BuddyPress.org

My great worry these days is that the dev community is being compelled to fix problems with usability of core BP, as much or more so than extending what’s there.)

And which is one of my concerns too, and is evident in many posts on this site with developers rushing out fixes to usernames for example as is perceived as being a problem highlighted by one person.

What worries me is that moving forward in this manner is not necessarily the best approach to developing a rock solid core app as you have perceived issues being dealt with in a slightly haphazard manner and the setting up or configuring of BP dependent on finding many and various disparate third party snippets of code.

I’m sure Andy&co are focused too an extent on fixing problems but also it may well be a case that ‘Problems’ are not necessarily perceived as problems- part of the reason I thought that this thread was a necessity; to try and flesh out what were considered existing UI/design flaws and provide that as good solid feedback to work from. I note that in the ‘roadmap’ it states that there are periods of consultation? to garner feedback for version features, I would like to see that process in action and to see developers helping guide these future releases; as I agree that it’s now not simply about adding ‘Features’ but far more importantly on providing a core that works and that developers may extend upon.

It feels as though BP is reaching a momentous milestone or crux point in it’s development, and that perhaps the core dev team ought to take a breather, take time out and review what is right and what is wrong and that needs addressing. Foxly made the point well in his ‘ spammers are coming'(sic) thread discussing his suggested approach to tackling the spam issues surrounding BP where he asserts that BP is reaching this crux point where if it wants to grow from simply a “Science project for hobbyist sites” to a fully mature app that can serve business / enterprise it has to tackle certain issues and is why he considers taking some time to tackle this issue he sees with spam is of paramount importance. I would not disagree with Foxly for one moment and what he has reported on thus far on the issue is commendable but I do not think a developer should be tackling this, taking time out from working on hugely useful ‘Feature’ plugins to work on something that – if is agreed to be an issue that must be dealt with – is essentially a core development issue and really ought to be handled by the core development team not by a third party developer (Obviously this is not to say it won’t be as things are in early stages and speculative at this point)

So, yes extending must slow down for a while and issues of a UI / design nature must be thrust to the fore and I would hope there is a means of collating some of the very apposite and useful comments and suggestions that have appeared so far in this thread.