confusing and incohesive

To start with BuddyPress on its own is an absolute mess if you are trying to create a private social media site. It just doesn’t get the job done. Yes, there are third-party plugins that can seemingly do everything that you need but many are not up to date or only work with some themes and the entire thing just becomes an incohesive mess of plugins that were not meant to work together.

I did get a site working nearly the way I wanted it, but this was mostly due to Wbcom who seems to be a developer that rounds out all of the hard edges of BuddyPress through themes and plugins. I guess if you think of BuddyPress as a platform for experienced developers like Wbcom to make a useful social media site then I should change the rating to five stars.

BuddyPress as it is requires a tremendous amount of help from various plugins and themes before a social media site can be created. There are few resources to guide you through the process other than those that describe the particular plugin or theme which is hardly unbias as the majority have paid options to upsell.

The BuddyPress site itself has a tremendous amount of information but none of it very useful. There are a lot of unanswered questions that I found in my search with similar questions that I had. Many of the forum questions are a decade old and it is hard to know if they are relevant still. Aside form that the documentation is extensive but it is the kind of documentation that mostly reiterates the same description of options that are in the plugin pages next to each option.

What might be really useful is a wiki that guides a user through some common configuration options for a handful of different use cases. Even if using third party plugins to reach the goal since the guide wouldn’t be created by the plugin dev a user could trust that it was selected for the task and not in the hopes of upselling.

I’m not against people making money, and I’m happy to pay for code that is truly useful and helps me reach my website goals. In fact, after this experience the options that came up in my search that do not use BuddyPress but have annual license fees for turnkey solutions for a social media Website look more appealing than when I started.

I just hoped to do it with BuddyPress. If a social media site to help people create social media sites with BuddyPress would help us get there I’d be happy to host it and learn by trying to build it. I just cannot seem to get off the ground with anything useful other than Wbcom which I guess might be the way to go if using BuddyPresss.