BuddyPress.org

There is a very delicate balance here because on one hand all of the developers leveraging [Word/Buddy/BB]Press are getting an enormous head start compared to building something from scratch. So we should all be enormously grateful for that. I don’t think threats to move another platform are really productive.

At the same time, critical feedback and vigorous debate will make the product better. I don’t think this should be characterized as moaning. Active threads on the membership architecture would be great to see (I know Peter has tried to start a couple of those).

Most people here would agree with Peter that the WPMU+BP membership functionality is not ideal. They would probably also agree that Andy’s compromise is a good one under the constraints of WPMU. BuddyPress will be a good forcing function to make that improve though.

Adopting some strict framework is not the answer. The trash heap is piled high with projects that had high architectural ideals. The successful stuff delivers a good user experience, often with frightening hacks under the covers, but over time becoming more robust and beautiful inside too.

There is a key architectural aspect to *Press that makes it successful though – extensibility. The hooks make it possible to hack the system to do so many things that weren’t even considered when the projects were originally conceived. Andy has exploited the extensibility in WPMU to bend it into a social networking system. He has also been religious about putting hooks everywhere to give us the same opportunity with the things we in turn build on top of BP.

As long as we are all being creative on *Press, things won’t be pure. Andy will be bending WPMU to his will and we will be bending BP to our will. That’s the beauty of it.