Services April 17th

[Jeffro]

During the month of April, I'll be talking about the commercialization of WordPress with each week containing a round-table of guests. April 17th is dedicated to services and features the following panelists.

Joshua Strebel - Pagely
Daniel Bachhuber - CoPress
Raanan Bar Cohen of Automattic

If you have any questions especially if they are business related, submit them here in this thread.

[Stevan]

1.Curverider is lunching www.elgg.com in may, the cost of that service is vary affordable $29.95 - $49.95 per month, so my question is - Why there is no buddypress hosted solution? With ning.com forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere I see open market but no one trying to fill that hole. Is buddypress not stable enough for that?

2.wordpress.com, drupalgardens.com, page.ly, elgg.com............... People can have websites optimized secured and hosted by experts with lots of customizations in backend for small amount of money - Do we see job cuts for freelancers and small web development companies?

Sorry for my bad English

[Mark McWilliams]

Why there is no buddypress hosted solution?

I know on WP.com for example, and quite possibly Page.ly too, it's not so much why isn't there a BuddyPress Hosted Solution, I guess it's more that it NEEDS WordPress to function, it's simply a plugin! So in a way these sites, almost (I'm not saying they do!), actually allow you to run BuddyPress, as you would just install and activate it?!

Good question though, I can see the logic in why you asked! :)

[andrea_r]

With ning.com forcing existing free networks to either make the change to premium accounts or migrate their networks elsewhere I see open market but no one trying to fill that hole.

If Ning is shutting down free services, and people are fleeing because they don't want to pay, then...

they won't pay for a BuddyPress solution either.

Also, the way BuddyPress works, is it isn't multi-network aware. you can set up one install of WPMU and host multiple blogs, but you can't set up one install of WP or MU and different BuddyPres-es.

While I feel BP can totally fill the Ning gap, and people should consider it, I've seen some ridiculous comments form people leaving Ning, who have said paying for hosting for a decent-sized BP install is not something they're willing to do.

Well, *someone* has to pay to run it somewhere.

[Stevan]

@Mark
Yes, gigaom.com is buddypres site on vip.wordpress.com but I was thinking more about low cost solution, something like: "build your one network for only 30$..... and pay +20$ to change default theme +20$ to have yore one domain name +20 ++++++ you now what I mean :)

@Andrea
You are right, those people would newer start there networks if it wasn't for free, but there are also people willing to pay or ning would close completely.With bad example of ning changing terms, main advantage of hosted buddypress could be easy transfer from .com to .org like with wp. Anyway I'm not web marketing expert or any kind of expert so I'm not claiming anything, I just saw drupal and elgg going .com page.ly success... zonkk.com offers free elgg sites(alfa)

Also, the way BuddyPress works, is it isn't multi-network aware. you can set up one install of WPMU and host multiple blogs, but you can't set up one install of WP or MU and different BuddyPres-es.

Don't have to be mu, Page.ly is not wpmu.

[andrea_r]

Don't have to be mu, Page.ly is not wpmu.

Right, but page.ly isn't free either. :)