[fmckinnon]

Hope this is the correct forum to post this request. We are considering a major platform change for our website, TheWorshipCommunity.Com (http://www.theworshipcommunity.com) – I’ll refer to it as TWC in this post.

TWC is built on two platforms:
The blog/articles are based on WordPress.
The forum is based on vBulletin, which is out of date, and needs major overhaul.

I’m strongly considering BuddyPress and bbPress. bbPress is a no-brainer because we HAVE to keep the forums. That’s where the bulk of our community exists.

So, my question is should we also use BuddyPress? I get a little confused on the difference between “Groups” in Buddypress and the forums … and “Group” forums.

I know that the vBulletin importer works because we’ve already tried it. I guess my big question is when you use BuddyPress and bbPress together … are the user accounts shared? Meaning … once we import all of our thousands of users from vBulletin, is there user accounts now created for both bbPress and Buddypress .. or is it still treated like two separate accounts?

I would be beyond grateful if someone who is experienced in both could look at our site and give some honest evaluation on if this combination would be right for our community.

Thanks!
Fred

[Robkk]

i see you also made a topic at BuddyPress.

i think Dan already helped you on this , but if you have any specific questions for bbPress you can ask away.

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/need-help-understanding-integration-of-buddypress-and-bbpress/

[fmckinnon]

Hey Rob,
Yes – thank you. Dan has been very helpful. At this point, I think it’s becoming more of a preference question … as I am struggling with what path to take.

We definitely already have sitewide forums w/ vBulletin, so we could easily just keep WordPress as our blog and use site-wide forums w/ bbPress. The thing I feel like I’m missing there is the added sense of community that can be built via the “add friend” type thing you get w/ BuddyPress.

Beyond that, my biggest question is the use of Groups in BuddyPress. My concern I expressed in the other thread was that you can get the discussion happening inside a group (via the comment/status system) that is NOT part of the forum, and vice-versa. So, discussion is not happening in the same place. The big idea we had was to bring it all together.

I suppose the simplest idea would be to not enable groups, and use site-wide forums … but if not using Groups, I’m not sure what other big plus there is to BuddyPress.

Again – I realize at this point, it’s all subjective and preference. I’m enlisting some beta-testers to hit our staging site from our existing forums to see what they like/dislike.

[Robkk]

if you feel like just using bbPress there are these two plugins.

bbPress has a group plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-private-groups/

and a friends plugin

https://wordpress.org/plugins/friends-for-bbpress/