Re: The BuddyPress next generation API, the journey begins
There are many pros and cons to coordinating an effort like that. Development of this project is very organic, and developers come and go frequently. It would be bad if there is a specific functionality that everyone has marked as a high prioroty, and we are all sitting around waiting for a developer to get it done, and then he disappears.
The best advice I can give is to poll the community before you invest in a plugin to see if anyone else is working on the same thing. If you are working on a plugin, make it’s development as public as possible so that if the functionality it provides is needed for the core, the community is aware of it and can have a discussion about whether your plugin should be merged.
I think generally though, the future of BuddyPress will prove to be plugins. There are going to be solid core features to get people up and running quickly, and an API that allows for more advanced extensions without as many headaches.
The next generation API code will be well documented with PHPDoc (assuming everyone is cool with that), and I hope that we can have a section of the codex where the auto generated documentation for each release can be accessed for easy reference. Once the code is documented it will be much easier to recruit people to contribute to the BuddyPress codex.
