Buddypress virgin – very confused and lack of docs!
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Hey guys,
Been a wordpress user/developer for years and I know my way around WP pretty well (within reason).
I wanted to add some social interaction to a new site that i’m building so I decided to give buddypress a whirl.
I have to say that, once I got it working, I was really impressed at what BP offers.
Please don’t shoot me down but I have some valid criticisms with the support docs and available support for even getting a buddypress install off the ground.
1) WP 4.1 / BP 2.2.1 (which is my set up)
After a clean install of WP 4.1 and BP 2.2.1 BP didn’t set up the required default pages. I eventually figured out that I could just create blank Members / Activity etc pages and it worked but this took me hours to figure this out which leads me on to the next issue.2) When googling for help with the issues i’ve experienced most of the results I found were years old and not even relevant to my current install. Furthermore, when I did actually get it up and running and wanted to start playing with the layout and functionality, all the help topics I could find that had code snippets (hooks etc) are no longer available.
3) Plug in support seems to be outdated at best. I know this isn’t the fault of BP, but it seems that there is quite a bit of required functionality that really should ship with a basic BP install. A lot of this has been addressed by plug ins, but most of these haven’t been updated for years and don’t work with a current install properly.
Examples of things that I feel should be standard :
– Setting email notifications site wide for new users (I can’t imagine any webmaster would be happy about sending out thousands of emails everyday for every single action that a user on the site makes). This is a critical update that needs to be implemented.
– When typing a message using “@” the dropdown list that pops up as soon as your start typing should only show names of the current users friends. What happens if you have 10,000+ users on your site? That’s going to get annoying for the users really fast. At very least there should be an option in the backend to activate this functionality.
– LIKE button. I wasn’t that surprised that something like this wasn’t installed as standard, but as this is an integral part of social interaction these days I was shocked after spending days trying to find a plug-in that works with the current version and have only managed to find one that works but is shaky at best. There are lots of “no longer available” plug-ins and bits of code and hacks out there but again – removed or deleted when you try to view them. From what I gather this seems to be something that developers have had real problems implementing. I can’t even find a single premium LIKE button plug-in out there! Surely it’s time to have this feature as standard?
4) I’m all for getting stuck in and even sharing what I learn with the BP community but the BP support docs are very sparse and could be so much better, especially for new users. I’m not a WP newbie but I’m having a real hard time trying to make sense of it all.
5) A clean current install of BP doesn’t include a BP theme. I have read that you have removed this and tried to implement it with any standard WP theme but that doesn’t help new users when trying to figure out what BP is capable of. Despite formatting issues many of the things it can do simply aren’t that obvious with a default WP theme. Surely it should at least give you the option to install a standard BP theme from theme manager?
Again, please don’t take any of what i’ve said in the wrong way. So far i’m very impressed with what Buddypress is capable of but I wanted to share the thoughts of a new user in the hope that you could have a look at some of these issues for a future release.
On another note, it took me about 5 minutes to find the link for creating a topic on the forum here too. Maybe this is the standard BP forum set up, but as a new user this could be much clearer.
For now i’m going to stick with it and get my head down and try to figure out the stuff I need to change for my desired set up, so I’m sure you’ll be seeing a lot of me on these forums – if you’ll still have me after this post đ
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