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Sarah Gooding

John James Jacoby on Navigating BuddyPress’ Identity Crisis

I had the opportunity to catch up with John James Jacoby at WordCamp US 2015. Jacoby is the project lead for bbPress and BuddyPress. In the video interview below he offers a quick overview of what to expect in BuddyPress 2.5.

Jacoby also gives us a look inside his Stuttter project, which contains several social components, and explores how they might fit into WordPress. These include his experiments with users, profiles, and the user experience as it pertains to aggregating activity.

“It’s really just attacking the idea of the big features of BuddyPress in a smaller way that developers can interact with more conveniently, such as taxonomies and metadata vs. the big monolithic solution that BuddyPress tends to be,” he said.

“I don’t think my experimentation with Stuttter is going to translate into me spending less time on BuddyPress,” Jacoby said. “It’s like a side project. It’s like an artist switching from oil to watercolor paint. You try and see what’s over there and bring back in what you learned.”

Jacoby said that he hopes to continue to provide leadership for BuddyPress for the foreseeable future. Part of this is mentoring BP core leadership to step up to feel comfortable leading and making decisions. The other part is helping the project navigate what he believes to be an identity crisis.

“BuddyPress as a project has an identity crisis,” Jacoby said. “It doesn’t know what exactly it’s supposed to be to the people who are using it. Defining what BuddyPress’ identity is or what problems it’s truly trying to solve is what it needs. Until that happens it’s going to float along without a clear definition of what it’s trying to do.”

As part of his efforts to help BuddyPress navigate this identity crisis, Jacoby has been talking to people and agencies who are actively using it. At the end of the interview he puts out a call for anyone who is using the software to reach out to him with feedback on where BuddyPress should go in the future.

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12 responses to “John James Jacoby on Navigating BuddyPress’ Identity Crisis”

  3. This is a managerial problem: “BuddyPress as a project has an identity crisis,” Jacoby said. “It doesn’t know what exactly it’s supposed to be to the people who are using it. Defining what BuddyPress’ identity is or what problems it’s truly trying to solve is what it needs. Until that happens it’s going to float along without a clear definition of what it’s trying to do.”

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    • Totally agree! bbpress is more important ( i think) than buddypress to a wide wordpress community, and it has a clear purpose, so while buddypress is floating, let it float for 6-12 months and please please concentrate on bbpress

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      • I agree, it may seem that the bbPress project seems slow on the development side of things. Hopefully John would start contributing more, or at least get developers interested in contributing to bbPress in some way from now on. BuddyPress already has a great following, so much that I can already see a BuddyPress 2.6 version coming out sooner before the long delayed (2 or more years I think) bbPress 2.6. I thought at least John’s successful Indiegogo campaign would jump start the release of 2.6 in at least the first half of this year, but bbPress 2.6 is still not released yet. If John does concentrate less on BuddyPress in the future and let others developers like Boone, Paul, or Imath handle it, hopefully he puts his attention toward the growth and development of the bbPress project.

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  5. Very interesting interview and I like JJJ his approach to guiding BuddyPress forward.

    I think BuddyPress has gotten to the point where it can almost do anything in the right hands. My biggest worry as a full-time BP Developer/Consultant and someone who’s heavily invested in the future of the plugin, is the huge amount of potential users that are lost simply BECAUSE of these possibilities. The barrier to entry is too high, and finding high quality tutorials, plugins and inspiration is a challenge if you don’t know where to look.

    I think that we (as the BP community) have not been able to properly showcase and explain the power of BuddyPress and thus lowering the entry barrier. I don’t think that this is because of the code quality or the direction the project is taking, it’s more a matter of figuring out how to best present the information to new users.

    There is documentation, there are awesome plugins & themes, and there are amazing sites powered by BuddyPress used by regular folks and “the enterprise”. But this remains largely hidden and this hurts new users. They need that guidance and inspiration to see that BuddyPress is indeed a real solution used by real people with similar goals as theirs.

    I don’t think this task should fall on the hands of the developers, or all of this should take place on BP.org. Just as WP/WooCommerce/EDD and other successful solutions have lots of high quality 3rd party resources I hope that BuddyPress will slowly move towards that as well. This is something that should be done by the community of site owners that currently use BuddyPress to power their social networks. By showcasing their community and inspiring others by blogging about their community, what they’ve learned and the plugins they have used.

    That being said I’m incredibly excited about the future of the plugin and huge thanks to the Core development team and the many contributors that helped shape BuddyPress to what it is today.

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  6. When you install BuddyPress you get an overwhelming amount of features that you may not want, that don’t look particularly good. After a good amount of digging, a developer can figure out how to wrangle the user-facing pages into something looking half decent, but it’s a battle. Maybe the REST API is an opportunity — a BuddyPress API could give developers the features but let them build their own interfaces from them.

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  7. This article is very weird considering that I am using BuddyPress for the last 5 years.

    BuddyPress is something that makes WordPress more social. It is for the users who wanted to build a tiny (or even large) community on their WordPress powered website. With the help of bbPress, you can turn any WordPress site into a fully pledge social network.

    That’s it. BuddyPress is a social media platform on WordPress. Period.

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  8. Identity Crisis?
    We use BuddyPress for so many different use cases, I can not see any identity crisis. BuddyPress is so huge it has no general identity.

    We use BuddyPress for Intranet solutions, learning systems, any kind of user generated content, e-commerce, marketplaces and membership sites. Even a german TV show use BuddyPress for their Community.

    There is a huge world around BuddyPress in the Enterprise Scope. The smaller sites often not understand the benefit of BuddyPress.

    WordPress educates user to build as lightweight as possible and use less plugins. BuddyPress is a huge horse. I think this blocks normal site owners to use BuddyPress. It is first interesting for bigger sites and company’s.

    The smaller site owners mostly want the profile component but they think BuddyPress is to huge. I believe if BuddyPress components would be released separately, the Members component would be installed on nearly every blog. Maybe BuddyPress should be a installer bundle ;)

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