With 2013 come and gone, the Project entered its 12th year of operation. Thanks to its rich community of worldwide contributors, something was always happening in the world’s most popular CMS, which by 2014 had about 21% share of websites worldwide.
BuddyPress began in 2007. Developers include John James Jacoby, Paul Gibbs, Boone Georges, and Andy Peatling. The goal of the plugin is to create specialized social networks.
At the time, Matt had said, “Someday, perhaps, the world will have a truly Free and Open Source alternative to the walled gardens and open-only-in-API platforms that currently dominate our social landscape.” BuddyPress was the solution, an open source sister project for WordPress.
In 2009, TechCrunch lauded the arrival of BuddyPress 1.0, comparing it with Facebook and MySpace. “It’s basically a social layer that you can lay on top of your WordPress…blog to give it some of the social network features that you’re already familiar with from larger social networking sites,” they said. John James Jacoby says they were ahead of their time.
BuddyPress was initially available only for multisite WordPress sites, but this soon changed. Availability for all WordPress sites began with version 1.2, and usage soared.
In 2010, BuddyPress placed third in Packt's Most Promising Open Source Project Awards. 2012 saw the first BuddyCamp, and 2013 saw the first U.S. BuddyCamp. 2013 was also the date of a major survey on BuddyPress which found that nearly half the respondents had websites in languages other than English.
In 2014, John James Jacoby (JJJ) raised over $50,000 in an Indiegogo campaign to support his full-time work on BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress.
JJJ’s interest in BuddyPress grew out of a desire for strong profile pages in WordPress. “What attracted me was the idea that we can all blog, but the thing that keeps people coming back is engagement,” he says.
He was looking for a profile plugin that would create a great profile page and didn’t find anything that met the need. His idea was to create a profile page to encourage real connections among users, and BuddyPress had that potential. BuddyPress soon became an open source network in a box — a perfect tool for social connections and collaboration.
Collaboration is central for JJJ. He was just finishing college and starting to attend WordCamps, he says, “meeting really fun people and collaborating.”
He knew people were trying to connect with others online, but as he discovered, finding tools that rewarded and supported those connections was quite difficult. “BuddyPress had some clear problems it could solve,” he says, “I went where I could make the most people the happiest.”
It was the collaborative aspect that brought him the greatest happiness and overall sense of satisfaction. “We had so many really cool contributors,” he recalls. “You’d wake up and there was this whole new thing to look at.”
At the same time, BuddyPress became a use case that showed the unlimited potential of WordPress. “It was the first big plugin that really pushed the boundaries of what WordPress could do,” says JJJ. He invested immeasurable energy into supporting it and encouraging others to contribute.
Like anything in open source, BuddyPress had its challenges. People who thought they could turn their websites into Facebook learned, JJJ says, “how much work goes into moderating and maintaining your community.”
BuddyPress works best for existing communities. “If you have no community and you get BuddyPress, you still have no community,” says Paul Gibbs.
It's undeniable that a web admin can't just install BuddyPress and expect lively discussions to occur just because the installed software would make it possible. There’s a critical mass required to get things to lift off. “If it’s a ghost town,” he says, “no one’s going to participate.”
In addition to the ability to forge human connections, BuddyPress requires some technical skill to create the look and feel website owners want. In software, there's always a trade-off between keeping power and flexibility and making it easy.
BuddyPress has chosen to be a robust solution with great versatility and freedom. Many people find that intimidating.
JJJ recounted finding it frustrating to see how many projects could benefit from using BuddyPress under the hood…and don’t. He gets feelings of nostalgia for his experience with BuddyPress back in 2014. It seemed that the sky was the limit back then, and growth didn’t continue on the rapid trajectory it had in those early days.
Still, BuddyPress has had hundreds of thousands of active installs and inspired numerous plugins. It has been translated into 45 languages. The current version, 10.3.0, is widely used in schools, by nonprofits, supporting mainstream news sites, and more. From the point of view of many observers, it’s the gold standard against which other forum software is measured.
It’s still tough to tell what the future has in store for BuddyPress. As platforms like Facebook and Twitter face government resentment and user suspicion, it may well see a renewed resurgence of interest.