I saw that announcement. Does their ‘platform’ include all of BuddyPress or just the templates?
Themes often include the BP templates as overloads but not the component classes.
If it is a fork then it would be the first commercial fork, afaik.
there is a buddyboss platform plugin designed to replace buddypress and bbpress.
buddyboss platfofm plugin is free. Theme cost money. Plugin is hard to find… look at the top left corner is says free download.
I use buddyboss and I LOVE what they do…
but.. im a little nervous .. with the change over.
Its worth pointing out that there OUTSTANDING themes are still available for normal buddypress..
I use the boss theme from them, Im considering updating to new theme for the updated look and functionality.. more info https://www.buddyboss.com/resources/docs/development/theme-development/theme-compatibility/
All I have to say about this: if you “try” their platform, make sure you have backups.
It will ask you to convert your site to “their” structure and I don’t think it’ll be easy to revert back.
I was a customer. I still have and use their products, but I guess I’ll have to look for another theme provider as they seem to have lost their midas-touch introducing this stuff.
Cheers,
Aron
It is a fork. And I think they did a great job.
I was able to toggle between it and BP without issues on a standard installation.
I’m not surprised to hear that some conversions are probematic – it is nigh impossible to anticipate all the possible permutations.
They have obviously considered what is best for the end user and supportable by them.
( As opposed to what is most interesting for the devs ).
It would be great to see their platform on github. I think it would receive some serious attention.
Though I wonder what the benefit of creating a new fork/platform over – separate paid-premium plug-ins and hyper tuned themes..
Still I love buddyboss themes – but being locked in is a headache I would not ever try to think about..
Frankly I’ve always been deeply frustrated with buddypress though..
In terms of being locked in, there is no more lock-in with BuddyBoss vs BuddyPress. Both are free, open source plugins. And BuddyBoss is being more actively developed than BuddyPress actually.
It is very easy to toggle between the two while testing. We only have one migration script, which is for people who have used our old Media plugin to migrate their media posts. For all BuddyPress data there is no data migration necessary. The core data structure is intentionally the same.
The main work to switch is just switching your theme. As we have editing the templates quite a bit to achieve a nicer frontend experience.
As for putting the BuddyBoss Platform on Github, that will happen soon. This month or next. It’s actually on Github now we just need to document the contributor process and then make the repo public. We want developers to contribute to it. This has always been our plan, we’re just doing things carefully one step at a time. We’ll soon let customers vote on core features as well and then we can pick the most requested features and prioritize them.
I am eager to introduce BuddyBoss’ latest release to my members, but unfortunately I have run into a bit of a nightmare.
I purchased the platform / theme for around $225 nearly six weeks ago. I have tried for weeks to try and get the theme/platform to function properly (including on three different test environments), but unfortunately I run into different errors every time (including on fresh WordPress installs to rule out there’s any previous plugin interference).
The support from BB, especially in the last two weeks, has basically been non-existent. I have to virtually beg for a reply. Right now they say there’s a Tier 3 support team looking into things, but an entire week has gone by and no one from that team has reached out.
Wish I could say I’ve had a good experience thus far, and am not ruling out using them still because I have invested a lot of time and energy trying to make it work, but so far I’m pretty disappointed. I’m at the point where I’m asking them if I should invest in hiring a developer so I can move things forward. Doesn’t feel right to have to hire a developer to make something that should be working… work.
I hope I can come back to this post in the near future and say BB has helped me turn things around.
I agree with breatheheavy about support being bad. For example I have created a ticket back in july stating that View version details for theme updates do not show any info.
It redirects to buddyboss.com home page. When it should go to https://www.buddyboss.com/resources/buddyboss-theme-releases/1-1-8/ or something similar. Ticket has been closed and todays theme update still shows no release info….
Support seems to be in a different timezone not geared towards US market. Most of the time you can expect one reply per 24 hours(closed on weekends).
@allnamestaken @breatheheavy
We appreciate your feedback.
Our support team is just about 24/7, some are in USA and some are overseas. We have people working on shifts covering all timezones. The delay in response is due to a large volume of tickets, we cannot always reply immediately. Many of the tickets are very technical, and some take hours to figure out. Some are our fault, some are not even related to us (server issues etc) but we need to spend time to figure them out just to determine that. We have increased our support agents significantly since launching the product, we now have a pretty large support staff. All of our metrics have improved since doing that – time to first response, time to solving the ticket, etc. We still have a lot of room for improvement, we are aware, but we are improving as fast as we possibly can.
Tier 3 is our actual development team that builds the product. So if your ticket is escalated to Tier 3, yes it will have a longer delay because now a developer is looking at your code… but it also means that if the issue is coming from our product, the person reviewing your ticket is also writing the patch so that we can issue a fix in an update.
Thanks for your feedback, it is appreciated and will be considered as we work to continuously improve our response times.
