Is bp dying a slow death?
-
Part of my routine each morning is to go through and check the wp and bp trac to see what changes have been made that I need to be aware of. With wp 3.0, this has become very important for me, and has actually taught me a lot about wp. It also helps to know when major changes are made between beta’s and rc’s that will affect what I am building. (I hope to one day get my coding ability to the point where I can actually contribute instead of just leaching)
I’ve just noticed over the past number of weeks that there is really no activity going on with the bp trac. Yeah, there are a few minor changesets, but that’s about it. It seems to me that Andy has completely fallen off the planet. None of us in the regular community have heard anything from him in what seems forever. Even the bpdev site is very quiet, and I didn’t see much of anything mentioned for the dev chats. (I wish I could attend, but for me at least, they fall at the worst possible time each week)
This thread is in no way meant to be a rant, and I don’t want it to go that direction. I’m simply asking if bp is pretty much being abandoned by automatic. At the very least, after watching the furious action over the past few months on wp 3.0 in the trac, it has become very apparent that bp does not carry anywhere near the weight with automatic. Of course that is to be expected. It’s just after watching so many video’s of Matt talking about bp, one would think that automatic would at least assign some resources to bp.
Am I way off base with this observation?
-
I think you are… but it is totally OK to be concerned when our websites and communities rely on wp and bp working together. Everyone who’s involved in similar projects, like this one is, know that it can be quite tricky to dedicate all of his time to development and that there are ups and downs when it comes to enthusiasm. So no worries, I don’t think that bp is slowly dying.
I’m afraid I too have noticed this decline in activity from when I first started frequenting buddypress.org and it’s Trac last november-ish when it was to a degree a hive of activity and one did see the three core developers drop in on a fairly regular basis, they are now extremely noticeable in their absence. It’s a little worrying as The community aspect of open source projects is often held aloft like a torch but that torch needs to be kept burning (rubbish metaphor )
It’s always awkward when a company such as Automattic backs something like BP as many might see that as a seal of approval and a reassurance that the project will be kept firmly on track and supported (I certainly did and it helped cement our decision to go with BP) at the moment it does feel as though things are on the back burner when – with the imminent release of stable WP 3.0 – BP appears to be far from release of 1.3 judging by the backlog of Tickets to be resolved.
I would really love to hear from the core dev team or even Automattic that BP is being kept on course and not sidelined for the moment while Automattic allocate resources elsewhere?
And no this is not a rant either just a fair degree of concern
Yes indeed we may have seen a bit of slowing down recently, but IMHO: WP3 will be out this week and devs are really waiting for this final release. @johnjamesjacoby has worked on the 1.2 branch in the past few days and the trac says BP 1.2.5 is due in a couple of weeks, hopefully bringing even more compatibility with WP3 for the BP 1.2 branch. Then I think they will need to merge that with the trunk, where a lot of work is already done in terms of 1.3 roadmapped features. And what about the wonderful plugins coming within a couple of months from GSOC projects? And what about all the other plugin devs, constantly bringing us extraordinary new features for BP? Future seems bright to me!
@luccame that’s the spirit!
No need to panic, everything is fine. JJJ is working hard on 1.2.5 and I’m still working towards 1.3 at a slower pace as my time is split in a few areas. I’m talking about soccer on Twitter because the world cup is on, and there’s more to life than code.
and there’s more to life than code
An inaccurate statement – Life is code!
Soccer?! what’s that? thought you were British born?.
There are clearly concerns as can be seen here and in other threads, while I appreciate pressure of work and the fact that you are perhaps not able to devote 100% of your time to BP, it’s vital that the core team are seen to be around – even if only from time to time – When one talks of Community it’s important to remember that communities have leaders and community members look to leaders for inspiration, guidance, reassurance; what can wreck a communities spirit is for it’s leaders to be perceived as not caring or concerned with other matters, or simply locked away in ivory towers, unapproachable. There has to to be the notion that the larger community is able to participate, to feedback concerns, that input does not fall on deaf ears.
@andy: I agree there is much more to life than code… but soccer? Seriously? You mean that “game” where guys run around for 2+ hours and never score a goal? Now if you’d said hockey or any other actual sport… I’d be right there with yah. LOL
Sorry. Just teasing (obviously). I’m fine with the pace by the way. No worries here. Enjoy your summer!!!
No need to worry. All is well.
I can assure you BuddyPress is 100% not abandoned.My excuses are more client work than I can handle, and building lots of core API’s to make extending BuddyPress /much/ easier in 1.3. Custom post types in WordPress 3.0 have me sidetracked also
I’ll post something up in the blog with some official updates and words to address this topic in better detail.
- The topic ‘Is bp dying a slow death?’ is closed to new replies.
