BuddyPress.org

Thanks for starting the conversation, MrMaz.

I want to see BP more as a framework for social tools rather than the end-all-be-all for social networking. Like WP itself, the real power of BP is in its extensibility. (Which is what makes the conversation about the API all the more important.)

It seems to me that throughout the development of BP, there have been two directions of movement: one is to consolidate functionality (as with the recent rolling of some blog related tracking into the activity stream) and the other is to add functionality. The two aren’t inherently at odds, but they do have a tendency to fight against one another. For ease of development, solidity of platform, etc, my tendency would be to err in favor of consolidation. The discussion that was floated a few months ago about moving more kinds of content creation into the activity stream is one example of this. I’m not really 1337 enough to say what this means from the point of view of scalability, but I can say that having fewer points of input/output make third-party plugin development a lot easier.

So, I were to think of the BP toolkit as a swiss army knife, I would want BP to be the handle and maybe the big blade or two. Corkscrews, nail clippers, can openers and stuff like that are cool, but they should be options.