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Sarah Gooding

Major Milestone For BuddyPress: 2 Million Downloads and Counting

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BuddyPress reached a major milestone today, crossing the two million download mark just a week ahead of the official 2.0 release. The plugin, known as “a social network in a box,” now has more than 500 related community extensions.

Over the past 7 years, BuddyPress has developed a strong international community of users and contributors. Roughly 50% of BuddyPress sites are in English, with the other half comprised of social networks in Spanish, Italian, French, German, Dutch, Swedish, Portugese, Chinese, and many other languages.

The upcoming version 2.0 of the plugin adds a host of new features that help administrators manage their communities more efficiently in the dashboard. It also introduces some remarkable performance improvements that reduce the plugin’s footprint by up to 75% in many places. Help celebrate BuddyPress crossing the two million download mark by testing 2.0-beta2.

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12 responses to “Major Milestone For BuddyPress: 2 Million Downloads and Counting”

  2. After searching for a good community plugin/script for my fishing network i came across buddy press and it rocks.
    I tried Elgg and others, not that good. I was going buy social engine until i saw the price of their plugins and you can’t even transfer your licence.
    So in my opinion it’s buddy press all the way, will be adding forum soon.

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  3. I’m a fan of BP, but only because there aren’t many viable options. Download numbers are deceiving. Considering BuddyPress is one of the ugliest examples of anything WordPress and has been quirky, at best, for quite some time, I wonder how many of those 500k downloads have actually turned into a live site? It’s price-point makes it inviting for those related extensions, but how many of those have been purchased/implemented. I hope the developers of BP don’t get sucked into the hype of the numbers. It’s had great potential for years but in my opinion has yet to come close to living up to it. Hopeful for its future.

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    • As a huge fan of buddypress and bbpress my biggest wish is that automattic gives them both more attention and love. Also, the current teams behind the two projects needs to add a few more developers and one or two ui/ux experts.

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  4. “One of the ugliest examples of anything WordPress”. Wait.. what?!

    It’s a plugin that has a team of core developers, dedicated plugins, themes, meetings (BuddyCamps) across the globe and dozens (maybe hundreds) of people who make a living doing BuddyPress projects only.

    Seven years ago it was among the first plugins that completely transformed WordPress into something other then a blog or CMS. This was a few years before solutions like WooCommerce, BBPress and Easy Digital Downloads. This also meant that a ton of code has been through many iterations and some of it could be improved. They core development team has been extremely hard at work doing exactly this, and the project is healthier than ever.

    BuddyPress has been an excellent solution for thousands of projects that needed a social networking solution that is free, gives you full control over your data and can be extended & themed with relative ease. It has been downloaded TWO MILLION times.

    Things can be improved, a lot of people have been very vocal about the project (I’ve been certainly one of them) but to call it an “ugly” project is not only incorrect (just as your notion of “price-points” and “purchases” when describing the free plugin & 500+ extensions) but it’s also a rude towards the people that have started this.

    Sorry if I come across rude Bob, but I don’t want you or other readers of WPTavern to get the impression BuddyPress is not an extremely valid option for building a social network. Come to BuddyCamp Miami in a few weeks and see what can be done with it ;-)

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    • Not rude Bowe, just off the mark. As I noted, I’m a fan. But if ever there were a poster-child for function to the abandonment of form, BP is it. There are several imitations out there and dozens of themes that incorporate BP, and all at least attempt to make it graphically appealing. And, because it’s free, it is often the first choice of those who are attempting to construction a social site – but I question the numbers and how often it ends up in the production model – that number would be more telling than downloads. There was no rudeness intended in my comment – simply a response to the “numbers” game, and of course, just my opinion :).

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    • Bowe, I agree with you. You ARE on the mark–with the tone and content of Bob’s raw opinion–which outright slams a lot of hard-working folks’ efforts and support of BP. In the spirit of that old saw, “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all,” Bob could have more positively voiced his criticism, and the post could have been written more constructively while voicing his concerns about the numbers. I can relate to Bob’s post though, as I tend to write raw and off-the-cuff. My own first-draft responses tend to be way more negative than I would like or intend. But, thanks for taking time to post your rebuke as it were, Bowe. It’s a great reminder to try to employ a more kinder tone and to exercise restraint. These are things I can very much improve upon myself. Cheers

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        • The jist of your first comment amounted to saying:

          “those devs better not pat themselves on the back because I’m nowhere close to being happy with it. I’m only calling myself a ‘fan’ because there are no other free alternatives”.

          It comes across as totally self-absorbed. If you don’t like where it’s at, participate to make it better. If you think comments like that are appropriate to throw around at any Open Source project that makes it software available for free, you may have skipped a few basic lessons about human nature that you could have picked up during kindergarten or beyond.

          Anyway, 2 million downloads is a massive milestone and that is good news for the entire WP ecosystem.

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        • Interesting comparisons (re: Kindergarten, elementary school), I was actually thinking of quoting Robert Fulghum’s seminal book, “All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten” in my original comment above… Hmmmm, might be worth a reread.

          But for now, call we all just get along? Hold hands? Sing a verse or two of “We are the World”? Smile? Laugh at ourselves and at each other? …and then get back to work, already? Ha!

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  5. I used BuddyPress and I’ll be glad to keep supporting BP project. If we are to be self-absorbed and lashed at WordPress 10 years ago, I’m afraid, it won’t be where it is today. Most times we need to appreciate hours of effort put into some work even if it makes little insignificance. Bowe, Peter and Steve, your comments are gem stone! Thank u all.

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