WordPress MU

Hi, I am working on a project using WPMu 2.6+ (and hopefully BuddyPress once it's compatible with Mu2.6) for a blog community that will allow members to either create a new blog or specify an external blog URL on their profile (a custom BuddyPress profile) (or both even).

Now, the requirement are such that the external blogs need to be treated almost exactly the same as internal in terms of displaying latest posts, from them on our site along with the latest posts from site internal blogs.

I was thinking of using the external blogs RSS feeds for all this functionality (as that's the only thing available).

I guess my question is, if anyone has ideas as to what the best way to approach this is? My concerns are:
- how to retrieve all external blogs for members who set them
- how to retrieve the latest posts in an aggreagated way (for all external blogs)
- how to moderate the external blog URL creation/change as to avoid people putting in a porn site or something like that.

I realise that there are also performance issues with retrieving RSS feeds for many blogs etc. So how to deal with this?

Will it be necessary for my client to make a compromise here?

Thanks in advance for any ideas and input. I will, no doubt have more questions around this project and hopefully, some things from it will benefit the WP Mu community :).

"(and hopefully BuddyPress once it's compatible with Mu2.6)"

It is now. :)

while I can see ways around aggregating external feeds, this part

"- how to moderate the external blog URL creation/change as to avoid people putting in a porn site or something like that."

will probably be a problem. Sure you could put in some authentication, which might help, but I dunno if it woudl stop it.

Thanks for your swift reply Andrea.

Thanks for the BuddyPress thumbs up, I'll give it a go. Last time I tried I couldn't see the extended profile admin...

Re: external blog URL
Maybe the URL field is only available on sign-up and disabled in the profile thereafter. If someone needs to change it, they will have to request it from the admin. I don't see that this would be a field that would change too often.

Ideally, what would be cool is, that upon sign-up with external blog option, the URL is inactive for display on the site until approved by the admin (but not the rest of the profile - ie. open registrations). The admin needs to have a way in the back-end to approve the profile field which then activates it for display on site. If the field is changed by the user in their profile, it immediately becomes unpublished and awaits moderation again.

This kind of approach could also be extended to avatars, etc...

I may come back to the external RSS aggregation later. But it's good to know that there are possibilities.

Thanks again.

It's php, anything is possible if someone codes it. :D