Help for BuddyPress Site to Change the World
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Hi All…
We are working on a space themed Virtual World for kids that will combine cooperative gaming, collaborative apps and tools for youngsters to learn and make friends all over the globe. The dream is that if you bring kids together for cooperative and collaborative educational fun we can empower children to change the world.
We are currently creating a BuddyPress social network for the development process that will bring together kids, parents, different advisers and our development team to discuss and share ideas on how to build something truly unique and powerful for youngsters. The children will be “Kidvisers” and will get rewards for taking part and even reporting on other worlds, games and apps telling us what they like and don’t like.
Need help and until we have our CrowdFunding campaign (hopefully starting in June) we don’t have any money. If you’d like to help please let me know. You see the first version of the site at http://www.planetearthlings.org
Thanks,
Greg
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Hey @planetearthlings very good idea, i like it! I wish you guys the best with this project as it seems very ambitious, in regards to what you want to achieve i would look into plugins available such as buddypress gifts 2014 and mycred and maybe combining them together for the awards system you mentioned, maybe you could even have the plugins customized specifically for what you need.
I am unsure how and what you intend to do about integrating a game and app system into use with buddypress, this seems like it could be a massive task to achieve and will no doubt give you a few headaches to overcome, i have sat back in the past and thought about how great it would be to have games and apps integrate with buddypress the way they do on other social networks such as fb.
Like i said i wish you all the best in this project and im sure others can give you a few bits of input and ideas.
Hi @mcpeanut…really appreciate your reply and ideas. I’ll check the recommended plugins tomorrow, but we might not be able to get going until we find an Buddy Press expert to assist.
I want to be clear our plan is to use BuddyPress as a networking platform or the continuing development process for the project, but not for the actual creating of the Virtual World. That will be a separate “software” created in Unity and published as a HTML5 site and as apps for different operating systems (Android, iOS, Windows, etc.)
At the moment we really need some assistance with the look of the site (design, typography, etc.) and the kind of work you’ve suggested integrating various plugins especially for galleries (both image and video) and other functionality.
Do let me know if you have any other ideas.
Cheers
GregIsn’t there anyone out there who not only wants to change the world but has both time and skill? 🙂 I don’t think it’s going to be a lot, but would love to have some suggestions both in terms of tech part and visual design. Thanks again!
Hey @planetearthlings sorry i didn’t reply earlier, even though i have a design background and do a lot of customizing via css and css3 i just wouldn’t have time to commit to helping on another project as i am so busy with other projects right now, i think the reason you aren’t getting any responses is because you have to understand that most people active here are already committed to there own ideas and projects, the only thing id suggest is trying to start some kind of community project that a group of individuals can all chip in and help with.
To do this though you would have to lay down the full expectations of the project and goals, id assume the people involved helping would only do it if it was a none profit project that does not benefit any one single individual or entity, because that’s basically like asking for people to all chip into a business idea/venture and let others build it for you so you gain profit from all their work/time dedicated and help they gave you.
You need to explain with greater detail, when the website is finished and launched will their be fees involved for usage and if so will anyone profit from it?
If it infact being built as a totally free to use website and not designed for you to ultimately make a profit how will the website sustain itself with servers costs, server administration, admin and moderation of the website itself, and growth?
@planetearthlings
Have you considered pitching your idea on Shark Tank? The reality is that you will not find the best developers unless you have the cash to pay them and though you think this is so important that it will change the world which is a very bold statement the harsh reality is that it will not and no one will remember it even 5 years from now. The reality is you need to set a realistic goal because neither you or myself will do anything groundbreaking that will change the world using BuddyPress because everyone knows when it comes to software you need to have something proprietary like the BIG social networks. Anyway sorry if you don’t agree but I’ve seen so many people come on this forum thinking they are going to create the next BIG world changing social network using BuddyPress when the reality is that is never what BuddyPress was ever intended for. Please don’t take offense to this reply as it is just intended to inform you of the obstacles you will face and the limitations you will find if you truly believe you can change the world using a BP site. Not only that but kids play enough games as is and connect with others all over the world using gaming systems already and all this inspires is for the kids to live at their parents homes until they are 40 years old and never have any real ambition but that is just from what I have seen in real life experience. Good luck!@bphelp i agree with you on alot of things you just said, i also have a different view on a few things.
when it comes to software you need to have something proprietary like the BIG social networks
Ok we all know that buddypress is not designed to beat sites like fb etc, but it is by no means an unusable platform to build upon and expand into a large social network if done the right way.
