BuddyPress.org

I have long been a fan of BuddyPress and bbPress, but I have never been able to finish a site using them. This is because I am unable to fully test their elements. I think that a lot of people would be willing to use BuddyPress and bbPress, but a few things prevent them from using them.

1. There’s no official BuddyPress and bbPress testing data. There are a few plugins, but they suck and don’t add data for most features. I’m talking about everything from demo users to custom profile fields to testing heading, paragraph, quote, and list elements in the forums and BuddyPress activity. Without full testing data, I am unable to finish a design, and this is way too much work for me, a non-developer of BuddyPress, to figure out and do. WordPress has official test data, so where is bbPress’ and BuddyPress’? I need it, and I guarantee a lot more people would design their websites to use BuddyPress and bbPress if we had it.

2. There’s no good way to reset the stylesheet for BuddyPress or bbPress so that I can style their elements from scratch, from what I’ve seen. Starter WordPress themes such as Underscores are blank and perfect across browsers, allowing one to develop a completely custom feel for their site, unbiased of any developer-chosen styles. I need that for BuddyPress and bbPress too. Hacking or child-theming BuddyPress’ default stylesheets is not what I would consider a good solution to custom design.

3. This is a bbPress-exclusive problem, but I’ll say it anyway. Very few people want to use bbPress, and that’s only for two purely-aesthetic reasons: One, category-type “forums” are treated visually like forums and put all their sub-forums in an inline list. Nobody ever wanted or asked for that. They want “categories” to look like dividers between groups of forums so that they’re easier to digest, just like every other forum software. No other software does this like bbPress, and that’s why everyone uses other forum software. It just looks unpleasant and hard to read, and cuts the real forums’ meta information out of the board index.

Two, people need images to separate hard-to-digest blocks of text. That is a fact that every good writer knows. One of the ways almost every forum system accomplishes this is by creating an icon in front of every forum on the board index. Forums often make them more practical by making the icons change when all the topics inside those forums have been read. But bbPress doesn’t use icons in front of forums on the board index, and let me tell you– that is the FIRST thing everyone I’ve ever shown bbPress sees, and it is the FIRST reason people decide they dislike bbPress. These icons are necessary for the readers’ eyes, and everyone knows it. For the love of god, fix this so I and everyone else will want to choose bbPress upon first look over other forum software.

Finally, I choose bbPress and BuddyPress due to their integration of features with WordPress. It’s why I tell everyone to use BuddyPress if it helps their community, and why I tell everyone that they SHOULD use bbPress with WordPress instead of third-party forums. However, few people do use either system, and I have a really hard time developing with both due to a lack of reset styles, a lack of testing data, and a lack of the visual functionality in bbPress that other forums have. Please fix this stuff. If not for me, then for the sake of not discouraging tens of thousands of potential users like you probably already do.

I love BuddyPress and bbPress. Please make it easier for me to develop sites with them. Thank you.