Welcome to the new ‘community’, guys. :-)

There are a few things that are different from the last time you might have looked at the community site in December; since then the ‘buddypress’ team has made a lot of progress in improving the usability and reliability of the software.

http://buddypress.org/

… to the point where Buddypress is something that seems more ‘usable’ rather than simple ‘proof of concept’. Most of the changes (in themes, groups, forums) is the latest release of Buddypress (v. 1.2) with Wordpress Multiuser. A few things I want to leave for discussion/heads up:

1) One of the things that was going to be part of Buddypress 1.2 was a privacy feature that let you create facebook-like profiles with limited access. It didn’t make the cut, but the privacy ‘addon’ is slated to release before the end of March. I will likely test that out and install it here – that way people who sign on could hide certain things about themselves, share certain things, etc.

2) Wordpress itself (http://wordpress.org) is slated for some pretty major changes – namely the end of the “Wordpress Multiuser” product as multiple-blog functions are folded into the main “Wordpress” product.

What does that mean for us: not much really – functionality should be identical, but upgrading/maintenance should be much easier. (Particularly when it comes to blog ‘users’.)

3) I will start looking into migrating our blogs to a different ‘theme’ – particularly as Jerry starts blogging. The theme I used on all of the blog sites was one that was clean and simple, though missing a feature that would be really handy for Jerry: ‘nested comments’. The theme developer was going to add these features, but instead decided to close down his Wordpress theming business.

What does this mean: again, not much – but the front pages of the blogs might look a little different. (I hope to also give Miranda a bit more control over text formatting.)