Alot of this will ultimately depend on resources we can throw into a buddypress powered site if it began to grow at a rapid rate, it is quite possible one day someone will tap into a niche market using buddypress that goes viral amongst this niche, making the website very successful. I am going to ask you this, what would happen in this scenario, say if someone here did build a site that went viral through no fault of their own as everyone just flocked to use the site that was powered by buddypress, are you saying you would have to give up and close it because buddypress and wordpress wouldn’t cope?Sorry @bphelp please dont take my questioning of your response negatively im genuinely interested in your opinion.
The reason i asked you the question above is because i think most people who have an idea for something they think is groundbreaking generally don’t do enough thinking about how they will implement that idea correctly if it did become successful, example: someone wants to create a social network with a good idea behind it, doesn’t have the funds or know how to have the propriety software you mentioned developed that other social networks have, then they do some research and stumble upon buddypress and think hey i can use it to build my amazing idea from, they then build their idea and think yippee its built im ready to unveil it to the world, and they get some hosting and put it live, it gets busy infact really busy then it grounds to a halt and fails.
Why did this happen? The thought process behind how things will need scaling and handling of growth wasn’t in place.
What if that person had done enough research about scaling and server configurations and are prepared to throw many much needed resources into the equation as and when needed?
The reason i ask you this is because i have now spent nearly 12 months researching about server administration/configurations regarding growth in a wordpress environment so i am curious on other takes on this.
@mcpeanut
I was simply referring to the “change the world” statement. I love BuddyPress/WordPress and have developed plugins for it and I never said it was an unusable platform. You are right about BP and niche markets that is one of the awesome uses for BP but niche doesn’t take on the bold task of changing the world. I simply believe you should set realistic goals. In your scenario that would be awesome if that was the case but I am not sure BP or WP could scale to the point that if “everyone” was on the site at one time like the BIG social networks it would handle that kind of traffic without major issues. Apologies to the OP if this is slightly off topic.@bphelp no worries mate, and i don’t think its to much off topic as this would need to be brought into consideration eventually if the reality of his website came true.
In your scenario that would be awesome if that was the case but I am not sure BP or WP could scale to the point that if “everyone” was on the site at one time like the BIG social networks it would handle that kind of traffic without major issues
Thats the beauty of the question 🙂 , I really dont think anyone has pushed buddypress coupled with wordpress to its limits as no-one has created that perfect niche yet that makes people want to use it by the masses, This no doubt has yet to be seen, tbh it is very complex to create a truly scalable environment for any platform and no matter if it was your own propriety customized solution or whether it be from using wordpress this is an issue anyone who built an highly successful site would face, i dont think its a question of ‘if’ someone will i think its more a question of ‘when’ 🙂
@mcpeanut
Wouldn’t it be nice if someone or a organization would fund the overhead so we could really just test and see how scalable a WP/BP site would be when you have tens of millions of people flocking to the site at one time? That would probably never happen but then again you never know. That it my opinion would be the only way to test WP/BP scalability.Yes i agree, we are the small-time people in all this when it comes to funds, Well as a start i can keep you updated on my progress and research into this, i have just ordered five zeon powered dedicated servers which totals 5 quad core zeons at 3.4ghz each server has 32gb ddr3 ram and solid state drives appart from 2, I plan setting them up as a cluster for expansion and scalability. the initial config i aim to achieve is using one as a load balancer, one as a database server, one as a dedicated firewall, and the other 2 as dedicated file servers which consist of 10tb in hardrive space in raid. wish me luck 🙂
@bphelp wp com and wp org already has “tens of millions of people flocking”. Only problem is they are reluctant to add BP as a social layer. Google did it with G+. But somehow wp thinks it as a stigma so BP is not added to it.
