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If you are starting fresh with a BP child theme, all you need to do is look at the files in bp-default to decide if you need to customize them or not. I know that sounds sort of open ended but with the way child themes work, some time you might need to copy and edit every file but other times you may need to only touch one or two.
My approach has been to create the initial child theme style.css file and then start with the “regular” files – home.php, sidebar.php, index.php, archive.php, etc. just like a normal WP theme. I only copy a file from bp-default into the child theme if I really really need to modify it. Most of the time you can easily add stuff via actions and filters in your functions.php file. The advantage is this can be much more portable if you redesign your site in the future – just copy functions.php into a new child theme and go from there.
Really it’s best to just systematically go through bp-default and decide if you need to tweak each .php file or not. In most cases, you probably don’t have to.
If you just want users to be able to submit blog posts, why not use regular WP instead of WPMU? In the WP settings, set the user’s default role to be contributor or something higher than subscriber. Then they can access the backend and write blog posts on the blog.
Note that this functionality doesn’t really have anything to do with BuddyPress.
The only reason to run WPMU is if you want your users to each have their own blog. If you don’t want to offer that, don’t run WPMU.
BuddyPress just provides the social networking functionality (activity streams/updates, forums, groups, etc.).
As for Burt’s plugin, I think it might not longer be necessary in most cases now that BP runs on WP Single and not only on WPMU. I’m probably mistaken though.
My thoughts on the group vs profile pictures, sorry if I get rambling too much.
First, if I upload a picture, I want to ensure that I am explicitly recognized as the owner of that picture (I’m assuming that people are only going to be uploading their own works). It shouldn’t matter where I upload that picture on the site, it should always have a link into my profile. Since we don’t want to duplicate pictures in the site and having multiple URLs that point to the same content is considered bad, why not just always have pictures in linked in the user’s profile album.
As for groups. Yes, being able to upload directly from the group page is a nice idea. The tagging system previously described by you guys should be used here for sure. I think Flickr sort of makes it hard on this aspect because you can tag photos but you can also put photos into a group. That seems like an extra step to me. Use the tags to represent the group. For example, if you have a group called “The Photogs”, just tag all pictures uploaded from that group page with “The Photogs” (of course, make sure the user is aware of this and allow them to remove the tag if desired, etc.). This would require two things – your tagging system sort of needs to know all of the groups on the system and it then also needs to ensure people aren’t tagging their pictures with a tag that is also a group name when they don’t mean to (‘Are you sure you want to tag this picture to belong to the group “The Photogs”‘). Of course, this could allow users to ‘uncover’ hidden groups but I’m not sure that’s a big deal.
Coming back to the first point, picture ownership. At some point you’re going to have to add some way for people to assign a license to their uploads. Most sites can get away with something in their terms of usage that is a blanket statement but some will have to allow their users full control over licensing of pictures. Creative Commons (like Flickr) is easiest.
The reason I mention this is we’re talking about mostly public pictures on public websites.
Public vs private is also a concern when allowing people to tag their pictures or upload them to a group. If a picture is uploaded to a public group, it can’t be set as a private picture. If the group is private, does the picture have to still be public? There might be some interesting combinations.
And now for something a little different – Privacy.
A user should always have full control of their pictures. A user should also be able to permanently remove their username if it is tagged against a picture (like Facebook person tagging). Users should be notified when they are tagged in pictures and it might also be better to require them to approve themselves being tagged in a picture before the tag is visible publicly. Users should only be able to tag people who they are friends with. Maybe people who are in the same groups, but definitely not any random user on the site.
Ahh, details, details. Write a plugin.
Sorry, I don’t know of any sort of garbage collection type plugins for BP.
No, it should be possible, that’s sort of the whole point.
I assume these are public groups? Are you running WP or WPMU?
Ahh. WPMU is likely different. Sorry, I keep forgetting that most people are using WPMU with BP. I have to stop assuming.
You might want to ask on a WPMU specific site because if that function is using three different ways to get the same value on single WP, it might actually be doing something weird on WPMU in one of those calls (two of which are considered deprecated).
