BuddyPress.org

Well creating a network (basically MU) in WP 3.0 still requires that same deterrent-knowledge you speak of. Not everyone will be turning this on!
However, bringing this functionality to the masses also sheds light to the project and more developers will be able to contribute to the codebase.

I do agree with you about mass-communities! Not every community is going to be vibrant, but even those BP communities that have 10 active members is enough to warrant BP’s existence.

You should also know that there are a ton of low-quality “sucky” blogs because of WordPress, so what’s the difference if there are “sucky” communities because of BP?

Thinking in architectural terms, this makes a lot of sense — certainly more sense than Franken-bbPress does. If BP were to get a richly-featured, native, extensible replacement for ‘forum’-structured discussion, that would be a good thing.

These days, more than in the past, I worry about the right user-interaction design decisions being made, though, before they get locked in.

activity stream component into a dumbed-down version of a forum. It won’t be as feature-rich as bbPress et al.,

This, especially, worries me. Not to be the parade-rainer, but unless equivalent-functionality can be achieved, with a framework in place for greater extensibility because it’s ‘native’, well…

I don’t know. I think I’m going to have to leave BP alone for a while to wait and see where it heads, which is a bummer after having spent so much time and effort on it. Ah well.

This is an interesting read: http://factoryjoe.com/blog/2010/05/16/combing-openid-and-oauth-with-openid-connect/ @jeffsayre — what say ye on that one?

No repo yet (we’re still mobilizing!), but ping Rich on etivite.com.

I’d be happy to jump in and provide what help I can. Are you guys developing in a shared repo? PM me the creds

I’m in agreement with Rich because the activity stream is the main component in BP, so why not utilize it? (btw, sorry for not getting back to you, Rich!).

Custom post types are powerful; the next iteration of bbPress as a WordPress plugin will be powered in some way by custom post types, but that is still a long way out. You’d then have to factor in how this will all work with BP (more development time). I haven’t looked too much into custom post types yet, but aren’t custom posts still stored under wp_posts? If so, not great.

I’m going to be collaborating with Rich (Boone, you want to jump in?) to utilize the activity stream component into a dumbed-down version of a forum. It won’t be as feature-rich as bbPress et al., but it will be compatible with existing and future activity stream plugins, which to me, makes this worthwhile.

http://dev.benoitgreant.be/wordpress-mu/blog/2009/11/buddypress-real-names
thats the plugin homepage, maybe ul find his details there?

I like the idea of using WordPress and BuddyPress to create a decentralized social network and am even considering starting a plugin to implement it. I’d like to hear people’s thoughts how each necessary feature would be implemented and integrated with WordPress and BuddyPress, as well as share my own ideas on how it would be done.

Custom post types seem better to me in most ways. They have the full force of WP behind them, which means that things like attachments, media, and all sorts of other plugins will just work. The theming architecture is very well established, since it just uses the regular WP post loop. And you’d have the full admin power of the WP Dashboard for managing posts and replies.

The advantages of embedding forums in the activity stream vs custom post types? For one thing, the metadata attached to custom post types does not include things like group ids. I’d have to look into it a little more, but it seems to me that you’d probably have to do more lookups in order to get all the necessary information out of the post table than you do for the optimized activity table for this reason. And it certainly does seem more BP-centric to put things in the activity stream.

I think the decision should largely be made on the basis of a discussion that was started here about six months ago but kind of died off: what is the role of the activity stream? There is a real advantage to making all content types stored in the same way, whether it be in post types or in the activity stream – that much is clear to anyone who’s done BP development. The activity stream increasingly seems like a good option. But my worry is that if you push everything into the activity stream, you end up needlessly reproducing a lot of functionality that already exists in WP post types.

@Anointed Please do share your forum post type when you think it’s presentable. I’d love to see how you’ve set it up. I haven’t tried it myself, but just thinking about it I imagine it wouldn’t be too complex – most of the work would be done in the front-end theming and P2-style posting interface.

Boone – I can think of many reasons to use custom post_types for the forums setup. Really bbpress in its current bp iteration adds nothing to the mix that can’t be achieved with post_types. In the end the forums are just posts styled differently than normal blog posts. I’ve built a basic post_type forum setup already and the further I continue with it the more excited I get about the possibilities. I currently have no idea how to tie it into bp groups, but guess I’ll figure that part out down the road.

@boonebgorges Let me read up on custom post types more, I haven’t given it much thought to be honest. A quick glance seems it seems BP activity stream took some steroids, had a fun night, and mated with WP posts. (even seems in a futuristic sense that the activity stream could utilize custom post types as the backbone?). So that may throw a kink into my original thinking about using the activity stream.

Given that… Simplistic reasoning. Basically @21cdb and @r-a-y have mentioned some finer points which I agree with. The hang-ups I have with bbPress is how much “dumbing down” occurs within the BuddyPress wrapper and some of the minor issues that others experience. IMHO – the activity stream IS the backbone of BuddyPress – in the forums context the information is already duplicated (recording the activity, updating on topic post edits) and the fragmentation of conversation is very confusing. We already have the biz functions for recording, replying (+ for nested), pagination, hooks, add-ons, etc

@jeffsayre I’ve chatted on a few occasions w/ @djpaul about distributive technologies w/ regards to BuddyPress. (Actually, I talked w/ @apeatling & @johnjamesjacoby during WordCamp NYC 09 about some of the possibilities, too.) I would say I’m much more aware of the semantic protocols. I actually haven’t ever delved into the stack, but I’m excited to do it. I’ve read several of your posts over the last year. I keep track of Messina, Smarr, Shephard, Hammer-Lahav, Recordon, and other advocates…

…I started out with the interest in just getting my own site running on the stack. But my interest kind of snowballed, and now I’m pretty much thoroughly all around passionate about it. I’ll set myself up so I can start working. Maybe just tell those of us who want in where to go.

rich – What do you think is the advantage of rewriting the forums on the activity stream as opposed to with custom post types? I can think of a couple reasons to go either way, but I’m curious to know what you think.

I think Buddypress need some kinds of forums for detailed discussions. I don’t think it needs BBPress. The Activity Stream has nearly everything to replace BBPress. … Because it is all build with the Activity Stream technology users can reply from within the Activity Stream, have nested comments and all the great plugins that are developed to work with the Activity Streams.

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FWIW – I’m going to attempt this now… hopefully conning @r-a-y into helping (i need someone smarter ) I’m 99.1% sure it can be done

@mistercyril – Cool! I hope you’ll remember

In whatever theme you’ve customized, add ‘Tags: buddypress’ to your style.css file (or just ‘buddypress’ if it has tags listed).

@r-a-y WOW your a total savior for me. Thank you soo much for coming up with all these “concrete” solutions.
Really appreciate it man. BTW, if I ever make a penny with my site (due to open this week), I’ll remember to make a contribution