This plugin needs to be clompletely remade from scratch

Hi @frvncesko

Thanks a lot for sharing your review. About design, I must say that’s not my cup of tea, but if you have ideas about how we can improve it to make it look more “up to date”, I’ll be very happy to help these be available into the plugin’s templates/layouts. Don’t hesitate to share your detailed thoughts opening a ticket on our Trac environment.

I’d like to have more inputs when you say “core functions are below average”, what do you mean? Are you talking about bundled features or about something more relative to code used in functions of the Core component? Could you elaborate a bit?

About the “all in” approach, this is something we actually wonder about inside the development team. Personally I’m in favor of reducing the plugin size as much as we can to only keep very basic features in Core and move other features (like the one we are hardly working on for community media) into Add-on plugins. I believe to best suit anyone needs, the more granular approach we take, the best it is. The idea is to make these add-ons easily installable thanks to the “BuddyPress Add-ons” tab we added to the Plugins/add Administration screen. IMHO, this approach could also benefit to third party plugin authors as some of them don’t see with a good eye us to include features they may have been building businesses on. Users would keep the choice to use BuddyPress team maintained plugins or third party plugins.

this plugin has been built only to make you pay for everything and make everything super complex

frvncesko

I strongly disagree with your statement. I know we all, inside the BuddyPress core team, care about being good citizens of the open source as well as make things as easy as we can for theme/plugin authors and end users. The fact some features are only available thanks to business organizations is not something we are favoring in any way.

Hello @imath

First of all, thank your for your reply

What i was trying to say for the design is simple, kindly watch what Youtube, Facebook and other social media have done to their sites, they have completely changed the CSS of the website to the modern design style of these days, this switch on BP has never happened.

BP really needs to be restored in terms of design and adapt itself to modern days themes, otherwise it will be like using a plugin from 2010 with themes from 2023… and it’s not only me saying this, just take a look at other reviews. Any modern website is now using round corners, modern icons, bold cool fonts etc. obviously we developers could change the CSS manually, but my suggestion is that the BP team should do this by default also for newbie and people not very familiar with coding. We don’t want to rely on Buddyboss and other BP companies for the modern design and standard features that any social media nowadays has, we want it from the core BP plugin.

Something like that for the BP blocks and default pages would be amazing

For the “core” yes i was trying to say that the basic standalone version of BP it’s actually too basic, don’t get me wrong.. the plugin itself is useful, it let’s you create a social media, but a very primitive one. BP really need to stay up to date also in terms of core features and to minimalize a lot of things, the plugin should have medias uploads by default without relying on other plugins like media press anymore, should have likes instead of the star for better interaction and possibly get the likes notified to the users, should have a reshare button in the facebook style and should have hashtags possibly. Additionally I think that also the user profile page should be more inuitive, it has too many sections in one single bar that makes it bad looking and confusive, maybe grouping all of them in a side menu including the settings would be better

The messaging system also I think could be better, excuse me but the chat design is awful, also they are not in real time… an ajax integration for messages would be amazing too. BP has a lot of potential but feels like it’s in a certain inital stage, even if it’s 10 years old. I think the team is not putting effort in the plugin like they used to do when they firstly released the plugin.

If this is asking for too much, im down to consider to start to pay for a premium BP plan for certain features and have an amazing modern social network on my website, it’s better a premium plan than having a freemium plugin stopped in the mid 2000’s. (freemium considering third part devs)