BuddyPress.org

I shared some ideas and suggestions of mine for BBPress on BBPress’s forum. I would like to do the same here for BuddyPress.

As I said at BBPress, I am the owner and admin of http://dcjtech.info/ and I love computer programming. Not only do I love programming, but I love to help other developers. I would like to contribute to BuddyPress by offering some suggestions and ideas.

Please keep in mind that these are just my ideas; I understand that the BuddyPress team has ideas, needs, and concerns of their own that they must address. In addition, even though I learned a lot about the WordPress, BBPress, and BuddyPress framework and inner workings, I admit that there are some parts that I may have over-looked or mis-understood. In summary, I am trying to help make BuddyPress better and more powerful based on what I know, and I want to contribute my ideas as a thanks to all the developers that have spent time and effort making BuddyPress what it is today.

My ideas –

1. BuddyPress needs more options and configurable items – the more customizable, the better. Obviously, some developers are concerned about confusing or overwhelming users, so make a special admin page for “advanced” or “miscellaneous” options. Some additional options I think are needed or helpful include disable/enable feeds, disable the activity features while keeping “@” mentions (the activity profile pages attract spam), and fine-tuned settings for various features (like limiting what is shown in the activity streams, limits on messaging and activity stream age and size, etc.).

2. Export/Import BuddyPress settings – Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not think BBPress has an easy way to export/save settings to be imported to use as a backup or transfer/share settings.

3. Add a “clear/clean database” option – provide an easy way to selectively perform these various actions. (A) Remove “Manage Sign-up” users (my spam users never get past this, so some sign-ups may be weeks old or more). (B) Remove and delete all “friendships” from the SQL database if “friendships” is disabled (apply a similar feature for private messages and others). (C) Allow the option to delete the SQL tables of disabled BuddyPress modules and re-create them when enabled.

4. 100% HTML5 Compliant – I have not studied BuddyPress in this perspective or tested anything concerning this idea, so it is possible that I may be very wrong or the developers have a plan already. However, use of HTML5 (or the option to do so) would be helpful.

Here is an exact copy-paste of idea #12 that I posted on BBPress. I am including it here just in-case this is an idea that should be given to BuddyPress rather than BBPress.

12. Implement a built-in avatar system (perhaps BuddyPress or WordPress should use this rather than BBPress) – This would allow local avatars and provide a way for Gravatar to be disabled or used as a secondary. True, BuddyPress provides a way to upload avatars, and “Basic User Avatars” and “Simple Local Avatars” are plugins offering that feature. However, after upgrading my theme to HTML5 and removing Flash from my browser, I can no longer upload avatars using any of the three mentioned possibilities (backend or frontend). However, I can still upload media via the backend (w/o Flash) and via the frontend (with Flash). NOTE: I do list “plupload.full.min.js” and other similar scripts in Autoptimze “Exclude list”

If you see any features on my website that you want to implement in BuddyPress, feel free to let me know and then I can give you the code and tell you how I did it. Also, I use my own style sheets for BBPress, BuddyPress, and some plugins. I have been able to increase performance and decrease size by using a CSS minifier (http://csscompressor.com/) and implementing ideas from errors given by a CSS checker (http://csslint.net/). I saw significant improvements even before I changed the style sheets to specifically suit my website.

By the way, making BuddyPress templates that can be placed in the regular WordPress theme was a great idea and feature for BuddyPress; smart thinking BuddyPress developers.