If it did, it could be bigger. BP has the potential to be the next big thing or at least break the monopoly of fb. But fb invested a lot in seed users and secret/background marketing. Though Automattic seem to have some fund and purchase this compny or that from time to time, interest in BP is nil. Even in this site bp org you cannot use all the features of BP. Can you? Devs have their own reasons and power not to do.
You may write to Matt. See if you can motivate him 😉
@mcpeanut
Wow that sounds cool, probably expensive as well but you meant xeon processors right? And yes I wish you luck! Please keep me updated how it works out.LOL yes i meant xeon’s haha, that’s me all over spelling something as it sounds 🙂
Yes its expensive but its not intended for buddypress alone although i will test it out with it, its more of a venture into providing affordable hosting to clients etc. I can only afford to pay for it out of my other business revenue.
I just figured seeing as im interested in buddypress and use wordpress i would configure the servers like this seeing as i was purchasing them anyhows.
Too much to go into really as to why i purchased them, there would be no point me making the investment for a buddypress powered site on their own, when i have not yet built a buddypress site i have got traffic for.
@mcpeanut
Sounds like you have a good thing going. I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.Wow…I go to sleep a few hours and the world changed from quite quiet to one full of interesting conversation. Exciting. Thanks all for joining the thread. I’m originally from Los Angeles, but have been living in Goa (West Coast of India) for a long time. Wondering where in the world everyone else is?
@bphelp @mcpeanut @rosyteddy: I really appreciate your ideas, challenging comments and questions. Sorry, I haven’t been clear about what we are doing. Let me elucidate so you can understand I’m not some crazy person sitting in the basement of my parents’ house dreaming. The project is called Planet Earthlings and is based on an animation/live-action TV pilot we created a few years back with a team of over 120 people in seven countries. The TV series was done in 3D and told the story of four animated aliens who come to Earth and meet four live action children. They play and learn in a magical animated world.What we are doing now is a space theme 2D Virtual World (probably to be built in Unity with Smart Fox Server on the backend). The world will combine cooperative gaming, collaborative apps and tools for youngsters to learn and make friends all over the globe…hence the subtitle “One People, One Planet.” The dream is that if you bring kids together for cooperative and collaborative educational fun they’ll make friends with people all over the planet making it difficult…hopefully impossible…for governments to convince them people in other countries are our enemies. Yes, it’s ambitious, but there are many people all over the world who are interested and already joining the process.
The “main” project will live at “www.planeteartlings.net.” Which will be overseen by the Planet Earthlings organization, but we will be creating a Open Source front end so that people, companies or organizations who want to create a planet in our universe which is compatible with the overall philosophy of what we’re doing will be able to do it. We are also looking for open source games and apps that can be used in world.
Initially, (as in right now) we are testing WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform for the development team at “www.planetearthlings.org.” That may become something bigger, but for now it is simply to bring together kids, parents, different advisers and our core team to discuss and share ideas on HOW to build something truly unique and powerful for youngsters. The children will be “Kidvisers” and will get rewards for taking part and even reporting on other worlds, games and apps telling us what they like and don’t like. Others will take part because they want to be part of an exciting project for kids and are interested in being part of the change.
This is part of the process leading up to a CrowdFunding campaign we hope to start in June. After that we will decide on what will be included in Phase One development. We do NOT know how the development process will proceed as we’re still investigating the various options which include forming a core team locally, gathering an international team to collaborate remotely, partnering with an established Virtual World development company or even forming something elsewhere. When we move into that stage there will be funding and decisions will have to be made about how to proceed.
I have investigated several social network options and tested a few, but decided on BuddyPress because the “open source” philosophy behind it (and WordPress) are a big part of what we are creating. I am concerned about the scaling potential, but have been assured during my research that the platform will scale to thousands of users if it is hosted and setup properly. ***NOTE: This is one of the main concerns at the moment.
