BuddyPress.org

“Providing that flexibility is nice. However, with the exception of groups, there is no reason that the current BP core components need to offer the ability to assign roles. Why would a user want to grant someone the right to control their personal content? Facebook and Twitter don’t offer users that option.” — Jeff Sayre

Hi Jeff, sorry to reopen this topic, but I think it needs a revisiting.

The ability to easily hook into wp user capabilities and extend them to buddypress user capabilities is useful in several social network contexts. And, I hope buddypress is trying to be a more flexible platform than facebook or twitter since it is an open source platform that developers would like to be robust and scalable. I understand the idea of an egalitarian social network like facebook, etc. However, there are many social contexts in which a hierarchical social network structure might be needed. Furthermore, adding the flexibility to developers as an additional component of buddypress would not complicate it’s egalitarian default settings.

One example of a hierarchical context is an educational institution with Administrators, Professors, Instructors, Teaching Assistants, Students, Prospective Students, Alumni, etc.:

As it is now, there are only bbPress roles within groups (which are needed). However, without the ability to assign capabilities within buddypress outside the scope of groups, it is nearly impossible to create capabilities restrictions such as:

user_may_create_groups
user_may_start_forum
user_may_delete_comment (e.g. spam or inappropriate comments)
user_may_assign_capabilities
and so on.

In particular, the ability to restrict certain users from creating groups has been a topic in many other forums about buddypress. Yet, it hasn’t been well addressed.