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Can a Non-Developer make a solid, robust, 20,000 member Buddypress site?


  • CorinnaWest
    Member

    @corinnawest

    12 years, 3 months ago

    I’m trying to build a social networking platform to link psychiatric survivors and engaged community to help people find personal resources outside of mental health care. This has the potential to take out much of big pharma’s inaccurate messages about mental health. I’m not a developer. I have posted 5 other wordpress sites but they are just basic blogs. I really like WordPress, so I turned to Buddypress first when I wanted to build something much bigger. What I have so far is on http://ConnectPower.org and I have the newest versions of Buddypress and WordPress.

    However, I have seen threads with problems with Buddypress and I know I’ve run into a lot of those issues already like friend requests not working, forums not working, activation codes being requested twice, too much white space above the loop in all my pages, no way to join groups, etc. I’ve seen these issues on the help forums so I know I could probably work through them all bit by bit.
    However, I’ve also been looking through all the galleries and haven’t yet seen a large community (over 300 members) with much activity showing.

    My question is, Am I going to be able to develop a truly robust and professional looking product this way? Why is it the other big communities all work from scratch? Is it worth digging in and poking around and dealing with all these problems? Maybe the problems just have an initial barrier that will drop away. If Buddypress is supposed to be accessible to non-developers, maybe I just have a bit more learning curve to work through and then I’m home free? I’m pretty good at figuring out online stuff and I’m willing to take programming classes or go to Meetups or whatever would work.

    Or should I write a business plan, find funding, and then hire programmers to build something for me, maybe from a different platform? It seems like all the reviews of all the platforms I’ve looked at have these same issues, so really the question is,

    —->>> Can I do this myself or do I need to find some funding and get pros in on it for me?

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

  • modemlooper
    Moderator

    @modemlooper

    12 years, 3 months ago

    This site has 70,000 members. http://tastykitchen.com

    Any site that is self hosted needs work and knowledge to run properly. Also, anytime you start customizing a site it can run into problems. I’m not trying to discourage BuddyPress just giving a realistic reply to running a site. You are basically asking if Facebook could run without developers.


    Roger Coathup
    Participant

    @rogercoathup

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Most successful sites have a user interface / experience tailored specifically to their user’s needs; with a compulsive reason to be there. Just putting up a generic platform with groups, activity and members directories, and hoping they’ll join is unlikely to work.

    BuddyPress gives you a great platform to underpin your build, but you will need specialist design and development skills to craft that compulsive site with features your users will want and need to use.

    [ Edit: for another large membership BP site, take a look at http://enterprisenation.com ]


    Austin Nichols
    Member

    @fiq

    12 years, 3 months ago

    Buddypress can run an unlimited number of members out of the box. Yes, there are lots of tweaks you can do to the software, but the real issues are going to be with your hardware. You really need to have someone that knows servers.

    While technically possible, in my opinion BP should never be run on a shared server. Once you pass a couple thousand members multiple servers will most likely be needed.

    The number of members is a poor matrix for judging a sites success (or needs). It completely depends on the type of site. Some use BP social features as the main component to their sites, others may just use it as a add-on, like a support forum. It also depends on how much media you use. Some sites use very little while others use lots of pictures and video.

    PS
    We run around 1.5 million unique visitors a month using BP.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
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