BuddyPress.org

Having looked through plug-ins for the solution, with no joy so far, I’m going to put my want list into this ‘Ideas’ forum. Maybe the method is out there and someone can point me at it… and if not, maybe it will germinate into something I can use eventually.

What I’d like to do is roll P2 Theme into BuddyPress so that I can do a bunch of things that are essentially ‘project management’. Some wish list items in no particular order:

– utilize the easy front posting P2 Theme to make the site easy to use. Not interested in doing project management stuff behind the scenes, in the dashboard area (which seems to be a common thing in the plug-ins I tried out).
– utilize the groups function in BP to separate users into logical groups – say, ‘design’, ‘administration’, ‘accounting’.
– allow site admin user to add members to groups – so far you have to ‘friend’ the person etc in BP (or so it appears to me!)… too complicated for the end users!
– incorporate the ‘P2 Resolved Posts’ and maybe ‘P2 Check In’ and ‘jonradio Private Site’ functions into the system
– incorporate the ability to sort the blog page by either date of original post, or date of latest EDIT or COMMENT. Currently the latest post is on the top and if a comment has been made to an old post from a month ago, you’ll only know if you look at the widget that indicates activity… not good enough for my purposes.
– incorporate the ability to filter the blog page by GROUP membership. This is the big one!!!

So in daily use, the users will add posts containing new information relevant to their workgroup (or workGROUPS), edit existing posts to revise items if necessary (perhaps add another check box that P2 includes so nicely or revise an original detail), mark resolved or unresolved (P2 Resolved Posts idea) and add comments to existing posts. This is exactly what P2 Theme does now… with a plug-in or two… except it doesn’t allow the idea of workgroups.

The system would be much more functional if the BP power could be applied.

The extra functionality would allow different working groups to post/comment to the blog page as normal, but be able to filter out other work groups they aren’t interested in. They would be able to view the page based on the date of original post, or date of post revision, or date of latest comment. Therefore content could be displayed in an order that more reasonably and logically suits a workgroup user.

The power P2 Theme offers is huge, but it needs to go a little further to really do what I think it should…

Using bbPress seems like a reasonable option… except it doesn’t allow the quick and easy posting the way P2 Theme does… and would isolate each workgroup into a different forum. It feels like a confining method! I want to be able to select any of the workgroups I want shown (and belong to) and have them appear in the sort order I’ve selected.

I’ve included the jonradio Private Site plug-in in my function wish list, because it would allow the functionality described above to exist not just in an Intranet environment, but also (carefully) exposed to the Internet as well. Allowing workers in the field to update information would be very useful.