After reaching a result of ~245k WordPress sites using actively BuddyPress at the end of 2019, the “active installations” statistic (the one which is displayed in the sidebar of our plugin’s page on the official WordPress Plugin Directory), has been decreasing progressively and recently fell just below 200k.
As the Plugin directory uses ranges to simplify the “active installations” statistic, we’re no longer in the 200k+ category but felt into the 100k+ one.
-19%
That’s the BuddyPress usage negative growth between the end of 2019 and today.
Meaning?
In short, some users don’t use community features on their WordPress site anymore or, more likely, fewer and fewer users are using BuddyPress to power their community site.
While such negative growth can lead to bankruptcy when you’re running a business, it does not mean maintaining our plugin is under immediate threat. You can count on the BuddyPress core team’s passion to carry on working on fixing bugs and improving features.
Let’s come together and reverse the trend!
Confronted by extraordinary difficulty, people from a family, a tribe, a team, a community, a company, a country, a continent, earth, temporarily forget about their individual need or personal feelings and unite together to find the best way to deal with this difficulty. This is happening because we know that if everyone focuses on a general benefit, we’ll have a better chance of achieving that benefit than if each of us tries to satisfy our own goals.
I believe the English quote for this idea is “In unity there is strength“.
More than ever, BuddyPress needs you to contribute to beta testing, support, documentation, translations and, of course, code.
As a start, we’d love to hear your voice about this simple question:
In your opinion, what is the most important thing that BuddyPress is missing?
Please, tell us about it by replying to this forum topic. Feel free to talk about every aspect of the project and to suggest ways to do better. If you could then take an extra step and share the link of this post or this topic with your friends, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance for your help 😍.
We (the BuddyPress software & community) are 14 years old. We were the first plugin to extend WordPress with community features, giving users a free and open source alternative to commercial “Social Media” (social network companies whose end goal is to sell advertisements based on your data).
With WordPress and BuddyPress: you keep the freedom to share, data ownership and the control of every aspect of your community site. The BuddyPress core team is committed to preserving this free and totally open source tool for anyone.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.4.0. This maintenance release fixes three bugs. One of them was a pretty annoying regression from the 10.0.0 release that allowed non-members of a group to view and access a group’s invites navigation. Even though these non-members couldn’t actually use the invite functionality 😅, we chose to avoid waiting too long before making this bug disappear.
Immediately available is BP Rewrites 1.3.0. This maintenance release fixes two bugs and brings BP Rewrites compatibility to bbPress. For details on the changes, please read the 1.3.0 release notes.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.3.0. This maintenance release fixes seven bugs, mainly BP Nouveau improvements. It also makes sure BuddyPress is ready for the upcoming WordPress 6.0 release. For details on the changes, please read the 10.3.0 release notes.
We’re very excited to announce our first “feature as a plugin” hosted on the official WordPress.org Plugin directory is now available for download. Today marks another important date into our project’s history: BuddyPress is progressively moving towards using the WordPress Rewrite API to create, manage, parse and customize every URL generated by the plugin.
We’ve met twice during this first month of documentation contributions. ICYMI our documentation site is named the Codex.
First, we’ve shared our feelings about the current status of it :
Half of our guides are outdated.
New screenshots and descriptions are much needed.
Improving Codex organization is highly required: User documentation doesn’t reply to the same needs than Developer one.
SEO should be considered to make it easier for users to find the replies they are looking for (and to make sure BuddyPress Codex’ site is up in search results).
Plugins used to power the Codex site are not as great as they used to be now we write content using Blocks.
Then we took these decisions:
The codex will target Users and Site Admins.
A link will be added to direct Developers to the developer.buddypress.org site and the corresponding content will be moved there.
Organize the Codex using sections :
1 to help people to get started with BuddyPress,
1 to help people troubleshoot BuddyPress,
1 for each BuddyPress component.
Use & adapt the WordPress HelpHub plugin and theme for BuddyPress Codex needs. This way we can capitalize on the great work the WP Documentation team did.
Put up a staging site we can work on to update the documentation content and organization.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.2.0. This maintenance release fixes five bugs. For details on the changes, please read the 10.2.0 release notes.
We haven’t updated the BuddyPress Codex for a while and it really needs a big refresh! The BuddyPress development team decided at the end of their last week meeting to spend the next 4 to 6 months on this very important task: make our documentation up to date, better organized, more accurate and more useful to all BuddyPress user “levels”.
That’s why we kindly invite you all to join this effort and why not become members of a new BuddyPress Docs team!
We’ll meet every other Wednesday for an hour to talk about docs during a new “documentation contributor hour”. Our kick off meeting is scheduled next week (March 2) at 20:00 UTC. It will happen into the #BuddyPress channel of the WordPress.org slack.
If you haven’t registered a WordPress.org account, you’ll need to do so: create your account on WordPress.org
If you haven’t joined the WordPress.org Slack (the tool WordPress contributors are using to communicate with), you’ll need to do it, once you did the 1st step, from this place: https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.
If you have questions, don’t hesitate to comment this post 👌
