BuddyPress.org

Thanks JJJ and Daniel.

Yes, the goal would be to have these outside blogs appear in the “Blogs” area of the user’s BP profile. I appreciate that this is a novel idea but, when you consider that we will all be tripping across dozens of BuddyPress sites every day, it is obvious that we will not be able to maintain active blogs in each of the communities we wish support or have a presence in. Being able to list our “real” blog on our profile should a standard feature of BuddyPress. Also, as I say, it’s going to be essential for the non-MU version of BP.

Locking the content of those outside blogs into the BP site would be wrong, especially not using using hokey iFrames. Surely one of the best things about BuddyPress is that it smashes through the walled-garden mindset of the existing social networks and introduces a new age of openness; hopefully, people will find our BP sites useful and entertaining enough to want to stick around, even if we let our users’ profiles link to outside blogs. More importantly, we should honor our users’ participation in our BP sites by allowing them to create a real link to their real blog, that is only fair.

As for WPMU Dev, thanks for alerting me to their plugin but, unfortunately, their pricing is currently geared towards institutional budgets, not the individuals that BP is now drawing into the MU world. Funnily enough, I posted about this on their site today and got a little conversation going:

http://wpmu.org/all-wpmu-dev-premium-plugins-now-27/

Please do jump in and add your voice to my call for them to revise their pricing to a level we can all afford.