Aren’t there loads of plugins for these types of features?
All these feature request threads start to get on my nerves – I should cut back on coffee… – when I’m still wasting way too much time trying to fix basic core management and usability issues in my sites.
And forums shouldn’t even be in Buddypress at all imho. It’s an older generation web community format that clashes with the new social networking paradigms. BP should focus on groups and (micro)blogging and turn that into a solid and coherent platform, not get sidetracked by forums and all these generic feature requests.
I don’t consider this a “generic” feature request, but an important element of increasing usability. Microblogging is fine for small to medium-sized “trusted” community, but not for the site I am redesigning, which has a forum with nearly 20,000 users. Most users are short-term, looking for solutions to a problem, and once they get what they came for, most never return. I’m hoping to change that with the new BuddyPress design.
The site I am developing is all about a variety of user interaction in one place, and allowing 20,000 strangers to each have their own blog would be a disaster. Most people don’t want or need their own blog any more, and prefer to publish and interact in one centralized, standardized location — hence the popularity of Facebook.
So, I think the real value in BP is Groups + Forum: Groups for looser, more spontaneous communication, like Facebook, and Forums for more structured, searchable and archived collections of information. If you @Peterverkooijen are not interested in Forums, but want to give your users blogs, that’s fine — just use WPMU, or WPMU + BuddyPress but disable the Forums.
Forums have great value for many types of sites — we’re successfully using one right now, in fact.
Any new ideas about Favorites out there?
@snark
Ability to “Favorite” a topic and get recurring updates doesn’t work right now. It’s something I mentioned in the past on testbp.org. It’s probably a bbPress thing. I’m not sure if anyone outside the BP dev team has even looked into this issue. I might look into it myself sometime in the future.
@Peter
Don’t like forums? Disable it!
Don’t like forums? Disable it!
I already have, but half the posts on this forum these days are about BBpress/forums. Buddypress needs to make clear what it is. The growing emphasis on forums pulls it in a schizophrenic direction imho.
BBpress forum.
@Peter
True, a lot of the threads on the forum have been about bbPress.
I agree that it could be made clearer.
@snark
In response to your points up top:
1)
+1 Favorites sometimes = bookmarks in social networking sites. We need to be able to offer this across all types of communication features.
2)
Theme developers need to be able to pull this info in with a loop. Maybe we can already?
3)What is the current state of Favorties plugin development, and is there something in the works that can accomplish the above?
There is the BuddyPress-Like plugin: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-like/
The problem with BP Like is that it now competes with Favorites built-in to BP 1.2. I need to be able to turn off Favorites so that BP Like isn’t confusing/repetitive.
But really, this is something should be rolled into core.
@Peterverkooijen
Forums, yes, were part of an older web community – it was the sole way they communicated. With the advent of social networking came the creation of new ways to communicate. Forums were given less focus but they still have there place. Even today in Facebook you can clearly identify forum-esque features.
I don’t think BP has ever focused on forums. It’s always been on the activity stream/wire. Of course, forum topics are now tied to the activity stream – as they should be – but does not in any way give BP a “schizophrenic” identity.
