What is Buddypress?

Another interesting topic popped up on the BP forums today asking the question, What is Buddypress?…again my reply was too long for a forum reply.

I think BP has leaned too heavily towards plugins built on top of BP, a plugin itself. I didn’t see it working that way at first and that’s why I used MU to house member “posts” as different media types or post types by way of a blog for each type. With limited Contributor Author roles for BP members to post on the fronted on each of those blogs BP members now had pseudo picture albums and video libraries and whatever else, links even by way of Author Archives. You inherit comment system, taxonomy for each, a search engine for each and wp plugins that can manipulate those posts like you would a wp blogs, similar videos, similar photos, rate, etc. I thought bp plugins would come in to help intergrate wp authorship into BP profiles to allow for frontend “posting”(uploading photos) & manage those “posts/archives” what you also inherit is standalone wp sites for each media type../videos for video section or .photos.domain.com for photo minisite to supplement your main blog. Instead of now having to try to figure out how to feature, tag, categorize, and manipulate photos, videos, or links plugins.

Is there something really big i’m missing as to why that might not be preferred. Maybe that’s where I see BP going now instead. It was only with MU i could do this but with post types around the corner for wpsingle…i think making use of wp post on to house social components is a good option.

Especially MU, whole themes suites could just be the plugins. bp albums or bp links could just be a theme themselves…i guess for single it would be post types. then bp can focus more on how to feed these into bp profile to display, edit and manage: edit only your “posts” and more time for plugins to manage wp dashboard, blog theme, widgets, on the frontend from your bp profile. Anyway that’s what I’m trying to stick to.

So i guess Buddypress is toolkit for building any type of site with members who want to share or see other people share content.