Topic: Is bp dying a slow death?

Is bp dying a slow death?

Anointed
Participant

@anointed

14 years, 4 months ago

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?

Viewing 14 replies - 76 through 89 (of 89 total)

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thekmen
Participant

@thekmen

14 years, 4 months ago

@johnjamesjacoby sorry, my mistake, just looked in trac & the ticket has only been there a week, thought it was there longer. It was mentioned here on the forums a lot longer & I did notice it on the WP3 RC builds, my fault for not diving into trac & adding the ticket sooner.

Sarabas
Participant

@sarabas

14 years, 4 months ago

The one unifying theme out of these 76 posts is the lack of leadership so the key question for @matt and @apeatling is how does the current state of BuddyPress compare with the early days of WordPress? Would WordPress have been as big of a success if no one was working full time on it?

Right now it seems that BuddyPress has no full time resources… Open source works well at scale and yes while we all need to do more, Automattic also needs to tell us how serious they are about this effort and how much they are willing to invest to get the community at the scale it needs to be.

5887735
Inactive

14 years, 4 months ago

We all know BP can be improved, and those of us that love BP wait like kids on Christmas morning every time there is something new, but let me ask a simple question….

What is so lacking in BP that would cancel out everything that is right with it and cause it to die out?

Nothing. There is nothing so major that would cause it to die.

All the busy schedules of the developers aside, let me purpose another theory on why the BP community may have slowed down.

Ignorant site owners.

I think so many site owners thought BP was some out of the box Facebook they just needed to install with a few clicks. Even worse they thought if they had all those cool features visitors would flock to their site. When they discovered that neither was true they came with signs and pitchforks complaining BP killed their site, members are upset, etc., etc. It couldn’t be that they know nothing about web design (or are willing to hire someone), it couldn’t be that they have no valuable content, it couldn’t be that they have nothing unique to offer, it couldn’t be a million other things that anyone that has be doing this for more than 6 months knows, it must be BP to blame.

So, I’ll be a good little kid and wait patiently for Santa and keep posting my Wish List here, and until Christmas morning arrives I’ll keep playing with my toys from last year.

peterverkooijen
Participant

@peterverkooijen

14 years, 4 months ago

@dennis_h (“What is so lacking in BP that would cancel out everything that is right with it and cause it to die out?”)

Member management, privacy/security, a coherent vision of what Buddypress is and isn’t, …

I was never 100% happy with Buddypress 1.0, but worked around the problems in my custom theme and hoped the issues would be fixed in 1.2 and beyond. But the issues are not being fixed. The newer versions only add more confusing features and BBpress seems to have taken over.

So I’m sticking with 1.1.3 and develop that further in a direction that works for me. It seems to work fine on WP 3.0. I need a reliable base for my projects. BP is all over the place.

5887735
Inactive

14 years, 4 months ago

@Peterverkooijen

If you believe BP causes more problems that it solves why do you use it? If you don’t like the features why don’t you turn them off?

Everyone should be developing BP in a direction to fit their needs. If you want a site worth visiting you can’t use out of the box solutions.

I don’t mean my questions to be augmentative or polemic, I just want to know what it is that BP provides that makes you endure your admitted frustration.

peterverkooijen
Participant

@peterverkooijen

14 years, 4 months ago

@dennis_h (“If you believe BP causes more problems that it solves why do you use it?”)

I chose Buddypress primarily to manage member lists for my projects and give members online profile pages and ways to interact with other members online.

The first version of my site was a mix of WordPress + PunBB for the members list. When Buddypress appeared it made sense to consolidate everything on WordPress/WPMU/BP.

An early annoyance that cost me six weeks last year was lack of built-in support for firstname + lastname, which made Buddypress hard to integrate with my mailinglist script.

I now have the basics kinda working; all the dumb stuff that should work out of the box, like a user-friendly registration process, etc. Upgrading to 1.2 would mean having to start all over again.

rich! @ etiviti
Participant

@nuprn1

14 years, 4 months ago

@johnjamesjacoby said: because no one is testing the branch and no one is reporting back how various fixes have affected them.

I really dropped off on the bug hunts and running sites off of trunk (2 locals and a live). Since 1.2.x hit – my focus shifted onto contract work and building out plugins for such. I don’t see myself getting back into that groove until 1.3 is the next milestone. ( i’m still on WP2.9 )

As for everything else – this thread reminds me of the discussions on bbPress.org a year or so ago when communication on that project went dead – and the pitch forks came out. I think some of the frustrations come from wanting BP to bake a cake and run our errands. But at the end of the day – we all benefit from a freely available software package that can be shaped like playdoh. (nothing cool happens until you mash up the colors or eat it)

John James Jacoby
Keymaster

@johnjamesjacoby

14 years, 4 months ago

Long story short, everyone wants more communication, and I’ll do a better job at it going forward.

Nile Flores
Participant

@blondishnet

14 years, 4 months ago

BuddyPress is far from dying. I am really excited about all that I have been hearing at WordCamps this year and after talking to JJJ at WordCamp Chicago… I am certain the BuddyPress project is really growing big time. From a client perspective, I am seeing more and more clients requesting a social network added to their businesses and blog sites.

Kudos to the team. I guess I need to go over to trac and give it a hug like JJJ suggested.

foxly
Participant

@foxly

14 years, 4 months ago

[EDIT] Removed link to BP Album, added more plugin examples.

Dying a slow death???? Pfft… whatever!

There’s one team (BP Album+) working on FaceBook Media + Flickr cloned for BuddyPress, coming out in a week or two. There’s another dev (BP Links) working on content linking and import from almost any imaginable site, and another dev (Facestream) working on BPFacebook integration.

I think we’re just beginning to discover some of the amazing thing that can be accomplished with BuddyPress.

^F^

Hugo Ashmore
Participant

@hnla

14 years, 4 months ago

@foxly would love to test the nightly, could you fix the link to the build? or is it me?

Paul Wong-Gibbs
Keymaster

@djpaul

14 years, 4 months ago

On topic please, or I’ll start advertising my stuff here too.

foxly
Participant

@foxly

14 years, 4 months ago

@DJPaul

Maybe you should …seriously… here’s why:

Every platform eventually reaches a point where people come to the platform because of the software you can run on that platform …not the platform itself. Few people talk about how awesome Windows 7 or Linux or the latest version of Mac OS or even the iPad are as an operating system. Instead, they talk about all the fantastic applications you can run on them and as a result, make people excited about the platform.

I think that’s largely becoming the case with BuddyPress. I mean, we’re basically at the point where everything that’s going to be in the core platform has already been written. I really doubt we’ll see complex things like media hosting or Facebook connectivity or whatever the next big app is being integrated into the BuddyPress core, because they’re not features everyone will use.

So when people come to the forums posting things like “please assure me this is not a dead platform, because I haven’t seen any major changes in months”, it would probably be best to show them all of the new and exciting stuff being developed for BuddyPress, and that the platform is actually thriving.

Just my thoughts, anyway.

^F^

John James Jacoby
Keymaster

@johnjamesjacoby

14 years, 4 months ago

Enough is enough. BuddyPress, not dying. Devs, more communication. We’re all on the same page and this topic is losing it’s productivity so I’m closing it down.

Thanks everyone for chiming in and for helping out