BuddyPress.org

I am not trying to compare facebook or ning to BP. I am merely trying to highlight that users will ultimately make comparisons, whether webmasters or developers like it or not.

Most casual users of the internet are you used to the facebook experience where you do everything from the front end. Lets say if i want to use Buddypress to set up an organic farming community for example I am going to have many of my users getting confused with having a backend and a front end and all of the options and admin stuff in the backend.

Most of my users of my hypothetical site are 40 to 50 somethings who hardly know the difference between the front end and the back end and have only recently discovered Facebook. So I will find them struggling and complaining with using the site. So I will have to set up my network on Ning instead, where so many other 40 to 50 somethings have setup groups. It would be better for me to have my own private site but what choice do I have.

Buddypress is an excellent idea but having it religiously follow the dogma of wordpress when its aimed at being a platform for community sites, is ultimately going to cause some issues. All I am merely suggesting is tailoring WP to make it fit to the requirements of users.

Obviously human politics creep in everywhere and as a result this as well as technicalities Andy has his hands tied when it comes to forking WP for example. So why not turn BP into a separate project all together by integrating BP and WPMU into one package and stripping out some of the WP centric things like most of the backend. It can still say based on WPMU on the box but it won’t look and feel so much like WP to the end user if you see where I am getting at.

After all how many people who use BP will also want to use the WPMU only features on their site. Once you set up a social network you can’t go back to just being a multi-user blogging site. So stripping out the WP centric features surely won’t be an issue in the context of running a social network.