JJJ has been the lead developer of BuddyPress and bbPress since 2010. He also worked at Automattic for three years where he took part in the development of WordCamp.org and WordPress.org along with BuddyPress and bbPress.

WordPress being open source has been developed continuously by thousands of developers and organizations contributing to the core. However, there is no one focusing on developing the three sister projects full-time since 2008. Now he thinks there is also a great need of improving the software that are powering WordPress.org profiles in the background.

BuddyPress powers the WordPress.org community profiles by providing social networking elements to WordPress based websites. bbPress makes it possible to use support forums across the whole WordPress.org network. GlotPress is a BackPress powered translation tool that enabled WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress to be translated into dozens of languages. These three being used on WP.org proved that they’re easily scalable, however, they’re not limited to WordPress.org, you can install them free of charge on your WordPress site too!

With his own words, John James Jacoby promises to focus on the followings during his work:

  • Query and caching performance improvements for both BuddyPress and bbPress (to help them power the almost 20 million user profiles and the immense amount of activity going into them from all of the support forums)
  • Media & Attachment support in BuddyPress
  • Per-forum moderation in bbPress to help with plugin & theme moderation on WordPress.org.

According to him, $50,000 would be enough to support his full-time work on the project for 6 months.

There are still 29 days left and more than $35,000 has already been raised of the $50,000 goal. Check the video below and donate to his campaign to support the development of WordPress’s sister projects.

Anita Dunai

Anita helps with marketing, product design, hiring, sales & more. She is a brilliant leader and a motivating force for the team with a keen eye for detail. She directs information between management and our departments and handles external communications. She loves traveling and meeting new people, she is a real extrovert.