Why Buddypress is not going to cut it
Saturday, May 23rd, 2009Buddypress is an interesting open source community platform project. It got some traction and there a lot of users who like Buddypress more than any other alternatives on the table.
On the other hand I think it’s a seriously misled effort.
First of all, it’s based on Wordpress MU and here I smell the biggest trouble in the air. Andy Peatling is putting a lot of work to base social network features on top of the stagnant and underdeveloped Wordpress MU (looks like only Donncha works on it?) which is a complex platform unintended for what Buddypress developers do with it. Buddypress is essentially hacking Wordpress MU into something it doesn’t want to do and it takes to be a good hacker to do that.
The second suspicious thing is the decisions Andy makes to just keep it going. Read the first two paragraphs about complexity of Wordpress and decision to have logic functions in themes and your nose will feel the same as mine.
The third thing is that Wordpress MU already brings a lot to the table but there’s no guarantee you’ll need it that way. You think the 2 user consoles (one from Wordpress, and one from Buddypress) above the site content are any good? Is this a compromise you agree to make for the sake of using Wordpress plugins?
During my career I’ve been involved in a couple of projects that were started the same wrong way. You take some framework or existing project to “save time on developing trivial features”. You have some head start and agree with limitations it trades for. Inevitably you grow unhappy with those limitations because of the nature of complex systems. If you play it nice with the platform – I mean doing things the way it wants – it’s fine. But the more business logic you need the more clinical situations you face. The system tells you “It can’t be done your way – live with it”.
In the end of the day you might spend more time to get things stretched to work than to write everything from scratch. Also imagine results of both approaches. I’ve seen so much evidence that the don’t-write-what-somebody-else-wrote-100-times notion is as wrong as people-want-features one.
It makes perfect sense for Matt to have Buddypress in Automattic portfolio and it takes only one blog post to have Buddypress jump into the eyes of tens of millions bloggers of the world. But what’s the point? Is it to create a cool open source social platform or to show it can be done on Wordpress MU?
All in all Andy is showing a great deal of coolness in Buddypress user interfaces but I think he would better use his talent for a less troubled start (cough join OpenWack? cough). Buddypress devs will need so much extra guts to fight through Wordpress MU.
I may have done a poor homework of studying Buddypress and will appreciate if anybody clues me in in comments. But feedback like “The big drawback that I see right now is that the blog interface is pretty complex for a novice. I’ve been using Drupal for several years, and one of the things I like about it is that students don’t need any training in how to write a post on the course site. I can imagine them being overwhelmed by the wp dashboard, categories, tags, and the like.” already indicate you’re in trouble. Let along long term compatibility issues threats of two separate developments.
Anyone throw in tips of using Buddypress efficiently I’d love your input.
