BuddyPress.org

the api eh? (a large percentage of shared hosts are poor quality, we’ll never be able to fix that) my take is that at it’s core, it’s “the missing extended user profile framework for WordPress”. It would, in my feeble opinion act primarily as a framework api for extending those profiles. Some of the issues and limitations are really presented by wordpress and mu.. not Buddypress and in much the same way that bp extended the wordpress user profiles/functions we should tackle those head on as had been done with the improvements in the BP1.2 registration. There are infinite ways to build on those relational database fields. Focus exclusively on bp_xprofile _fields, and _data. It’s not that I’m anti-activity stream and the terms social network, life stream or whatever just seem to incorporate user profiles into some sort of relational scheme, be it friends, followers, ‘like’-ing, sharing or chronological micro blogging. Extending the stability, functionality, and interactivity of each component is the goal, but I’d prefer to see no dependency among core elements with one another. It’s fairly simple to build out a “social network” in other popular content management systems by extending the user database fields and in my day to day practice, I typically use only about 20% of the Buddypress core components for a WordPress project. Even though the hype is in the activity stream and the extensions for it (more facebook or twitter like), I side with @stwc in that “It also means that the platform has to have a robust set of tools for the administrator and moderators of the community “. A community (or ‘social network’) is just a set of users and to me, key items are a small footprint on the database and tight the integration with the existing wordpress user roles, permissions, registration and management. The api should ideally be flexible enough to accommodate any possible relational data between user profiles that a plugin author may dream of. I think the core integration between user profiles and the activity/blogs/groups/forums/friends illustrate the foundation of the api and should be as unified, consistent, and simple as possible with very little dependency or overlap in functionality. This would be impetus for creating a more standardized way to interact with the xprofile and be a good foundation for a solid api. lastly, thanks @mrmaz for starting the thread, being pro-active, getting the trac and api.buddypress and generally illustrating the potential of a solid api in regards to how well your links plugin and others can interact with the core.

ps.. death to PHP4 and fsck backwards compat