Re: Friends and Groups for BuddyPress 1.3
With BuddyPress being used now by/for different interest groups from colleges to niche organizations to purely social networking, etc. there is no doubt that there would be different opinions regarding importance of the friends component vis-a-vis groups component.
I’m surprised in the first place that the friends component could even be considered for deprecation since that’s a popular feature. How about a switch to enable or disable the friends component? In one install, e.g. for a professional organization, they don’t need “friends” and prefer “groups.” In another install, for a social club, they’d like “friends” and “groups.”
It would be great if we see categorization of friends (as Bowe mentioned above) as it makes a lot of sense and extend it so that you could send a message only to Friends-Family or send a message only to Friends-CollegeBuds.
However, should the friends component be deprecated, I would request devs to expand Groups component with a user function to have the ability to privately categorize the people within a Group he/she belongs. e.g. Group-Hiking-Friends, Group-Hiking-Pros, Group-Hiking-CollegeBuds, Group-Hiking-NeedsMoreTraining.
