I find it very good plugin with basic features, but in reality, you need better design and more features / options.If you want to save time to make your site look decent or not so good at coding yourself, I recommend you to go with paid themes.
A month ago I created my first Wordpress site with one third-party plugin and the forum plug-in bbPress.
Getting a theme to work well with both plugins took quite a bit of time as I had to write a small bit of custom css and PHP. My knowledge of css and PHP is low. Actually it took a few weeks to get everything to look nice and work well together, although the work was done on a very part-time basis.
I now want to install BuddyPress and bbPress together on another Wordpress site as community software for a certain niche.
Is there a reasonably low-priced (or free) theme I can purchase for BuddyPress (and that works with bbPress installed on the same site) that looks nice?
Please give me some recommendations. I don't want to spend three weeks making css tweaks to get a decent look community website.
As regards reviewing BuddyPress (together with bbPress), I installed both a week ago. It is good BuddyPress allows you precisely to turn what functionality what want on and turn everything else off. For my case I just wanted the ability to allow BuddyPress groups to have their own associated bbPress forum. It worked, although the default themes are rather plain - hence my desire for a good theme recommendation. BuddyPress and bbPress work well together. My only issue is one common to all Wordpress users. The more plugins you add to a Wordpress site, the greater the chances of some little issues occurring, although this is not the fault of BuddyPress or bbPress.
When I was looking for what forum plug-in to use, I installed three different ones. bbPress was the most plain looking one by default. However bbPress was the only one that played nicely with all the other plug-ins. So I stuck with bbPress. After a little work, I managed to get bbPress looking good.
We are almost in 2023 and this plugin doesn't follow none of the modern trends in terms of design and features. The core functions are below average, the standard design of the plugin is awful, looks like a plugin built in the mid 2000s like the designs we used to see in 2006/2007. The plugin is very primitive, there are no reshare options for status, no likes for post but a weird star that doesn't even gets notified to another user. Then why the hell the plugin doesn't support medias by default? You need toooo many plugin just to add some small simple things that should be inside the plugin by default, like also live notifications. I've been using Buddypress for years and my conclusion is that this plugin has been built only to make you pay for everything and make everything super complex, this plugin is not really customer friendly and it's not a nice choice to create a social network based platform, and if you want a decent social network prepare yourself to install 40+ plugins only for buddypress.
Plugin is great, our theme supports it. But there is a bug with blank page for the registration page, user profile edit page etc. etc. if theme contains 'theme.json' file but no 'templates/index.html' file (not block theme)
It can be fixed by adding this code into your 'functions.php' file or in the 'after_theme_setup' hook:
remove_theme_support( 'block-templates' );
We have spend almost two days to manage this problem.
I just spent the past six months trying to create a new website using BuddyBoss, and have given up. I had high hopes for BuddyBoss, but the product doesn’t live up to the hype. The one claim they make that they live up to is support, which is good.
If you want to build a site that’s a straightforward clone of Facebook, with no unique functions or features, BuddyBoss might work well for you.
But if your members need functions beyond ordinary social media, you’re probably better off with a plugin like Youzify that allows you to add these social media features to a regular WordPress site that allows you to do anything.
Here are just a few of the major problems we encountered:
1) They have a "BuddyBoss Integrations" webpage with a long list of plugins that supposedly are compatible with BuddyBoss, but I think they just mean your computer won’t blow up if you combine them. For instance, Elementor is on that list, which was a major plus since we use it heavily. But it turns out that none of the core BuddyBoss pages (like Groups, Forums, Members, etc.) are editable in Elementor: you can only create new pages in Elementor using their Sample page.
2) Don't believe their claim of requiring fewer plugins: you’ll need tons of them. It’s true that you don’t need BuddyPress, but that’s about it for cutting down on plugins.
3) Many of our support requests got the reply that we would need to hire a professional developer to get what we want. Sometimes it seemed like sending business to developers was the reason they created BuddyBoss.
4) The turning point came when we realized that we were spending half our development time trying to work around BuddyBoss limitations. We bought it to make our lives easier, not harder.
We were far beyond the 14-day money back guarantee. But, since we never used BuddyBoss for even one minute on a live site, I was hoping for at least a partial refund, since it turned out to be useless to us. (There’s no way you can really discover that in just 14 days.) No such luck: $228 and six months of work wasted.
I worry about the future of the BuddyBoss company. They regularly have lifetime license offers that they push really hard. They are sacrificing future revenues for a cash infusion now, which makes me wonder whether they have staffed-up too fast and created too much overhead.
