BuddyBoss Developer Gives You Some Honest Advice
BuddyBoss Developer Says, “It’s Just Right for Small Businesses?
As a long time BuddyBoss developer, I recommend BuddyBoss to any business owner looking to add community features to their online courses. If you are building your online course platform and are looking for ways to get members engaged, it’s a solution to consider. If you are wanting to get members communicating with instructors and fellow students and are wanting to add social media features, it has a large number of features you should explore.
Let me discuss what a BuddyBoss developer like me has learned from years using it so you understand what it can do for you.
BuddyBoss Developer Tells you, “What exactly is BuddyBoss?”
To best answer this questions, let’s go over a little bit of BuddyBoss history. Before BuddyBoss was born, there was BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an open-source WordPress plugin enabling you to add discussion forums to your website. It includes member profiles and member-to-member messaging. BuddyPress does plenty, but it takes plenty of work to configure especially since adding many of the features people expect means installing a combination of other plugins to get the job done.
What happened next is that a group of experienced BuddyPress developer types launched BuddyBoss. They packages two products together. Those are BuddyBoss Theme and BuddyBoss Platform. On the website you will see them called out as two separate items that are included when you make your purchase. These two go really well together.
What do these deliver:
- First you get a solution for providing social media features to your WordPress website. BuddyBoss allows you to include member profiles, private groups each with their own activity feeds, member-to-member messaging, “like” and “friending” features and others.
- The ability to sell online courses on your membership site.
- Straight-forward gamification features.
BuddyBoss Platform by itself provides these features, but it falls short on the visual design side. It is compatible with other WordPress theme, but the BuddyBoss Theme is specifically designed for it.
BuddyBoss years back had a version called Social Networking for LearnDash making it really clear that BuddyBoss was designed from the start to work with LearnDash. Our team from the early launch of BuddyBoss made use of the platform on customer projects and we quickly expanded our agency practice to include BuddyBoss when community features were needed in our membership and online course projects.
Because of our agency’s history working with Keap/Infusionsoft, we have developed expertise using Keap/Infusionsoft with Memberium to build highly functioning learning sites. Over the years, we have developed skills working with MemberPress, Wishlist Member and other WordPress based membership tools. Many of these project including putting WooCommerce or ThriveCart to work to provide e-commerce features. These together provide a highly functioning and flexible platform for small business owners.
Given this product stack, BuddyBoss Theme and BuddyBoss Platform can easily be used to build learning sites with e-commerce features for selling all sorts of products in addition to selling memberships and online courses.
Because BuddyBoss integrates so well with LearnDash, the platform is perfect for:
- building online courses from scratch,
- organizing course content,
- giving students assignments and quizzes,
- awarding badges and certificates,
- enabling instructors to interact with students, track student progress in a course or series of courses, and
- a lot more.
Because LearnDash has a strong set of addon vendors, Uncanny Owl and WisdmLabs being really good ones, LearnDash provides some really good features.
You can get the BuddyBoss Theme for their yearly price of $228. Of course, there are many free themes that will provide you with a very nice visual design for making your online courses and site look really good. If you are wanting to build a site with community features, the price is more than worth given all the BuddyBoss Theme and BuddyBoss platform together provide.
BuddyBoss is not necessarily a complex solution, but it is very feature rich. That makes it difficult and time consuming for first time online course builders. That is why we highly recommend working with an experienced BuddyBoss developer on your site. You can benefit from the experience a team the knows the solution can provide you. It will also enable you to tap into best practices that you won’t likely know if you are building your online course site for the first time.