DISQUS

VentureBeat: Wordpress’s BuddyPress is the web’s social network in a box

  • Joshua Parker · 7 months ago
    Buddypress is slowly growing in popularity, but hopefully, it will be looked at as a bridge to bring sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter together into one package.
  • Kevin Flavin · 7 months ago
    I'm looking forward to throwing this up on my site. Is there a beta or alpha available to test?
  • CarlisleGroup · 7 months ago
    Looks good, exciting stuff, would like to know how to alpha/beta the site.
  • Jeff Sayre · 7 months ago
    Eric-

    You state that, "Right now, you can only get BuddyPress on WordpressMU, Automattic’s hosted service for publishing multiple blogs." That makes it seem like you have to sign up with Automattic on their hosted WordPress.com service to use BuddyPress.

    Did you mean instead that the BuddyPress plugin (that's what it actually is) works currently only with WPMU? If so, that is correct. Perhaps BuddyPress will function with single-user WP in the future.

    The fact is that right now, BuddyPress is ready to go. Anyone can download WPMU install it on their own server, and then install BuddyPress. There's no requirement to use WordPress.com, to use one of Automattic's hosting services. It's all open source and all free.
  • Eric Eldon · 7 months ago
    That's correct, Jeff. I wasn't clear. Fixing....
  • Frumph · 5 months ago
    BuddyPress is crap, it's over inflated processor usage and doubling up on functions and code that has the same data in it that you can get from utilizing standard wordpress calls. Some of the same functions for finding data that it uses are already present in the data stream and called multiple times in the same area's of code.

    The only thing they have is there's nothing else that's out of the box (so to speak) working that someone can just install and use.

    I do not recommend using BuddyPress at all. I know a minimal of 3 people who lost their accounts on their shared-hosting servers because of BuddyPress's extreme usage.

    Maybe in future releases they will streamline everything to the point where it's not such a strain, but right now it's not worth it unless you can afford your own vps or dedicated.
  • John S · 1 month ago
    If you read the code more you'll see that most of the functions are actually porting through to WordPress functions and not duplicating. Profiles is the one exception, although it does sync back.

    Many of the functions that are called multiple times on the page for the same data have their results cached, so with a little more investigation you'll see this makes no difference. It's the same as calling get_option( 'var' ) multiple times.

    If your friends lost their accounts it's their own fault. For one, WordPress MU (that is required for BuddyPress) needs at least a VPS to run. Of course it is going to kill a shared server.
  • Frumph · 1 month ago
    John S, thank you for replying to something that was posted 4 months ago, if you feel like having something to say, go back in the code 4 months to when BuddyPress was reinviting the wordpress code.