Re: Extending Groups
@techguy The philosophy for wide-spread adoption is to not create any additional tables, and use meta whenever possible. This way you can rely on the internal functions of WordPress and BuddyPress to get and set that data, and you don’t have an upset site admin that needs to figure out where to put that table, how to cache it, how to serve it across multiple servers, etc…
I also think it depends on the scope that you need to achieve. The Groups API works really well for just about anything that you would want to plug into the groups component, but at the same time there can also be a need for totally 100% custom jobs where even the built in functionality doesn’t work for your application, in which case a totally custom theme might be in order.
All in all, I usually start with a custom plugin, that relies on the Groups API and group meta, and only use wp_sitemeta/wp_options if it’s a blanket default setting for all groups that can be changed by the site administrator.
