[Richard Venable]

Thanks @mercime. My plugin is in active development. It is still early on, but I am really wanting some good feedback on ways to improve it, so let me know your thoughts when you try it out.

[Richard Venable]

Whoa. Thanks to @moosh101, I realized my sign up page was busted. I fixed it now, but that wasn’t good timing for the sign up page to break.

[Richard Venable]

What about allowing users to add their own RSS feeds (for say their own blogs hosted elsewhere) and automatically labeling it with their username?

[Richard Venable]

The people at CUNY Academic Commons created a MediaWiki extension that does what you want (I think):
http://dev.commons.gc.cuny.edu/2009/07/06/new-mediawiki-extension-buddypressactivity/
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BuddyPressActivity

[Richard Venable]

The file goes in your plugins directory. What error message did you receive?

[Richard Venable]

This is how I did it on my site: (it just prevents BP from registering the widgets)

// Remove buddypress widgets from blogs other than the main blog
function hide_bp_widgets() {
if (!is_main_blog()) remove_all_actions(‘bp_register_widgets’);
}
add_action(‘plugins_loaded’, ‘hide_bp_widgets’, 1); // Has to run before bp_setup_widgets()

[Richard Venable]

I guess this topic dropped off the radar, but I hope it comes back up again, because I personally think this is a great direction to go, and I see many advantages to having the friends feature built on top of the groups feature.

I haven’t had time to read most of the previous 70 posts on this topic. One thing I do want to respond to was what MrMaz said early on about friends being a one to one relationship and groups being a one to many. I think friendships are one to one, but in practice they are almost always queried as one to many. You don’t usually query to get one friend, you query to get all of a user’s friends at once.

[Richard Venable]

No WordPress MU? Those better be really good reasons! Be careful about hacking together your own network of blogs when WordPress can already do it for you. Did you know that WordPress is merging with MU for version 3.0?

[Richard Venable]

By the way, Andy, despite my concerns, I love the general direction that BP 1.3 is headed. I really love how the wire is gone and messages are becoming more generalized. I love that the @message means “Hey! Come and read this and reply!”, I just wish that the @message was separate from my content.

[Richard Venable]

Andy, it sounds to me like you are storing the @ tag, you’re just storing it in the message content, which is what I don’t like.

You’re right that it is simple, which is good, but that doesn’t make it easy to use. A command line console is simple, and if you know the right commands it is efficient and easy to use. Yet, most people are confused by command lines. GUIs are far more user-friendly, but compared to a command line – a GUI is just UI bloat.

You said you plan on addressing the confusion between usernames and display names “probably though autocomplete, or accepting display names somehow.” I don’t know how you are going to do that without UI bloat.

I think the tag box idea minimizes UI bloat as much as possible, while keeping a healthy separation between content and meta data. I think that separation will be more important as BuddyPress develops and as more plugins are created.

Also, you said “It’s just a filter on the content that is posted to look for @mentions”. So, does that mean that every update message gets searched for the string “@rvenable” every time I want see my messages. Isn’t that going to get slow fast? Wouldn’t it be faster to have the message be stored in the DB with the user_id so you can just search a table of numbers instead of parsing thousands of string messages?

[Richard Venable]

I think one of the crucial issues is that you are mixing content with meta data. Twitter does this for obvious reasons, such as making it work well with text messaging. I like what Andy said about BuddyPress not being Facebook or Twitter, but one thing BuddyPress is… is WordPress.

WordPress does a great job of separating content from meta data. Blog Posts have content and they have tags. Why not use something similar here? Why not let the meta data be separate?

Just add a tag box! Any tag that starts with @ means that the tag name is really a username. Now think about the WP tag box. You type any tags in, separated by commas and press ‘Add tag’. The tags automagically get separated into their own little icons. A similar thing could happen in BP, but when @user tags are added, they get displayed as the user’s full name. You could have an interface that allows for entering @username or just allows the user to type a full name and have it autocomplete. Using auto complete is easier in a tag box than in a content box.

WARNING: Whatever you do, be very careful! If you merge content and meta data now, it may be very difficult to separate them later. In 1.1, wall posts had their content separated from the meta data specifying whose wall it was on. Now with 1.2 it sounds like all of my wall content will be modified to say who I was talking to. Then, if you change your mind and want to separate them out again in 1.3, you will have to modify the content again to remove the meta data.