While I don’t have personal experience with Mingle, it makes sense that you should at least be able to migrate the userbase over. As for Private Messages, Friendships, etc. that sounds more like a job for a plugin.
Make sure though that before you do anything that you create a backup.
I’m not worried about friends lists, i’m concerned about the user lists, their profile information, and their avatar.
As far as I can tell, Mingle is a straight out of the box social plug in. You just install and activate it, it does the rest.
I’m testing this very thing I have 29 users on ecigusers.com both plugins have very different features that attract me to them. I also have a plugin called mingle forum which seems to work even with buddypress activated but the menu system is all over the shop. Is there an extention that anyone knows of that can add a custom menu to buddypress??
Not that I have found. I have spent over 3 days looking for a solution to Buddypress with BBpress. My problem with BBpress is that it does not have any reliable plugins to upload images to the forum. Mingle forums does this effortlessly. I would say that someone at Buddypress/Wordpress needs to address this because the forums are filled with unanswered posts and frustrated users. Go Mingle!