Re: Uploading documents, photos?
You get what you pay for I guess. Although, in the case of BuddyPress… at a cost of $0.00… you get a whole lot more than you pay for.
Besides, if they waited until the system had absolutely everything… it would never be released. It was only released about a month ago. And now that there is an official 1.0 version out, I predict that developers will be flocking to it and developing lots of great third party plugins. It’s already happening. Consider that a couple of motivated developers have already freely donated their time to create pretty decent (if basic at the moment) events and photo gallery plugins!!!!! Pretty awesome if you ask me.
As for document management… there are a number of standard WordPress plugins that will handle that for you. Of course, it won’t be integrated into the groups, activity feeds, etc… it would just be a WordPress page with downloads on it… but one of those plugins might serve as a stop-gap for you for now.
If you really want/need free social networking software that is more feature complete now… right now… try Elgg. But it doesn’t have nearly the same amount of developer interest, buzz and support… it’s no where near as user-friendly… and creating a theme that does anything more than change a few background colors and images is next to impossible. I did a lot of research into these two options and BuddyPress… even with the limits of it’s current 1.0 feature set… was the hands down winner. No contest.’
Finally, you say you don’t care if something if free or paid for… you only care about the final product. Well, if that’s the case, there are literally scores of commercial web applications out there right now that do similar things… socially networked Wiki’s, Intranets, etc… but most of them are very expensive. Look at SocialText, Telligent, Confluence, ClearSpace, MindTouch, Thought Farmer… and on and on. Tons of them. Some are more Wiki-like with some social stuff added and some are more Facebook like with some Wiki stuff added… but there is certainly no shortage of commercial options out there.
