BuddyPress.org

I’ve seen that there is a movement to migrate/update the Codex documentation regarding BP on WP-milti and I’m looking forward to that, but in the mean time, a couple pieces of feedback:

It isn’t too hard to detect if BP is being installed in a multisite system. The user shouldn’t need to dig through documentation to make it work.

As of now, I see the ducks on GitHub indicate three install cases:
Case 1: Network-wide activation using the Main Site of your network to house your BuddyPress community
Case 2: Network-wide activation using a Secondary Site of your network to house your BuddyPress community
Case 3: Activating BuddyPress on one of the site of your network only.

After reading through those, at the end, I see:

You currently cannot have multiple instances of BuddyPress on a WordPress network.

I have to wonder what that hangup is here.

Let’s call this currently impossible situation an extension of Case 3.

A simpler way to do this might be:
(And please bear with me as I try to describe this in English rather than code… If I was any good at coding, I’d have volunteered to write it for you.)

Are we being activated in a Network configuration?
If NO, install normally, as stand-alone.
If YES, get the current blog ID and use that to configure paths and such. Set bp_root_blog in the Admin Settings page and store it in wp_X_options, with a default of 1 for network-wide (cases 1 and 2) or the same as the current blog ID for case 3.

There should be no need to edit config files or directly manipulate DB tables.