Finally Migrated Away After 3? Years of Nuisance

I have used Peepso Ultimate Bundle for over 3 years on several sites. One of these was a previously established BuddyPress (horror) community before the move to Peepso… and having decided that we really needed to get rid of Peepso, the migration to another solution was a very big job.

Just prior to Peepso version 3, they decided to pretty much force Gecko theme onto users. Unfortunately, Gecko and Peepso, in general, don’t like the WordPress ecosystem and don’t use the Customizer, preferring their own solutions instead.
This is a truly awful decision as it resulted in hours of work.

Known problems are discusses in the Peepso community (which BTW offers no simple way to delete yourself from it) and nearly always the response is… “we intend to fix this in a future version”. But it seldom happens.

Because of the way they chose to move away from WordPress standards before Version 3 (their own customizer etc), we determined to not update from that point on and continued to make required edits to the plugins ourselves.
In doing so, we essentially forked Peepso and were able to remove huge amount of bloated code, override several poorly designed aspects, introduce mobile push notifications, create a mobile app, vastly impove the quality of the CSS and massively reduce unused JavaScript – all for free.

Peepso has the potential to be a super platform BUT they absolutely must redesign their database storage usage, make the relationships between content types obvious and easy to follow, store activity comments as WP comments, use the WordPress Customizer for Gecko Theme and Peepso styling, and reconsider their pricing model.
Oh, also, once a user had paid for a licence once – they actually (WordPress licencing rules) have rights to use the plugins and extensions indefinitely just not with updates or support. Peepso hinders this by having licence and version checking in the init sequence of every page load – which then blocks the extensions from working if you haven’t renewed. This should also be changed – if the product is good enough, users will happily renew their licences.

Overall, a potentially good product but it caused our team thousands of hours of work to keep it running the way it should.
The alternative WP plugin replacement we have chosen (not naming it here but it’s easy to find with some research) has proven to be robust, better coded (although also with some small niggles) and uses the WP customizer and database storage in a logical and well.designed fashion.