Why Buddypress is not going to cut it
May 23, 2009 – 5:55 am, by Emil @ SkalfaBuddypress 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.
4 Responses to “Why Buddypress is not going to cut it”
Well, I think I have to disagree with you.
MU is announced to be merged into the WordPress project, therefore your conclusions not leading to the right direction, about these projects.
By DjZoNe on Jun 15, 2009
DjZone,
Thanks for your opinion. Merging Wordpress and MU is probably a good idea for MU but for Wordpress and Buddypress? It adds up overhead and necessity to hack things even more, which was my main point in this post.
Thanks.
By Emil @ Skalfa on Jun 16, 2009
I think that before the boys over at Automattic spend too much time worrying about BuddyPress or merging WPMU, they might want to take a deep breath and fix the ongoing security holes and upgrade errors that have been affecting us as of late. I’m all for new, amazing features but if the platform is proven to be unstable or vulnerable people will quickly move to something more secure.
By Christopher Ross on Aug 3, 2009
This post is old, but hopefully some of the questions have been answered. I think the issues raised are on point, but not the conclusion. After the merge, users will likely have “options” regarding buddypress, wordpress mu functionality, etc. Future WP development will take BP firmly into consideration and CMS functionality enhanced. What Andy’s done is great and although hackish will get more integrated and elegant over time as the platform supports it. The merge is the first major step.
By designodyssey on Dec 23, 2009