Wed 28th July Dev Chat homework

This post was contributed by Boone Gorges for the upcoming Dev Chat; thanks Boone!

Hi everyone,

As we look forward to BuddyPress 1.3 and beyond, it’s time to have a look at the roadmap. During this week’s dev chat, we’d like to take a few minutes to consider the following items. The list is adapted from a collection of feature requests assembled by Paul. I have filtered out those which are pretty clearly, IMO, plugin territory. I’ve also added a few preliminary thoughts to some of the ideas that I hope will help to spur conversation during the dev chat (and get you thinking about it in the meantime).

Some things to consider about each item between now and Wednesday:

  • Is the item core-worthy? (likely to be used by a large percentage of BP installations, unable to be easily achieved by plugins)
  • If so, where does it go on the roadmap? How easy will it be to implement? How important is it?

In no particular order:

  1. Media support – Photos, video, audio, galleries. In high user demand. BuddyPress Media is shaping up to be a powerful plugin solution.
  2. Attachments for forum posts, PMs, activity items. Related to the previous item.
  3. Refactoring the forums components – Some suggestions: forums as activity items; forums as custom post types; forums as an abstraction layer to allow for user choice in forum software (bbPress, phpBB, etc). Considerations: bbPress is in the early stages of being rebuilt as a WP plugin; we may not want to reduplicate efforts needlessly.
  4. Abstract forums away from groups – A frequent request from the bp.org forums.
  5. Microformat support – BP should output and accept: activitystrea.ms, XFN, Open Social, vcards, FOAF, sioc. Remember that for a format to warrant core support, it should be either widely used or at least relatively assured of wide adoption in the future.
  6. External API support – Development of a REST API for BP to talk to external applications. Possibilities: Atom, XML-RPC, PuSH. We might want to consider getting a little synergy with WP core in this area – WP supports XML-RPC for blog posts, for instance.
  7. Search overhaul – Possible directions: better faceted search; search across all components; including a bp.org-style multi-search in bp-default
  8. Richer bp_has_x() queries – This back end change would answer a lot of user questions regarding filtering. bp_has_activities(), bp_has_members(), etc should support additional arguments: exclude, metadata, xprofile, multiple values for scope/user_id/etc.
  9. Improved taxonomy support, especially for groups and users. Taxonomy across data types: groups, members, forums etc can share the same tag. Related: allow the easy creation of custom user and groups types
  10. Refactor user roles to support current_user_can()
  11. bp-default improvements:
    • Autocomplete for @ mentions
    • Front-end blog posting for bp-default
    • add_theme_support( ‘nav-menus’ ) for bp-default
  12. Privacy – Simple profile privacy and/or complex Privacy Component controls.
  13. Reply via email – for PMs, activity comments, blog comments, forum posts. Maybe borderline plugin territory. I thought I heard rumblings that comment-by-email would be in the first round of WP core plugins – might be a starting point.
  14. oEmbed support – r-a-y has already written a plugin, and it’s supported in WP core – seems like a no brainer.
  15. Rich text editor for text entry. Related: auto-quoting for forum posts, activity items.
  16. Generic component extension API