BuddyPress.org

+1

I’ve been running a ning network and wordpress blog in parallel. Slightly integrated by way off rss feeds, but nowhere near enough. Likely to jump onto buddypress at some point.

Is this still active? I am very curious to see how this would turn out, but I see that the group has not been active for a while.

It’s just a start, but after I heard the news about Ning I wrote a plugin that will import users from Ning to WordPress: http://teleogistic.net/2010/04/importing-ning-users-into-wp/.

Sadly Ning doesn’t offer easy export of the rest of the content. But I think some folks out there are working on ways for you to get your forums, discussions, blog posts, etc out of there as well.

Heh, to be fair it was an adaptation of an existing plugin. I probably wrote about half of it

Wow. I considered Ning briefly, but didn’t want to have all my users’ content locked up in a third-party system. Glad I didn’t pursue it.

Well it’s hard for me not to be a little smug about this Ning stuff. I moved 2 of my Ning networks over to BP with cut and paste technology and in the process have lost most of my members. However it forced me to concentrate more on the content side of my site and not the whiz bang features and I needed to do that. Ning was and is a joke and people who thought they were gonna be able to stay and suck off the Tet of Ning for free were sadly misguided.

This is a great opportunity for the user base of BuddyPress to grow but to do so there HAS to be some real discussion and debate about CORE functionality. If we are to scoop up some of those disgruntled former Ning Network Creators then the base feature set should be comparable with what they could get with Ning.

For those of you who don’t follow me on Twitter or on my blog (btw – what the heck is wrong with you? I rule), I just updated the Import from Ning plugin to support BP xprofile fields: http://teleogistic.net/2010/04/more-import-to-ning-goodness/

I worked nonstop this weekend to finish up our own advanced importer we started a few months back. Allows you to do a full import of a Ning network’s users, their custom profile fields, and avatars to BuddyPress! It reallywas a bit of work to scrape avatars from the profile pages but looks real cool while importing. Full support for very large member lists via optional FTP upload and batch processing so it won’t timeout on you.

http://premium.wpmudev.org/project/ning-to-buddypress-user-importer

While I can respect the effort, I can’t see a reason to pay $79 for it when there’s a free version available. Most of the people coming from Ning are those who don’t want to pay to upgrade in the first place.

Yay?

People should be able to choose what’s best for their needs/price. Many network creators will want professional hand holding for their migration. It ok to let them hire a developer for lots of cash instead of pooling their money with others in the same boat to get excellent support for low cost?

I started the WPMUDEV plugin 3 months ago, but we delayed it as we wanted to wait for Ning to provide a full export. When we saw the Ning announcement they asked me to push it out asap, and that was before Boone released his. There is no shared code.

I think it is completely fair to give users a choice of what features they want to have. 60% of my dev time was spent on the plugin supporting large member lists without timeing out and scaraping Avatars from Ning to import into BuddyPress. And considering what it cost Incsub to hire me to develop it $79 is more than fair when you get access to support and 8 premium BP themes along with 100+ other premium plugins.

Not to be rude or anything Aaron.. but this is the first time you’ve been here and imo it for one reason only: Promotion and SEO purposes.. Google for: Ning Migration BuddyPress and this is the #1 hit.. Convenient If you were around daily it would not be strange, but I’ve never seen you around until there was a chance to make some money..

If the plugin was available for anyone to download, but with an option for support for $79 then that’s a different story

Which is why I made the comment I did earlier, this is a viable and far more honorable model to follow, a lot of those escaping Ning will not be developers and will look for support and I’m sure delight in finding a premium support model to give them a feeling of reassurance.

I can’t support the model WPMU runs on I spent some company cash to look into what was provided in the paid subscription and I wasn’t that impressed and as a frontend developer the themes left a lot to be desired and if I had used any it would only have been after heavy correction of the many errors found throughout them, and to find that out of the box I had to do a fair bit of work didn’t really leave me that impressed.

On reflection I actually find it in slightly poor taste that you posted to this forum a link to a premium plugin behind a paywall and if it were down to me perhaps would have considered pulling the link.