We aren’t looking for full-time BuddyPress developers right now and I wouldn’t expect anyone to work full-time unpaid. We’re simply looking for a few hours of advice and possible implementation from people who are intrigued by what we are trying to do. Would love to have input/suggestions about what functionality we should include in the initial version of the site and with the look. Examples of what we need now would be design suggestions in terms of look, including help with the site typography and possible suggestions about functionality…for example what would be the best way of integrating galleries of both images and video.
@mcpeanut I understand your view that most people want to get paid. We all need to eat, but there are plenty of people who want to be involved in something with lofty goals. I personally have worked almost five years unpaid on different parts of this project. Right now the project is setup with a “company” mostly because we’re not in a position to understand and deal with it differently. It may be something that becomes profitable, but we may set it up as a non-profit. That is one of the questions we will be discussing on the development platform.
@bphelp I hope you will continue with the discussion and pose as many difficult questions as you can come up with. I like difficult questions because they make me think, and often about things I haven’t yet considered. I don’t have all the answers even though I have hard drives with about five terabytes of data for this project, thousands of images, video and hundreds of thousands of files. I may be a dreamer, but I’m also an experienced IT Project Management consultant, a feature film director, novelist and entrepreneur, among other hats I sometimes wear.There is much more about the project to discuss, but I leave it at this for now. Hope you don’t mind the length of the post, but I feel confident there are many people out there in the WordPress/BuddyPress world who are interested in this kind of work. Some will join us as volunteers and others in paid positions when the time is right.
Thanks all! If you want to learn a little more about the earlier project including lots of press and even a national magazine cover you can check that at http://www.palaflicks.com. Cheers!
@planetearthlings that’s a better explanation than you originally posted 🙂
I really do wish you well with the project, in regards to you asking for ideas about the design etc maybe you could design the site as if it was in space with various portals to different places (meaning pages) where as each portal (page) would represent a different landing site full of different things to do with tasks and challenges?
Maybe even with some kind of animation when a link is clicked transporting you through each portal.@rosyteddy
Not sure exactly what you meant to convey by your reply but your wrong in thinking a single BP/WP site has tens of millions of users are using this platform simultaneously even on wordpress.org I am not talking how many members there are I a am talking about how many people can actively be on a site at the same time before it bottlenecks. I don’t know Matt Mullenweg so I have no affiliation in that direction and I kiss no ones ass to get affiliation because I prefer being humble. FB is not a monopoly. There is other competition out there other than FB so I don’t know where your info comes from. Not to be rude but do you even know what a monopoly is?@planetearthlings
I built a site about four years ago using BP and I had implemented some Java type games on it for users to play and compete against each other tallying scores against one another. Not overly complicated but I never thought this site would “change the world” either I did it more or less for my own amusement. If you have talented developers at your disposal that can do what you need then that is awesome but if you don’t then you may have to do the work yourself as I did. Ultimately my host shut me down because it required to many server resources and I couldn’t afford the pricey money per month they required for dedicated servers. Hopefully that won’t happen to you but I am speaking on plenty of past experience. If you want to change the world with your idea then it is going to cost you a lot of cash more likely than not. Good luck.@bphelp i think @rosyteddy has missjudged the userbase in general as to how many active users there are at any one time compared to how many people are registered, I also agree fb has by no means the monopoly on anything, look at youtube as an example, i mean you have to class youtube (google) as a sort of social network in a way or not? I mean it has a crazy amount of users that all interact with each other and can post to each other and it all interlinks together with google plus accounts, then there are sites like linkedin which boasts over 300+ million active users and pinterest etc etc, what these sites have essentially done is tapped themselves into that certain ‘NICHE’ we was talking about earlier in the thread.
@mcpeanut Your idea is similar to the interface mockups we have already created for the actual virtual world with kids looking through the front window of their spaces ship and then zooming towards solar systems and then to planets. Haven’t thought of recreating that for the development social network, but perhaps one day. Right now we’re really just interested in a simple site with the key functionality to have discussions, share ideas (plus images and videos) and be able to stay in contact.
Wonder if there are any developers out there that could create a planet interface for BuddyPress…and how much it would cost? Can’t afford it now, but might be something we’d do in the future.
