Re: Enterprise Buddypress
To me the biggest barrier to more professional use of Buddypress is the lousy member/user management. Everything is based on username/password. There isn’t even a built-in way to get people to sign up with their real name, first name + last name. There is a required custom field for “Name”, but with the way the sign-up form is structured new users are almost encouraged to enter a garbage name – lowercase, one word anonymous nickname bs.
After lots of painful hacking in core files I now have a form with one Real name field on top. My custom code in the back splits the real name and stores it in various places in the database, so at least I have synchronized data in wp_usermeta etc. Buddypress does none of this out of the box and in general BP developers don’t seem to see this as a problem. But the one field for real name still doesn’t really force new users to enter a full two-part name.
In a previous version of my site I did have separate first name and last name fields. I NEVER had people sign up with cutesy one name names. Sure, you can create custom fields in xprofile, but synchronizing the input with all the other username, nickname, name etc. fields in the datebase and integrating them with other member management scripts businesses will have on their server requires serious database and php programming skills.
