BuddyPress.org

Hi, I am the manager of a development sector in an IT company in China and people here are used to work with ASP and they never heard of BuddyPress. I am not a programmer and I am in lack of the technical background to evaluate how complex could be developing a social networking site that I’ve been asked to develop. (my specialty is ASM and hardware :p )

The more important requests that my customer has is that the posting of articles and all the user interaction has to be in the frontend. Users have to be in one community (blog, I think I can call it) or in several. When they post information, they need to specify the level of access they want to give to other users (exactly as facebook is doing now) . They have, nevertheless, to be able to see information from one community to other as a ” related article ” when the tags are coincident.

To sum up, what I need is help from somebody that is very familiar with WPMU and BuddyPress set of plugins to know if it’s suitable to outsource the project and then continue it with my team. I’ve found plugins like the Site-Wide tags and the Social Privacy that will help me a lot. I need to know which is the complexity of customizing a set of plugins and design themes, generating a completely new site while keeping inside of the framework like WPMU.

Till now, my experience has been successful and I’ve installed a copy of WPMU and set up a couple of plugins (there are so many, that is part of the attraction I feel) at http://mindlinx.itr.cn . I’ve noticed that the framework is not completely stable and the themes are likely to have uncompatibilty issues.

Advice is welcome !