So here’s why blogs are separate from home bases:
BuddyPress is designed to support existing blog networks, as well as brand new installations. On an existing installation, users already have their blogs set up and established. Forcing a new blog on them just to use BuddyPress features would make no sense and most of them would be left empty and unused.
It could be possible to give users an option whether or not to set up a personal blog with their new home base. The trouble is, that would mean some home bases have blogs, others not. That could end up being even more confusing for users.
Also, another big problem is adding additional authors to the blog. This would mean other site members would be posting within a users home base which would mean an additional layer of security would be needed so they couldn’t access the main user’s messages, profile etc.
Overall, separating blogs from home bases saves a whole lot of headaches, and allows BuddyPress to easily support new and existing installs. Perhaps we can work out a way to automatically set up a redirection from “user.domain.com/blogs/blogname/” to “blogname.domain.com” for each new blog. Going any further than a simple redirect would be fundamentally change the way WordPress MU works – and that’s not something we want to do.
I’d also like to create a BuddyPress blog theme, that will tie in with the overall look and feel, and add the user navigation menu. This should reduce the contrast between home bases and blogs even further.
Hope this explains the choice a bit more.
Cheers,
Andy
I’m really excited about BuddyPress…
I’ve been kicking WPMU and Buddypress around for the past few weeks with a view to adopting it to build a social site for some groups I am involved with.
The BuddyPress stuff is looking very cool and potentially could save a lot of bespoke development and/or plugin integration and customisation BUT… and this is a pretty big but…
As echang highlights above, it worries me that a user has to have at least two different sub-domains in order to have a blog. Could a potential solution, at least in part, be to create a mod-rewrite rule that maps a blogs sub-domain to a sub-directory of the primary user sub-domain such as /blog. Thus the blog admin could be http://username.domain.com/blog/wp-admin/
I’m pretty new to all this and I might be over simplifying the issue (or I might just be overly “simple”??? 
) but I would be extremely intrested to hear what others in the WPMU and BuddyPress communities think about this topic, along with any other proposed solutions.
Thanks for the questions. Some things I’d like to see on the home page:
– Latest posts, comments, tags and new blogs.
– Recently active, new, and biggest groups
– Recently active and new members
– Member, group and blog directories
– Site wide activity stream
– Recent group forum posts
– Latest photo updates, most viewed photos
Just some initial ideas. Most of this should be possible already with what is already there. I’m going to tackle the home theme next week.
As for your second question. I’d like to see the signup process modified to allow the first blog to be registered straight away. This may be down the line a little bit though.
Blogs will stay on their own subdomain/subdirectory simply because this is the way WordPress MU works – and changing that would break existing installations.
Site RSS feeds will be available at some point.
Andy
I am also interested in the “homepage” features. Same questions as echang.
Kepp up the good work.
First, thanks for the great work so far! I’m also interested if site wide images and video will be available on the sites home page. Also, will there be any kind of voting or favorites feature in upcoming versions? Thanks again.
