i think its more due to the fact that nobody is talking about ning anymore their system isn’t very open technically speaking. for instance when i do a google search for ‘social network in a box’ or ‘social network software’ there are many references to buddypress in the results but none for ning. i know when i was looking at ning in 2010 coincidentally enough i decided their lack of customer service and locked in system weren’t a good way to go for our network. in fact ning isn’t even listed in the wikipedia list of social networking software options:
although maybe because it’s a platform and not really software you can install.
one more thing i would add is that a lot of the really popular dedicated buddypress plugins are now wordpress plugins as well so they may not really show up as buddypress only plugins anymore.
sorry i read the title of you post too quickly htaccess shouldn’t need anything special for buddypress the standard wordpress compatible htaccess is fine. group based forums are depreciated so i wouldn’t expect that work anymore anyway.
you can only have one theme active at a time. also i think personally, buddypress would make a bad alternative for google drive since its really not the same thing at all.
as for putting a menu item to take users to the main forum page that will not be a problem.
it sounds like you may want try using wordpress first and then add buddypress once you are a little more familiar with it before adding buddypress to the mix.
just curious what you are actually trying to schedule, group creation? i think everything else can be scheduled already with normal wordpress functionality.
I’m just trying to help man i tried to share what information i had paying someone to answer the questions you cannot was just a suggestion based on what i would do.
it sounds like you have a lot of very specific implementation questions it might make sense to hire someone to help you out. hard for any volunteer to get that involved.
never used that before, sorry. the only reason to add multisite is if you want you users to be able to create their own semi-independent blogs/sites. if you only want them to be able to create posts you have a lot of options.
multisite is just activated by a setting in your wordpress config file it can be done before or after buddypress but if you are starting from scratch id probably do the multisite first, then add any plugins.
not familiar with a2 hosting but pretty much anything is ok to start out with but if you get traffic you will quickly get to the point where you need some kind of vps.
