BuddyPress.org

@tonyaccardo – We have spent the past 5 or 6 months now working on a new vb/wpmu/bp system and it’s getting close to completion. I have no plans of releasing the software, but I can give you a little insight into why no-one has responded to your request.

Bottom line:

It’s a HUGE job. It has taken the coders hundreds of hours of work to complete the project. The amount of code is actually rivaling the core of bp itself. You REALLY have to have a specific reason for wanting to take on wpmu-bp-vb.

What we’ve built:

Well I also run a number of very large vb communities, and while vb has ‘blogs’ they suck, and many members asked to have blogs and social networking. The ‘easiest’ solution would have been to simply dump vb for bbpress, and migrate all of the data over to bbpress.

However bbpress is nowhere near what vb is, not even close. Yeah it’s nice code, but vb has years and years of development behind it and bbpress is just beginning. So for us dumping vb was not an option.

So we needed a real plan and decided to bridge the programs together, but the bridge is the smallest part of the equation. Not only did I want one registration/session setting for the users, I also wanted auto vb forum creation upon group creation within bp. I also wanted automatic vb forum creation upon new blog creation within wpmu.

Simply put, if you signup and create a blog, a new vb forum is created behind the scenes that belongs to that blog. The same thing goes if you create a group within bp.

Well that’s all and good, but as vb is commercial software, there is no way I wanted to have to install new copies of vb for each blog. I wanted to run only one copy of vb, just like bbpress does. That is where the HUGE amount of work came into play.

Not only did I want each blog to have their own vb forum, but we also had to deal with member roles and forum creation. So we built the system so that ‘technically’ each blog is able to manage every single aspect of vb from styles, to membership, to permissions, heck you name it. As far as the blog owner is concerned, they are running their own full blown copy of vb, fully integrated.

There are many other things to consider as well. Many of the function names within the programs are the same, so you can’t just call functions from bp within vb. Even including things as simple as your wordpress header within a vb template took a bit of work. You see, wordpress header navigation is dynamic, add a page/category, and you have a new link. Obviously you do not want to have to manually change your header in vb to match wp everytime a navigation button is added, so you have to automate that part. Well the function names are the same in both, so now you have to create your own header nav functions so it stays dynamic. Not hard but still more work.

If all you are after is bridging wp/vb together, there is a basic bridge script you can use from vb.org. It does not work with wpmu, but can be modded to work. We started out with this route and after making the changes it worked perfectly.

However, it is designed to use vb for reg/sessions, and this caused some major issues that we had not thought of in the beginning. Think about hosting ‘paid’ blogs on your network, and telling them that their members have to go to another site forum to register, yeah that went over real well. LOL.

So that is where we are at now. We are rewriting the bridge code to use wpmu reg/sess so that users signup on whatever wpmu blog they come across and they are registered into the entire system (even having the ability for a visitor to signup directly from a sub-blog in wpmu took a bit of custom code which is done). I expect the coders to have this part finished shortly.

Once that code is finished then we begin work on bringing in the vb posts into the wire and activity streams of bp. There seems to be little to no documentation on doing this within bp so I can imagine it’s gonna be an interesting project.

We will then begin work on filtering out the pm system within bp and replacing it with the pm system from vb. (I’d rather use bp pm system, but it’s a kiddy toy compared to vb right now, and I don’t care to wait years for bp to catch up).

We are not touching the core code of either wp, bp, or vb so future upgrades are not going to be a problem. That is another thing you have to really consider.

Bottom line is, it was a massive job that took months of work, but we’ve mu’d vbulletin and should have the perfect deep integration replacement for bbpress shortly.

I hope now you can see why you are not getting any responses. Even in it’s ‘simplest’ form, what you are asking is going to take someone hundreds of hours to build, and that’s only if your coders know vb/wpmu/bp code inside and out.

anyhow, hope it helps.