BuddyPress.org

For orangeguru:

Nice, but did you have published this website ?

What kind of configuration do you used ? WordPress MU + Buddypress + what widget ?

Add

My suggestions:

First look – nice and clean.

But I would say it’s too spacious and “nice” for daily use.

Last year I did a similar page for a client – who wanted several columns for widgets (Blogs, Login, Chat, Community, Forum, etc).

http://orangeguru.biz/clients/bizzlounge/index.html

If the layout / type is too big you hardly see anything what’s going on on a normal sized monitor (1280×800 or x1024) without scrolling. On the other hand you’ll never fit everything on a small or big screen anyway. So the layout has to be compact on one side – but also prioritize the widgets / elements.

I suggest deflating your design a bit, resizing some sections. It doesn’t need to be as tight (in my opionion too tight) as my design mentioned above – but it would help.

D.

I like this, very impressed that it seems that their will be a sitewide activity feed (as opposed to a per user feed) Am I right Andy?

What I don’t see is categories and tags. I know WordPress MU does not support sitewide categories, and I know theres a plugin to make Tags sitewide.

Any plans for these features in Buddypress?

Loving it! I think it does what its supposed to do (Aggregate), and a component/ widget arrangement sounds pretty good.

I like it. Aggregating this information makes an immediate statement about the site and its users. As it is, it’s easy on the eye and the page isn’t overloaded.

I guess it’s all dynamic, so’s the bbpress feed too?

Also are the member widget tabs dynamic or hard coded?

Looks great Andy! One thing I noticed: the “What’s hot” link for blog posts – is there going to be some kind fo rating system (or is there one already I’ve missed)?

Actually, looking at this and the similarities with the default profile template I see quite a few opportunities to create site-wide style templates which may be edited by users. Think: changing the background and text colour for your blog, but keep the actual layout etc.

In the upcoming home theme yes.

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

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’m putting the final touches on the codex theme today, which should be live at some point this afternoon. Once that is activated the docs tab will be consistent with the others.

The demo tab should be a simple one to solve – I just need to add the site header to the home theme.