I created a site, looking to mirror Ning as much as possible, generally it’s a bit problematic in a number of ways.
Forums are ok, you can get a chat plugin that works in a very similar way to Nings, however there is no music player, user profile pages are woefully basic, as are groups, with very little you can do to provide users and group owners with customisation. In general the user interface is very clunky with lots of scrolling and clicking to get to information that with Ning you could organise to have it viewed with just one click.
Also, in order to get the Ning look and feel and features, you have to load up so many plugins that site performance suffers.
There is no Ning import option from what I can see, I never had to do this but I noticed the plugin that allowed you to do this was well out of date so would suggest it no longer works, and even if it did, it would only pull in the very basic of info.
Regarding support, you will have to do a great deal of this yourself, these forums can help but at the end of the day you will be creating a site with many different plugins, each of those have interdependencies and it is up to you to become an expert in getting these to work together, finding out when they don’t and identifying the one that is causing the problem and to raise this as an issue with the developer (my site for example uses plugins from around 40-50 different developers for example).
Having said all that, this software is in the most part free, and there are some features that Ning does not have, I tried several different solutions before settling on WP/BP and in my view this combination provided me with the best of the available options.
If you would like to see the site I created it’s here – truthofself.com
Also the video options available are generally poor compared to what you get with Ning, all of the available seem to focus on each individual having their own gallery rather than the concept of a shared gallery that everyone can post to, the only way you can get around this is to get everyone to join a common group and share their videos in there.
@venutius have you tried the Mediapress plugin for Buddypress? From what I’ve read, Mediiapress much like the photo/video portion of Ning.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/mediapress/
I run Mediapress on a couple of sites, however you can’t use it to share Youtube video’s and the likes, that rules it out for my Ning type sites
I’ve been working on trying to get MPP to support ning type features thoug, so there is hope, just not right now. For example, until last week you could not have a general gallery for everyone to upload to. Instead they had to join a group first, which just made things more complicated for users. Another issue is that there has to be seperate galleries for photos and videos etc, I’d like to be able to have one gallery for all media, I’d prefer it if my users did not even know there was a gallery as such and I’d like to have a shortcode that displayed all the latest images, so I could put that on my front page. Alas these things are a long time coming.
It’s not free and I have used but might be what you need.
Ning To BuddyPress
That looks useful, if only migrating users was most of the job but clearly for any plugin to migrate your groups, files, videos images etc it would have to know an awful lot about the structure of the site it was migrating to, still it would save part of the work for sure, and right now you can get it for 15 days for free it seems.
