When we decided to build EasyOutsource, a community job site, our first attempt was to build it on the Drupal platform. At the time it appeared to be the best solution available due to several plugins that could potentially, when combined, work as a social networking site. However we discovered a number of issues with Drupal, mainly that these plugins didn’t work well together, and that the Drupal interface was confusing and in many ways chaotic. Often changes that would have been simple in WordPress required expensive programming, and many of the features we hoped would be easy to set up with Drupal turned out to be extremely time consuming. We rebuilt the site several times and lost our confidence in Drupal as a legitimate platform for building social networking sites.
Then we discovered Buddypress, a social networking platform built specifically to integrate with WordPress. Being experienced WordPress developers we were excited about the possibilities. We were blown away by how easy it was to set up and configure, and how friendly the interface was for users of the system. We were able to replicate what took us months with Drupal in under a week. From there we contacted several of the core BuddyPress developers and worked with three of the most active contributors to build us the custom plugins we needed for our site. We immediately recognized BuddyPress’s future potential as a platform, and decided to move in the direction of becoming a BuddyPress-focused agency. Since then we have built many BuddyPress sites and we are actively contributing themes and plugins back to the community.
BuddyPress has a large library of plugins built specifically for integrating with it, not to mention the 11,000+ WordPress plugins that can be used in conjunction. BuddyPress has a lively developer community, and it’s comforting to know it’s built for WordPress, a platform with over 25 million installs. In mid-February BuddyPress was retooled so that it could be downloaded via the WordPress plugins directory (as opposed to a manual install process), and since then it has seen an explosion in popularity (see image below).
Additionally the theming system was rewritten so that BuddyPress themes would have a similar structure to WordPress themes, meaning the learning curve for figuring out how to theme BuddyPress sites is now relatively small for experienced WordPress developers. Because the WordPress developer community is enormous, we are confident that many more developers will discover and contribute to BuddyPress and it will soon establish itself as the dominant open-source social networking platform.
Want us to customize BuddyPress for you?
Contact us today. We’ll be happy to help.