Re: WP and BuddyPress(WPMU)
” so we’re left with two choices: 1) Switch to WPMU/BP or 2) Install WPMU/BP in a subdirectory.
My first question is this: Am I right about our two choices above?”
Yes.
Switching the whole thing over to WPMU is actually not so bad. The biggest worry there is plugins. Depending on what ones they are, and which ones are a dealbreaker, you will need to test them somewhere ahead of time before even deciding which option to pick.
posts, comments, users, the theme itself and ad placement – ALL those can be *exactly* the same in WPMU.
“The only drawback we have with installing WPMU/BP in a subdirectory is that we’d lose the ability to pull in BP features onto the homepage of our current site such as recent blog activity, avatars, etc. Is that correct or is there some way for the two to communicate even if on separate installs?”
Actually, you can do that. We did it here on http://wanderlustandlipstick.com, a client site. Note it’s not a BP site, but the main site is a single WP install and the WPMU part is under /blogs/. With some lightweight custom code, we pulled in avatars & recent posts to the front of the main blog.
Overall, your choices are pretty much 50/50. The big kicker here is how you want your URLs to be formed in the end.
If you want or don’t care about an extra folder name in the URL where WPMU will live, then it may be “easier” to have it as an add-on, and share databases to share users.
Personally, I’d lean towards moving the whole site to WPMU. Do the move in a dev environment, then in a low-traffic time planned ahead with full notice, make the switch to the new WPMU site (at the same URL basically).
