Fascinating developments over at the BP forums where, according to dimensionmedia:
“Word today from WordCamp Denver – BuddyPress for WordPress (standard, not MU) is coming. It looks like the only main difference is that you cannot have blogs/sites for individual users (obviouslly). But from the sounds of it, everything else is there.”
Could this be a serious step towards attempting to integrate all single user WordPress blogs with each other (oh, come now, you so know it’s coming!) or just a simple way of adding community functionality to a single user WP install with lots of users?
Either way, it’s interesting news and will no doubt excite a lot of people (myself included).
Quick straw poll, if you could simply deploy BuddyPress with a single WordPress.org install, would you bother using MU?
I don’t know. The news does not excite me. I think that even having two different project (WP and WPMU) is becoming inconvenient.
WPMU is mature enough and does not lack anything that WP has. So, I am lately wondering why carry on two different projects when they could focus only on WPMU. They only need to add to the latter the facility to preserve a “WP” behavior and interface for those people that do not want a multi-blog environment; plus they have to build an easy way to switch to a multi-blog environment.
At the end of day, they only need a way to “restrict” the interface for those people that want only a classical WP installation, and provide a way remove that restriction for those ones that want a WPMU environment.
What do you think about this?
Cheers,
Vincenzo.
PS: sorry, I’m probably a bit off-topic :)
Agreed. BP on plain vanilla WP install would be awesome. Please hurry!
I’m kind of “meh” on the news, although I know plenty of people will be excited. I have seen enough to feel that many people who are trying to use BP really wanted or needed it just for single WP, and the WPMU part is way over their heads.
The reason I’m meh on it for single WP is that it’s way overkill for a single blog and most of the functionality is already there for user profiles & all the bells and whistles.
Yeh it’s overkill but in a way WPMU is overkill – I mean, a fair % of BP users are gonna not be after the blogging features are they?
@Vincenzo Not sure if I agree – first up WP really drives WPMU, then there’s the fact that there are many many more times regular WP users and developers than there are WPMU-ers.
Yeah, that’s kind of what I mean – a lot of the people interested in BP really want it for a single site, which MU is overkill for. But the size of BP now is overkill on a single WP install. :)
This is fascinating, actually. I am eager to try this out.
We have WPMU installs, but one of the things I didnt like about WPMU (though realize its a requirement for what its trying to be) was the blogs aspect. Since we already had a fully functional blogging system, I was curious how I could integrate all the other social community aspects in a separate install.
Now I know! Thanks for the heads-up.
This is certainly exciting. This will open up a whole lot of opportunities for people to start up niche social networks.
I see no difference if I don’t allow new users to create blog at buddypress + MU. What’s the key point of this new project?
It was me that did the preso in Denver last Saturday about BuddyPress. If you want to, you can check out the slides here.