BuddyPress.org

I completely understand and feel your pain Mike, I deal with the same issues. It is a balance how you keep it simple yet powerful. Let me first explain the url structure. Buddypress creates groups using the defined constant as a path variable. By default that is ‘groups’, therefore wpmu blogs could never reside inside the same subdirectory because of conflicts. WPMU creates blogs in the root directory. Also WPMU does not allow blogs to be created with dashes or names that or less than 4 characters.

So -> http://mjpratt.com/groups/usma-1987

becomes -> http://mjpratt.com/usma1987

becasue the blog gets created in the root and is stripped from the dashes.

To stay completely in the group structure would require pulling in the correct data based on the blog id. This is certainly possible, but not a great way to develop. Therefore I’m almost inclined to think the otherway around. Utilize buddypress for profiles and pull in group related info into a blog structure. So I would redirect http://mjpratt.com/groups/usma-1987 to http://mjpratt.com/usma1987. Offcourse the group has many other components, so it is neither ideal.

I guess what you really are after is not really a group blog, but, and yes, yet, bp-groupblog probably comes closest.

Let’s see what we can do come bp-groupblog version 2. It is a work in progress and with community feedback in can develop into something truely and universally useful.