WordPress MU

Big Congrats Andy!

I honestly don't think there's anything to worry about D.

It's a good day for WPMU - we've been going on about wanting these sorts of things integrated with the platform for eva and now they are going to be and will be actively developed.

Where's the issue?

very stoked about this news

no issue. it's just that it woulda been nice if we in the community had gotten together done this ourselves. don't get me wrong, i'm excited about this. remembe,r i was gonna pay for an option and then release it to the community, so this saved me some money.

no issue. it's just that it woulda been nice if we in the community had gotten together done this ourselves

This is all in the name of open source, so people are more than welcome to help out once the new repo is in place. :)

I actually reckon that - and excuse me for a huge amount of ignorance here - that the community can never really take over something without decent leadership & organization.

That's where WP & WPMU have done well and where I reckon / hope BP (new acronym ;) will follow.

Andy - have you looked at the DiSo project (http://diso-project.org/)? Seems like a lot of what you're trying to do with BP would mesh up really really nicely with some of DiSo's goals as well (especially if some of the plugins could be made to work on wp.org, so that "end users" could install them on their own blog and start building the distributed social network we've all been waiting for :)

I think Chris Messina is one of the main drivers behind it, and I'm sure Matt could hook you up with him pretty easily.

Beau

PS: I've done a lot of customizations to WPMU in a social-network-ish implementation, check out http://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic.php?id=7761&page&replies=1#post-45913 for details :)

Hope it goes well and that the revamped product meshes really well with WPMU.

Its interesting to see the alternatives now being mentioned and although its great that there is more than one open source solution I do sometimes wonder if all those different developers had actually got together and worked on one project rather than multiple ones if we'd actually get a lot more accomplished.

@steve - thats what i was trying to say. either way, i'm excited for the product.

Are there any updates on BuddyPress? Just wondering if there is a timeline yet?

Thanks

Also really excited to hear updates on BP progress. Currently I'm looking to move my SN out of LiveJournal which has been imho the best SN solution available for the past 7 years but is now going rapidly downhill, but I am curious if there's going to be any plugins developed to allow WP installations to interact with WPMU installations with the BP features, or even just different WPMU installations communicating eg allowing your friends list to include users on different sites, achieving true SN portability? I'm hoping something OpenID based might be doable - gravatar/openid functionality has been achieved in a WP plugin for displaying LiveJournal userpics in comments, so I'm hoping I'm not wishing for something that isn't going to be doable...

that's not what Buddypress does. So far, it's for one MU install. It doesn't currently interact with other sites.

What actually means :
a vanilla installation of MU ?

Will that mean that wpmu will now be managed & developped by automattic ?
When can we expect plugins, etc. ?

One feature I would love is an easy way to provide domain mapping.

A "vanilla installation" means a plain install of MU with nothing else added, no tweaks or anything. That is, how you get MU when you download it. Domain mapping will most likely not be in with this as it's not related. Buddy press just makes user profiles and add some social networking bits, that's it. it doesn't do cartwheels too.

The buddypress.org website will be going live tomorrow, I've just finished building it on WP 2.5.. :)

The site will give a lot more information on each planned component, as well as give people the opportunity to discuss features.

The buddypress code repo has also been set up at: http://svn.buddypress.org/trunk so please feel free to download and check out the latest version as development progresses.

There is also a trac server set up where you can report bugs and monitor project progress: http://trac.buddypress.org

Please join the BuddyPress mailing list: http://lists.automattic.com/mailman/listinfo/buddypress-dev to keep up to date with BP related discussions and timeline considerations.

Thanks!
Andy

Nice to know Andy. I guess I will wait until tomorrow to try and find out whether I should try this out or wait for the next release of wpmu ;)