[peterverkooijen]

“… just because buddypress or wordpress or whoever develop new features for an application doesn’t mean you are forced to use the new features. You don’t have to install the forums …”

The topic of this thread was about removing groups from forum. Groups imho are a natural part of a social networking architecture. Forums not so much. Most of the questions on this board these days are about forums/bbpress. That seems also where most of the developers attention is going, while there is almost no progress on what should be the core of a social network script for WordPress; member management, privacy/security, making BP WordPress 3.0-ready, etc.

Talk about “dropping rigidity and opening up to an amazing new flexibility and power” is pure nonsense. I’m not a programmer myself, but have you looked under the hood? Have you looked into the database? Do you know how BP is structured? Software can’t be all things to all people. It will never make you ice cream sundaes. Sure it’s nice to have built-in features, but there is always a trade-off. In Buddypress’ case it is growing structural confusion. Where would you draw the line?

I’d prefer a leaner core, a script that only adds social networking to WordPress and does it well. Integration with bbpress should go via WordPress, not as bolt-on to BP. Ideally WordPress would have an API that would make the members database just as easy to integrate with PunBB or phpBB if I wanted to.