Buddypress growing up – adding to the wishlist
by Philipp
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.
Philipp,
I really think an RSS architecture wherein P2P becomes a kind of syndication bus for resources that can be archived and expanded would be awesome. I have an idea for teaching a course on Pirates and Zombies (then and now) through P2P wherein we can test this structure. The course is something I have been developing for a freshman seminar at UMW, but I would really like to throw it out at P2P and see if it might provide an interesting case study/model. let me know if you are interested.
Ahoy Reverend – Harrrrr!
Excellent course, perfect for P2PU. The freshmen at UMW are clearly having too much fun. I am working on a paper on open accreditation this week, but hope to start setting the P2PU sails next week so we can play around with pulling content in. What are you thinking in terms of storing the course outline? I noticed that BYU is using WP for their Open Courseware – they simply create blog pages for the content. That would work. However, my gut feeling is that keeping the basic course outline on a wiki seems more remixable.
Sail Ho!
[...] But just the organization of a series of texts and ideas around a more coherent theme. So, I just commented on Philipp Schmidt’s Sharing Nicely about a course for P2P University. The course would center around the history of pirates, zombies, [...]