You can hide the plugins panel in the administration area from your users and you can use plugincommander to choose which plugins should be activated for users and which shouldnt be.
Personally I don’t see why you would make a plugin folder for a plugin. If every plugin started doing that, then we’d have a lot of plugin folders.
the difference is that BP have its own structure for functions, that does not work with other versions of WP…
but it’s just me, i like when things are well dressed…
It’s a good idea and one I’ve tossed around, but the problem is that it would need to exist outside of the wp-content/buddypress/ directory to avoid automatic update problems, and people wiping out the plugins folder on accident (if they do a manual upgrade for example.)
Something like this may still happen down the road, as BuddyPress grows and a need for specific methods to register plugins with BuddyPress increases. At the moment it isn’t necessary because BuddyPress plugins are actually just normal WordPress plugins that may take advantage of BuddyPress features and API’s. (At least, that’s how plugin authors should be writing them.)
What will need to happen for sure is a way for plugins to tell BuddyPress “hey I’m here and I want you to know this information.” It’s possible to alter the $bp global directly to do these things, but tighter integration into the platform makes sense.
My opinions are subject to change on this one, but today that’s how I’m feeling.
it’s a great feeling actually, John James… and it would take “some” coders to build a bunch of BP-only plugins to start the wave…
maybe if i start coding again i will punch out some of the tools i have to be working exclusively in closed operation inside BP, and would store them temporarly in the plugins dir but would definitively work better if in their own location…
would be possible to work that detection loop in 1.2 ????
Right now BuddyPress is more in the core-creation stage. We’re trying to get everything working step-by-step to where we want it to be before we can really start thinking of how to allow the world to plug-in to it correctly.
Right now the roadmap doesn’t really include anything like this at all, but I suspect something will sneak its way in eventually.