Sharing Nicely

Buddypress turned 1 (point 0) recently, which is great, because we would like to use it for peer2peeruniversity.org. Joss immediately posted a little wishlist for features he’d like to see in future versions (and he puts his money where his mouth is – offering to pay for some of the development). So, I thought, why not do the same and add one feature to his wishlist.

• Integrate groups and blogs. We have been thinking about “courses” (learning communities) as blogs in buddy press/ WPMU. Within those courses we’d like to have discussion groups. Buddy press currently treats blogs and groups as separate things completely. We’d like to link a group and a blog, so that those who are blog authors (course participants) are automatically part of the discussion group. We’d also like to pull them together on the course home-page, but I suspect that can be done through an appropriately designed theme.

Maybe what we need is tweaking and configuring rather than software development, but we’d need someone who can help us think through the details and do the tweaking. And we’d be happy to pay for development as long as it remains part of the buddypress context and useful to other people.

And while I am at it. Here is something else we’d love to see emerge in the wider WP MU world (not really part of buddpress). I have heard Jim Groom talk about something like this, and Hans/Heili/Priit are interested in the idea as well (they call it edufeedr).

• Edufeedr/Discussionmaster: Assuming that blog/group integration works, we’d like to be able to turn conversations that take place on external blogs and internal blogs and in the group, into one master conversation including all comments. The master conversation works like a blog planet, but includes comments and syncs inwards (pulling all new content in) and outwards (pushing comments back to the blog posts that they refer to). Admitted, this goes beyond buddypress – and should probably be a separate thing.