- No. Reign is a responsive site that works properly on a phone, and for most communities that is enough. If you need a real app in the stores, that is a separate build and a separate budget, and it is the main thing Honeycommb is selling you.
- Members usually export as CSV, which WordPress imports without trouble. Posts and media depend on what your plan exposes, so confirm the export format in writing before you commit to a date. A migration that assumes an export which turns out not to exist is the worst way to find out.
- BuddyNext, free to install. It gives you member profiles, an activity feed, groups, messaging and notifications, which is the core of what a branded social network does. MediaVerse adds member photo and video uploads with albums, also free.
- Not in the same form. Push comes from a native app, and without one you are using email and on-site notifications instead. For communities where people check in rather than get pinged, that is usually a fair trade. For ones built on immediacy, it is not.
- Plan on a few weeks rather than a weekend, and stage it. The site and member accounts can be ready quickly; media volume is what stretches the timeline, because every photo and video has to be pulled down and re-uploaded. Run both platforms until the new one is genuinely ready.
- Yes, that is what MediaVerse is for, free to install: member uploads, albums and galleries attached to their profiles and the activity feed. The upload experience is a web form rather than a native camera roll picker, which is the practical difference on a phone.
- Reign is a theme, so the branding is yours to the extent you want it: colours, typography, layout and logo, without asking a vendor. That is more control than Honeigcommb's theming and more work. Most people get what they want in an afternoon with the Customizer.
- It might, and you should measure rather than guess. Look at your current split between app and web sessions. If the app dominates, expect a dip and plan how you will keep people coming back, whether that is email digests, a regular event, or content worth returning for.
- Hosting is the running cost people forget to budget. A small community runs comfortably on shared or entry-level managed WordPress hosting for a few hundred dollars a year. Past a few thousand active members you want managed hosting with object caching, which is more like $50 to $100 a month. That is still an order of magnitude below an annual platform contract, and unlike a subscription it buys you infrastructure you control rather than access you rent.
- Yes, and decoupling the decision is part of the appeal. The site works on its own, and if an app becomes genuinely necessary you commission one against your own REST API rather than being locked to a vendor's roadmap. Most communities find the web experience sufficient once they stop assuming an app is mandatory.