BuddyPress.org

Interesting points. Working recently with trunk prompted the same thoughts vis-a-vis disabling BP and being left with a heap of odd pages, but then I simply removed or unpublished those pages.

It would be interesting to hear the comments of the core devs who are :

@jjj
@djpaul
@boonebgorges

Not in disagreement necessarily and get your point. I’m interested in this as I don’t know myself why this approach has been adopted (probably should have been paying more attention in those dev chats )

The reason I suggest something along the lines of post types is to allow adding new “components” so BP would install activity – forums – groups etc content types and then a theme could add it’s own. Allowing more individualized networks. BP could be nothing more than allowing front end editing of post types / components. But this will never happen. From a BP core devs mouth “can of worms”

Well, it’s not really rules of web development, it’s more like recommendations and while most of them do make a valid point, it’s wrong to get too hung up about them, if there is a good enough reason to break them. Then it’s not bad development, it’s innovation

@driz

BuddyPress is already a theme. Look at bp-default. That is a full WP theme that for some reason was bundled with the plugin. There is a huge mess of code devoted to making this setup work. It is nearly impossible to freely modify the templates, even if you roll your own BuddyPress theme, because the javascript is so tightly bound to the ids and classes in the markup.

I don’t think its reasonable anymore to call BP a plugin, since it does not enhance a WP site in the purest sense. It completely takes it over and defines an entirely new set of rules for how to customize the look of your site. That sounds like a theme to me.

If you think about BP as a theme, then the only acceptable ways to solve the issue and stay true to WP is pages or custom post types. This only doesn’t make sense though because BP is made up of many components that should be making their OWN decisions about how they get displayed.

So back to my original point. BP is defining too many rules, and forcing components to adhere to the default theme itself, instead of a theme prototype (which is how WP works). If BP was doing it the “right” way, then this whole issue would be moot, because each component would be deciding how its URL was determined, and the end user could decide if they liked it or not.

I think this is in the scope of the topic because it gets into defining the problem that needs to be solved, which is important before working on a solution.

I also have found myself torn about using pages for BP directories. In the end, though, I think it’s a compromise that works out for the better in the short- to medium-run, and does not have awful long-term consequences.

In my view, it is a gross overstatement to say that this move ‘ruins’ BP. However, there are a few things about it that are unappealing:
1) It forces the creation of what are, essentially, dummy pages – whatever content you might add to the page through the normal WP editor is totally ignored
2) Related – It uses part of the WP page infrastructure (URLs) without using others (in particular, WP page templates)

Problem (1) is unappealing, but it is mitigated by a couple of points. First, the current system is not a whole lot better. Instead of having ‘dummy’ pages that you can see in the admin (like BP trunk has), the current version of BP has ‘phantom’ pages, so that when BP detects a URL like example.com/groups, it essentially hijacks the page load in order to do its own stuff. This is a bit jarring, and not at all transparent. So there is a trade-off, but it’s not all bad. Second, while the idea that ‘Pages in WordPress are supposed to be static content’ seems right to me in broad strokes, it doesn’t seem to me to be a hard-and-fast rule. Many plugins (gallery plugins, ecommerce plugins, etc) display their content by means of a shortcode that is manually inserted on a page or post, with pages being used for their pretty URLs.

On the other hand, there are some real benefits to directories-as-pages:
A) Easier URLs (as @driz has noted)
Integration into WP 3.0-type menus (this is the big one IMO)

How important are things like (A) and (? For sites maintained by folks with some PHP chops (and organizations with money to pay people with PHP chops), they could be fairly easily accomplished with BP_GROUPS_SLUG, etc, and with some other finagling. But – and this is just a guess – this profile does not match most of the users of BP. Nor should it, necessarily. To the extent that BP can be easy to use and install for people with little technical knowledge, without at the same time making it less flexible from a developer’s point of view, it should be. This change is good for end users, and is no more difficult for developers than the current technique, so it seems like a net win.

Another more theoretical argument for the directories-as-pages move (especially as compared to the new admin panel @driz suggests for changing slugs) is that BP shouldn’t reproduce functionality that WP could provide, unless there is a convincing reason for doing so. Using WP pages for BP directories is a step toward greater BP-WP integration. It’s not perfect (see my problem (2) above) but it is a start.

As for custom post types: It’s likely that at least some of BP’s components will be refactored to use custom post types in the future. When that happens, part of the upgrade script will probably involve removing the dummy pages at issue here. So from the user’s point of view, the transition will be seamless.

I should say that I am in agreement with a lot of the sentiment in this thread about making BP a bit more lightweight, framework-y, and disjointed than the sometimes hulking behemoth it is now. However, that kind of transition can and probably should be gradual (at least more gradual than the 1.3 release).