BuddyPress.org

Please, don’t cram BP full of this type of features! Leave them to third parties; basic free plugins, sophisticated paid plugins, external apps with a plugin interface, etc.

There are already so many WordPress plugins available. Why not start with adapting and extending those, instead of reinventing the wheel within BP.

Please core developers, concentrate on the core! Make sure it’s clean, solid and secure. Concentrate on APIs that make it easier for third parties to hook into BP.

Photo albums may be core to some, but not for everybody. I can think of dozens of other applications that could be core to someone; event management, mailing lists, groupware, file sharing, paid membership levels, video galleries, group video editing, chat rooms, video conferencing, shopping cart, credit card payment bridge, mobile apps, geolocation … etc.

had to add my 2 cents..

photo albums are an integral part of most social networks – they were also a promised part of buddypress when it was announced, and given the features that were supposed to be available by 2009 is the reason we have spent so much time working with and testing BP.

While I think it is fine for people to develop and charge for premium plugins, I have found with several projects that a nightmare occurs when core code is updated and plugins are broken – many of the premium plugins developers do not update. Anyone who purchases premium plugins needs to be aware that they may not work in the future, this has hurt other projects in a big way. I vote that buddypress gets photo albums in the core, and as soon as possible.

[blockquote]”dozens of other applications that could be core to someone; event management, mailing lists, groupware, file sharing, paid membership levels, video galleries, group video editing, chat rooms, video conferencing, shopping cart, credit card payment bridge, mobile apps, geolocation”[/blockquote]

– I agree that many of these features are core to a social network in 2010 – If I was Automattic, I would have a developer on salary that worked full time to make sure plugins for these things did not break with future core updates – it’s essential for a stable future of social software in my humble opinion, this is one of the issues that crippled phpfox years ago.

Without some of these things that some people consider “extras” – buddypress is nothing more than a web 1.0 app that some geeks may enjoy, but essentially does nothing more than phpbb or phpnuke did years ago. Boonex’s Dolphin has photo albums, privacy, chat, and all of that – all core – and it still leaves room for premium plugin developers to create fancier flash gallery plugins, and others.

@John James Jacoby – I like your idea of charging for answered questions – that would make things better for those who answer and those who ask – very similar to a group-financing of plugins that get core support I had a couple years back.

The issues with the existing plugins for ZenPhoto and NextGen are that they are designed for a single user blog and content.

When users are split into the different sections many of which do not have blogs it creates serious issues. I looked into those, and even stripped them down a bit.

I think WP 2.9 is on the path to galleries, although not active. It has editing, uploading, management(although wrong) and many other features that would be easier to get working then to hack around a outside solution.

Photos should be core, Events as well. If you want to develop these as “core plugins” that users have to activate like the repos in Linux thats fine, but they still need to be there and accessible.

Don’t forget, folks, that while NextGen and Zen are awesome..like Dennis said, they are for single user galleries. The phrase “BP plugins then only have to provide ways to display images stored by those apps within the BP context” is not a trivial one, however lightly it is thrown around. Pictures not only be stored and accessed in a scalable manner, but relationships to users need to be maintained, in a ddition to Groups and possibly even events. Then each image must maintain an associated comment/activity stream set of functionality. Finally, in order to be truly useful in a social media context, the ability to “tag” a user in an image will be very important.

Just because @peterverkooijen says he doesn’t need it doesn’t mean it can’t be argued that it shouldn’t be a core element.

@Peter

I don’t agree with what you’re saying. I understand the logic behind your ideas, but I think that it’s much better to create a gallery component from the ground up created for buddypress only.

If you have someone working on it which is 110% familiar with BuddyPress and knows exactly which core components and 3rd party plugins might have use for photo galleries, you have a much stronger and cleaner end results then using an existing solution.

You’ve mentioned keeping BuddyPress clean and “non-bloated” for several times, and I think that adjusting/hacking/modifying/adepting existing scripts to work with buddypress (which means a high chance of code conflicts, unused code and a clunky user experience) is not something that I would choose above a well written BP only component.

Would Facebook use an existing photoalbum script? It might sound like a very stupid comparison but I think BP aims to become a open source solution which stands completely on it’s own and can be compared with the bigger social network sites (atleast I hope that’s what they are aiming for:) A awesome BP Gallery component is very much needed and something which should not be (code)based on any existing plugin/script out there.

My 2 cents

Just like to say that I very much appreciate Mark’s remark about roadmap updating to inform developers about core-team plans.

Even if you’re not working on complicated and time consuming feature/plugin etc. but running any BP site you’re always dealing with the community of your users. They may also demand some features or functionaly and it’s a good thing to know what you can expect from core-team and when before you run into hacking

@andrea_r

Good to know. I’ll begin my homework on how to do this. Seems the indexing/db piece in the BP context remains a real concern.