Re: The BuddyPress UI Design and conceptual approach to Social Networking
Mike Pratt said 1 day ago:
“ @peterverkooijen @hnla I take the other side of your “little diff b/t blogs and forums” opinion. To me, a blog post is a significantly more “deliberate” piece of content … For ex, we have a group called the “12th Man Training Table” which centers on athlete nutrition. Folks want to post recipes for training means. Clearly, forum topics are the wrong vehicle. On the other hand, there are raging debates in that group that definitely belong in the forum construct..not a blog post with comments … So Peter, please keep in mind that what you would do to BP would build a BP that works for Peter, but it’s not necessarily the only use case around, that’s all.”
Mike Pratt, you miss the point. I’m talking about how the script and database is structured, not what you as a user should do with it. Functionally a blog post and a forum topic are the same thing; a piece of content that others can comment on. Similarly there only needs to be one way to store (threaded) comments. There is no need to duplicate that in forum thread, wires, etc. There is no need to have variations of posts and comments in different places in the database.
I’m talking about taking redundancies out, boiling down the architecture to the lowest number of necessary parts, less is more, keep it simple stupid. That does not mean you as a user will have less options. WP blog posts already provides many ways to make very different types of posts. In my P2-based custom theme I have started making a clear distinction between ‘status updates’ and ‘blog posts’ using categories. Apparently WP 3.0 will have more sophisticated hooks to do different things with different types of content.
Same for comments. There are already lots of different things you can do with comments, from IntenseDebate and other plugins to built-in threaded options, inline Ajax commenting and styling possibilities via your theme. Buddypress should leverage basic WordPress building blocks as much as possible instead of adding new database tables and third scripts like BBpress. Ultimately a lot of this is for the theme developers to develop. They could develop out-of-the-box themes for different use cases; schools, companies, sport clubs, etc. BP should focus on a solid core and flexible API.
