BuddyPress.org

I’d ultimately love to see things go in that direction, and have been sifting through code the past few days thinking of how to get more red in the trac than green.

However, if this was the case, and activity had a component scope and a serialized array of return values, then you could replace private messaging with a threaded activity stream that only the users involved in that thread can view. You could send activity to multiple groups at a time, or only 1, or all of your groups, or the entire site, or any other registered components serialized set of values that mean whatever they mean.

You can almost replace the notifications class all together too, because if you take a count of the number of activities a user has directed at them and store it in usermeta, when the user returns if that number is higher, there’s your total notifications. Filter those new activities and now you can see how many of each. Actually, the code already exists within both WP and BP to do this.

In that regard, the activity stream does start to replace core communication components like forums, private messages, status updates, notifications, and the wire. At that same time, BuddyPress becomes less about separate components with their own API’s and classes and subsets of functions, but more about creating new methods for users to interact with each other in specific scopes of communication.

You could take things like twitter lists and make them work both ways, where you could send a message/comment/update/picture to only specific users instead of only viewing tweets from users. You could create an endless array of ways and names for collaborative tools to develop the platform from within the platform. It’s basically the blog post_types concept attached to people’s activity instead of re-categorizing blog posts.

The way to further develop groups would need a whole new topic, but I’ve got some ideas for that too.

@mrmaz, what you propose is the fundamentals of how I’ve approached my development before finding WP; start with small basic classes and work my up in functionality. There very easily could be a basic “bp_component” class where every new component just extends off of that, and sets the needed vars and assigns the needed functions accordingly.