BuddyPress

The plugins listed in the extend section of the buddypress.org website used to be a very good selection of the latest buddypress innovations. But recently it seems that many WP and WPMU developers are including the buddypress tag in their plugin eventhought they are not real buddypress plugins, rather they just happen to be compatible with buddypress. Probably half the plugins in the WP plugin repository are compatible with buddypress but that does not mean they are buddypress extensions.

A solution might be to create an exclude array where one of the admins looks through the list and excluded plugins that are not veritable buddypress plugins. Or there could even be a button that says: this is not a BP plugin.

a few examples of what I mean:
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/post-rich-videos-and-photos-galleries/home/ – does not integrate at all with BP
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/login-with-ajax/ – not a BP plugin, just compatible. um, who cares
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/default-blog-options/ – nothing to do with BP
http://buddypress.org/community/groups/bannerman/ – nothing to do with BP
and that was just the top of the first page.

Have to agree, finding BuddyPress plugins that integrate with & add to BP is getting harder because of the current extend section.

i’m sure a simpler filter would do the trick. Or better yet, only include plugins that have the keyword buddypress or BP in the title. all the real ones seem to.

would this be easy to change?

+1

I’m not sure this is really necessary. Why shouldn’t plugins that work with BP, but aren’t specifically made for it, be listed? You mentioned Default Blog Options, which can add a lot of value to a BP installation, if you allow user blogs.

Also, forcing plugin authors to add BP into their plugin name is a bad idea. If a plugin also works on a WP install without BP, it would put some users off. A good example for that would be s2member…

I’ll have to go back and rename some of my plugins, if this happens. There’s got to be a better way. Maybe sortabllity by rating or popularity as determined by bp.org users, which would filter out the irrelevant stuff.

The real issue is that any plugin in the WP Plugin Repo that is tagged “buddypress” is automatically listed in BP.org’s Extend Section. So, any plugin dev that uses that tag will have their work listed.

We could request that plugin devs use the tag “buddypress-compatible”, instead of “buddypress”, when tagging plugins that are not dependent on BP but can run under BP. This way, only those plugins that are truly BuddyPress specific (dependent) will be listed in the BP.org Extend Section. Of course, it would be up to each plugin dev to honor that request.

One could argue that plugins that provide a new widget could be tagged buddypress as they don’t break BuddyPress, per se. Jeff, I don’t think asking people to use a different tag for BuddyPress compatibility will work, people won’t change what they know.

The page will turn into junk unless there is some degree of oversight applied to the plugins listed.

@DJPaul

That is a good point. However, since BP.org is currently pulling in all plugins that include the “buddypress” tag, there is not much we can do. If we had a BP.org plugin and theme moderator, that would be different!

since there is attention on the extend section – i noticed the “last updated” is off by 15 hours. on one i just updated: “Last Update: 15 hours ago”

Might I suggest tag BP plugins as “buddypress-extend” or “bp-extension” plus “buddypress” just to make the distinction that that the plugin is bp-dependent as opposed to just being bp-friendly.

Why dont you make your own directory?

@mercime -

Yeah, that was my suggest above as well.