qTranslate plugin incompatible
I was actually testing the 1.1 release candidate so I could help with some bugs and I did actually find one. I also discovered that the current version of qTranslate the multilingual plugin I use totally breaks the new buddypress pages causing "page not found" or whatever your Wordpress 404 page says. This is due to something in the URL rewriting. I reported it to the qtranslate forum on Monday, but now it is Saturday and there wasn't even a reply to my thread there. This is frustrating because Wordpress doesn't check language tags so pages that were translated display their content twice when the plugin is disabled.
The bug I had discovered involved a Buddypress function being called when I had that feature disabled in the Buddypress configuration. I was happy to see that the if function exists check was added to the problem line of code the same day I reported it.
Buddypress adds several features and fixed one important problem.
Working Forums
The problem I had and any reader will notice is the integration of forums with wordpress. Wordpress's parent company started their bbPress forum software project before Buddypress but after Wordpress however my testing of the software over the last year only made me want to cry. It was never compatible with recent versions of Wordpress and for about a year there was always a message of it being just a month or two away of being up to date. Also the integration needed so that people wouldn't have to register and log in never seemed to work right. When it was announced that Buddypress would use bbPress as the forum software I was brought to tears and I totally refused to try 1.0 since you had to manually install bbPress and I remember how much fun that was.
I had tried the SimpleForum software on my sites for several months and it was easy to install and configure, but when I updated my sites to Wordpress 2.8 the forums broke and no content would display even after following their instructions so that promising plugin lost my favor.
In Buddypress 1.1, special code was added so that the integration of the bbPress forum software was automated so you couldn't do it wrong. Additionally the display of forums is also handled so you don't need to log in to bbPress to edit themes and other frustrating tasks you'd want to avoid. This is great because having to manage a separate theme for integrated forums just does not make sense.
Groups
Buddypress set up a group system which works like bbPress's main forums, but the difference here is that different users can join groups and start threads. On a group page you can see who is part of the discussion group and the admin can manage it all there.
Friends
Being able to friend someone is fun, but the functionality is that you can invite your friends to join a group not any member.
Blog Directory and Member directory
I was surprised to discover that the system automatically added a directory of blogs (including blog 1) and a directory of members. I thought I'd need a plugin for those, but they just appeared.
Sitewide Recent Posts
If you enable the Buddypress option to track posts, you'll discover a widget for displaying recent posts from all the blogs. Before you needed a plugin to do that on Wordpress MU. I don't know when that was added, but I'm glad it was. It saved the installation and configuration of yet-another-plugin.
Buddypress still has much work to do even though it is officially 1.1 it still feels like a beta. Although it was announced from the beginning there still isn't a system for users to make a photo gallery. You can use a plugin for that though.
There also isn't any way to set a membership level or be able to charge for features. (so you can pay for that dedicated server you'll need) Since the plugin is for setting up communities, I think memberships really should be included as an essential core feature not something left for plugins.
In any case, I'm happy that the development of Buddypress is active and have great hope for Buddypress in the future. It was nice to see that Buddypress took care of about half of my "wishlist" in the previous post.