@bp-help Server costs are a major part of the budget though less problematic than the development costs as long as we’re ready for the minimums and next level growth. Beyond that additional storage/bandwidth would be good sign of a rising user base. Definitely undestand the concern. I’m concerned about that and the overall ability for the project to scale.
Not sure exactly what you meant to convey by your reply but your wrong in thinking a single BP/WP site has tens of millions of users are using this platform simultaneously even on wordpress.org I am not talking how many members there are I a am talking about how many people can actively be on a site at the same time before it bottlenecks.
Thanks @bphelp. What I meant was that wordpress com and wordpress org already has plenty of users. If Buddypress was added to this (just as Google added the Google Plus) this user base could go up much, much more. When it would have happened, you could have really known how millions of concurrent users are getting handled by wordpress and/or buddypress. If anyone wants to test for oneself or wants to know how wordpress com (which powers 20% of the net) handles simultaneous users here’s a starting point https://flood.io/blog/10-scaling-wordpress-from-zero-to-hero as well as there are many resources on the net.
FB is not a monopoly. There is other competition out there other than FB so I don’t know where your info comes from. Not to be rude but do you even know what a monopoly is?
May God bless you. I wish this was true. I am not a facebook fan. I will be happy if it just dies like Myspace and Orkut. And I know what monopoly is. If it was the 90’s facebook would have faced anti-trust and other lawsuits like Microsoft did in 90’s. Times have changed. Internet was once a large interconnected network of multiple sites nicely and openly connected by www, email and search engine. Though there were large companies even at that time, there was no one like facebook with so huge amount of data-mining and closed-wall/closed-garden approach. Why do we have to see so many sites just acting as “slave” to facebook with facebook like-buttons, facebook comment-box etc – and they do not even ask me for an option before throwing those buttons and boxes on my unwilling eyes. Youtube has no like-buttons or comment-boxes on other sites, neither has twitter comment boxes on other sites. Many kids these days have no email address but just a facebook account. When WhatsApp was coming up as a real competitor, facebook just gobbled it up by purchase. Sad that WhatsApp could not retain its own independence. If there were just at least 4 or 5 *equally* competing social networks like facebook where peoples’ participation was distributed and ‘load-balanced’ I would not have complained about the “monopoly”. I understand that you are having difficulty in what I am trying to say – I accept that as my failure. But what I am saying is nothing new – even the same concerns have been expressed by several persons openly on the net including Tim Berners Lee, the person who “invented” the http-www protocol and for whom we are enjoying internet as it is now.
I don’t know Matt Mullenweg so I have no affiliation in that direction and I kiss no ones ass to get affiliation because I prefer being humble.
I respect your opinion. What I meant was that if Matt could be inspired or motivated, Buddypress could have reached the next-level. I have posted to Matt several times about Buddypress. And if many did, may be there could have been, may be, a change in the attitude towards Buddypress. Matt is the creator of WordPress and I believe he is the central and key person who can …..
Anyways, there is no conflict in ‘being preferring to humble’ and writing something to him. But obviously you do not think like me. You do not have to. And no problem. I am sure someday someone will pick up the cue and clue and we really will have the inter<—>net that was and the internet of dreams. Thanks to you for your feedback.Since this thread contains a good amount of discussion, I will humbly beg to share some point of views
“”At one time, WordPress Joomla Drupal and other such software defined the standards for blogging or cms – they were open in all aspects and no product of a private, closed, biggie company equaled their efficacy and reach. They lead and biggies followed. But in the last 5 or 7 (or ?10) years no such software has come up. Unfortunate but true. Its now a world where facebook and the like are ……. Will there be another WordPress or Drupal or Joomla? Time will tell. But probably no. Sad but true. NO!””
“Stallman was one of the first to grasp that, if commercial entities were going to own the methods and technologies that controlled computers, then computer users would inevitably become beholden to those entities. This has come to pass, and in spades. Most computer users have become dependent on proprietary code provided by companies like Apple, Facebook, and Google, the use of which comes with conditions we may not condone or even know about, and can’t control; we have forfeited the freedom to adapt such code according to our needs, preferences, and personal ethics.” http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/the-gnu-manifesto-turns-thirty
Wishing you all the best @planetearthlings
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