Update 12.0 may brick your site. Test on staging first!

Thanks for your review.

I agree testing on a staging site where your production site is cloned on is important. I would advice not to wait until the major version is published as it’s a bit too late. I wish you and other users like the one who published this review for example give the BP Core Team some of their time to beta test major releases. Beta period for 12.0.0 lasted more than 4 months and we haven’t got any help from many end users to anticipate issues like the ones you’re talking about. For 12.0.0 we knew some specific / very customized configs would have difficulties with it. The important change we made in 12.0.0 is crucial for next BuddyPress features some BP plugins might still not be ready for it, that’s why we built the BP Classic Add-on you’re talking about.

Hi Mathieu,

Thanks for your response, I’m sure you and the team are busy with feedback from 12.0, so appreciate you taking the time to respond. Please also know that my comment is not to downplay the excellent work your team does generally in building and maintaining BuddyPress. It’s a vital part of our membership site.

As a site owner managing BuddyPress is a very small part of what we do every day. Devops includes ongoing maintenance of core and plugins, responding to performance and security issues, site feature development as well as a vast number of issues outside of the technical work: Marketing, SEO, Business Development, Partnerships, Customer Support and more.

It’s not reasonable to devote time to beta test every new update that is delivered for every plugin.

I would perhaps push back and ask what % of popular BuddyPress themes and plugins did the team confirm worked correctly, and conduct developer outreach if there were issues.

In particular in our case in limited testing we have thus far uncovered site breaking issues with Kleo (a popular theme) and some BuddyBoss plugins. We’ve reached out to both of those teams to get it resolved.

BP Classic does not help resolve those issues, and reinstalling an older version of BuddyPress left our site in an inconsistent state.

My suggestions for the future are:

1. BuddyPress team should have KPIs around % of popular themes/plugins that are compatible with newly released versions.
2. Legacy support modes (e.g. BP Classic) are fully backwards compatible.
3. Rollbacks to previous major versions should be possible without a full site restore from backup.

Thanks for your consideration ??

I wish we had the staff, means & time to apply your first recommandation. We’re an open source, free & community driven software where unpaid contribution is what help us maintain the plugin. Unfortunately, when you don’t pay for a software, if you want to ensure some quality maintenance for your site you need to share some of your energy into contribution. If BuddyPress is a vital part of your site, then you need to take care of it. The least you can do is beta test for your own safety. I and the other members of the team are doing our best freely. If You and other unsatisfied users carry on rewarding our work with bad reviews, I’m afraid one of these days passion won’t be enough to carry on giving you our time.

To me, “It’s not reasonable to devote time to beta test every new update that is delivered” for BuddyPress, it’s vital.

I can only agree – in my case the update to version 12.1.1 from 12.0.0. caused the bbpress forums to crash. Thankfully, I am able to restore BuddyPress to 12.0 because I made a backup. However, since bbpress has not been updated for two years the crash may also have to do with the outdated plugin.