BuddyPress.org

Hi
We are in the process of releasing a free theme for BuddyPress which should compete with any available premium theme on design/quality.

Since the holidays are here, we are scheduling for 15th January. I am hoping to encourage BuddyPress adoption with our free theme.

Regards
Brajesh

Hi @coolhunt,
Thank you.

I am sorry but I won’t be able to provide a preview currently. For the 2nd theme onwards, we can do an early preview.

Thank you
Brajesh

@hochingj Replying to your comment:

With as much as @buddyboss depends on buddypress and with how much they charge, I sure hope they are doing the ethical thing and donating to the buddypress group that they are profiting off of.

I think there is some misunderstandings here. First it is important to know that the BuddyBoss Platform is 100% free and open source. We do not charge for it, you can download it and develop on it for free right now. We are providing a feature rich and actively maintained plugin and we are funding all of the development and documentation for it out of pocket, and not charging anything for it. We did this because our business previously did depend on BuddyPress and our customers didn’t like what BuddyPress was offering, and we believed we could provide a better solution that met our customer’s needs, and so that is exactly what we did.

Our solution is open source just like BuddyPress, and we will open it up to contributors on Github shortly. If you want to contribute to our platform we will welcome you with open arms. Our only goal is to provide a great service to our customers, and our features are driven entirely by customer feedback.

We are profiting only on our theme, whose code is not pulling from anything created by the BuddyPress community. We no longer depend on BuddyPress to any extent for our new products so there is nothing for us to contribute to. We are contributing to the actual users of BuddyPress, by giving away a free version of BuddyPress that is more feature rich and developed at a faster pace, and is backwards compatible to BuddyPress, but not dependent on BuddyPress for its current and future development.

If you fast forward to a year from now our plugin will be very different from BuddyPress, even more so than it already is. The differences are big enough that it would have made little sense to try to do this through BuddyPress. We cannot depend on others to do what our customer base is asking us for. We need to move really fast, and BuddyPress moves really slow, and is actively adverse to growing its feature set too large. But our customers do not want a streamlined plugin, they do not want to depend on other plugins. They want all of the community features out of the box and integrated with each other, and as much as possible, they want that right now. We need the ability to take common requests and build solutions to those requests, without having to ask permission to someone else first. This is what our customers want from us and our obligation is to our customers above all else.

@buddyboss Hey Michael!

I totally understand what you mean. I feel the same way about WordPress. Even simple whitespace changes there become endless discussions that result in no changes and no agreement, and worse… no fun.

My own personal concern here, comes from everyone involved in BuddyPress purposely trying to create an inviting, open, fun, rewarding experience to contribute to the project, and seeing talented folks like yourselves choose to compete instead of collaborate is the opposite of the target we are shooting for as a project.

What more could BuddyPress have done? What could the team have done differently? I’ve never really seen much in the way of upstream improvements or recommendations or requests in Trac or the forums from your team. Not that it’s necessary. Not that it’s expected. But there isn’t a history of anyone saying no or shutting y’all down.

I applaud the independence. I wish all y’all nothing but the best. And I hope BuddyPress is inspired from the creativity and inventiveness that BuddyBoss is known for.

Here’s 2 cents of input from a new comer…

It’s great that BuddyPress is free, that’s certainly an important part of the market to serve, and I applaud members for doing so. Truly.

However, there’s a downside to free too, nobody is obligated to the user, as is the case with paid software. So for example, if I were to succeed in my goals I’d have a social site full of serious professional people, who aren’t going to be easy for me to attract as they are already quite busy. I can’t afford to invest tons of time in winning them over, and then have some software let me down.

So I’m looking for some situation such as I have with a WordPress.com paid account, where if something technical goes wrong they jump on it immediately and fix it, and I can stay focused on content, marketing, networking etc. The WordPress support team says they would help me with BuddyPress if they could, but it’s not their software so there’s only so much help I can expect, which seems entirely reasonable to me.

I could come here for assistance, but I would have paid the BuddyPress team nothing, so it wouldn’t be reasonable for me to expect help unless somebody just happens to feel like it on that particular day.

So as seen from here, BuddyBoss is not really competing with BuddyPress, but providing a different kind of service, a commercial service. The downside with BuddyBoss, best I can tell, is that BuddyBoss isn’t really up and running yet. You know, they’ve been unable to point me to a single one of their client’s sites, a limitation they explained to me quite promptly and politely.

Wordpress.com has a theme which offers some level of social site features, but so far I’ve been unable to make any sense of it. If it’s confusing to me, it will likely also be to any new users I am able to attract.

So my first impression is that BuddyPress appears to be interesting hobby software generously provided for free, but if I want a more serious setup I’ll have to start looking beyond the WordPress environment.

Thanks for your input Cool Hunt. Can you direct me to any BuddyBoss or BuddyPress site which I could join as a user? Is there perhaps a directory of such sites somewhere?

It’s the best wordpress plugin imho …

If not for buddypress i don’t think i would be using wordpress

And with people like @sbrajesh who assisted me when i was totally clueless.. The Dude is practically a legend… And il’d forever be grateful to him, We Need more people like that on earth

…
Because buddypress is open-source i don’t think people who use it would let it go that easy .. I support open-source because i believe knowledge should be distributed freely for quick advancement of the human race as a whole.

I have to apologize to Michael from Buddyboss. I did not realize their platform was free. Kudos to you guys, you are doing a great job. I have been testing your plugin and have been extremely impressed.

@techhnyne

BuddyBoss Platform (our version of BuddyPress) is free, including updates. The platform includes all of the social functionality, while the theme is purely for layout and is optional. You do pay for the theme, just as you would pay for a nice BuddyPress theme. You can also build your own theme, or use some generic free theme from the WordPress themes repo if you prefer.

@hochingj Thanks!

@coolhunt

Thank you!

– You cannot run BuddyBoss Platform and BP at the same time. BuddyBoss is a fork of BuddyPress and shares a lot of the same underlying code, so they cannot run at the same time.

– These are the themes available: https://www.buddyboss.com/themes/
“BuddyBoss Theme” is for BuddyBoss Platform.
Boss 2.0 and OneSocial are actually for BuddyPress.

I know it’s a bit confusing, but long term our product stack is basically just BuddyBoss Platform and BuddyBoss Theme which is actually very simple. We’re not making any new BuddyPress themes. The goal is to have everything you need out of the box from us with one plugin, one theme. That way we can focus all of our efforts on updating that product stack and just make it really awesome. We are adding more options over time to make the theme really flexible with layouts, especially via Elementor, so that people can take that one theme and make it look like anything.

@buddyboss then why when i go to the website it only has pricing and not download?

if you say its free i should not have to pay anything for a download. if you say a theme is what im paying for then why is there no basic theme thats free or even the plugin without a theme so users can built their own theme?

do i really need to spend over $200 to try it out because im skeptical. i rather save the headache of filing a return

Sorry, I just remembered that I can download the free plugin:
https://github.com/buddyboss/buddyboss-platform