Oh, that's a rant for another day. I don't think I have the energy left.
The short answer, I guess, isn't that dissimilar to what happened around here on this site around the time of the 1.x - 2.x switchover, and from which I'm not sure the community has ever recovered: community tools that worked, then, during a redesign, disappeared or didn't work as well.
Also, the major version bump and rearchitecting (minor compared what happened to Vanilla) with BP 1.5 made a huge number of the plugins that had been written while BP was in its rapid growth and adoption phase unusable and incompatible with the new version, a major no-no. That's the position I'm stuck in with my BP site -- it's just too much work than I have had time for for a long while to rewrite other people's code (because in many cases the authors of those earlier plugins abandoned them).
The couple of poorly-conceieved redesigns of Buddypress.org since earlier days (where BP itself is used) have turned a lot of people off, and the community has fallen apart to an extent. BP.org should have been a showpiece for what the thing can do (and it is pretty fantastic, if you're a Wordpress person), but instead, there are vast swaths of functionality that work out of the box but are broken on the site itself, and pieces of the puzzle (like the support forum itself) that need more useful features than exist out of the box (but are easy to mod in) to make them fulfill their intended purpose as a community dev support site, but limp along in hobbled form because there aren't enough resources to work on core _and _manage the community _and _make sure the community tools are featureful enough and working. At least that's what it looks like as a developer.
Ball dropped, community becomes an endless set of surges of new people showing up and asking the same questions because the doco is scattered and incomplete, and then disappearing again, while long-time users either lurk to hide from the waves of noise or give up entirely and move to greener pastures.
Not unlike Vanilla, like I said, at least through my lately-cynical glasses, although to be honest, I have higher hopes for the future of Vanilla than I do BP, unless Automatic starts pouring some resources and support into it.
I think th wiki can be a valuable asset to help to minimize the common issue of docu-dispersion. But it really needs everyone to engage.
If you find something somewhere that you spent time searching for, link or copy it to the wiki. If there is something missing... maybe some more fundamental element that is needed, create a new page and write down what you want to know.
The wiki can be a powerful tool. Its up to everyone to make it what we need and want.
Answers
@stavthewonderchicken what about BuddyPress land? What was wrong over there? ("Don't even get me started about BuddyPress")
Oh, that's a rant for another day. I don't think I have the energy left.
The short answer, I guess, isn't that dissimilar to what happened around here on this site around the time of the 1.x - 2.x switchover, and from which I'm not sure the community has ever recovered: community tools that worked, then, during a redesign, disappeared or didn't work as well.
Also, the major version bump and rearchitecting (minor compared what happened to Vanilla) with BP 1.5 made a huge number of the plugins that had been written while BP was in its rapid growth and adoption phase unusable and incompatible with the new version, a major no-no. That's the position I'm stuck in with my BP site -- it's just too much work than I have had time for for a long while to rewrite other people's code (because in many cases the authors of those earlier plugins abandoned them).
The couple of poorly-conceieved redesigns of Buddypress.org since earlier days (where BP itself is used) have turned a lot of people off, and the community has fallen apart to an extent. BP.org should have been a showpiece for what the thing can do (and it is pretty fantastic, if you're a Wordpress person), but instead, there are vast swaths of functionality that work out of the box but are broken on the site itself, and pieces of the puzzle (like the support forum itself) that need more useful features than exist out of the box (but are easy to mod in) to make them fulfill their intended purpose as a community dev support site, but limp along in hobbled form because there aren't enough resources to work on core _and _manage the community _and _make sure the community tools are featureful enough and working. At least that's what it looks like as a developer.
Ball dropped, community becomes an endless set of surges of new people showing up and asking the same questions because the doco is scattered and incomplete, and then disappearing again, while long-time users either lurk to hide from the waves of noise or give up entirely and move to greener pastures.
Not unlike Vanilla, like I said, at least through my lately-cynical glasses, although to be honest, I have higher hopes for the future of Vanilla than I do BP, unless Automatic starts pouring some resources and support into it.
I think th wiki can be a valuable asset to help to minimize the common issue of docu-dispersion. But it really needs everyone to engage.
If you find something somewhere that you spent time searching for, link or copy it to the wiki. If there is something missing... maybe some more fundamental element that is needed, create a new page and write down what you want to know.
The wiki can be a powerful tool. Its up to everyone to make it what we need and want.
Vanilla Wiki, Tastes Great! 31,000 viewers can't be wrong. || Plugin Development Explained