Developing OTFA

A misnomer to some extent: the social networking part of it hasn’t worked properly yet. The two functionalities which define social networking are of course ‘friends’ and ‘groups’ and we have implemented neither. The reason? Well, the two plugins available ‘Friend’s-List’ and ‘Groups’ are either not totally implemented, or not applicable to our environment. And this is probably to do with the fact that Automattic, the people who brought us Wordpress.com are presently working on BuddyPress.com, the social networking environment for a vanilla install of WPMU.

This presents problems for extant WPMUs: with a raft of members and a great deal of content the ‘vanilla install’ means BuddyPress ain’t going to be applicable to them, in particular us. We can of course create a second install of WPMU and engage in some form of db-hackery to get the installs to share users, but it is hardly ideal. So we’re back to what we can do now:

At present it is entirely possible to produce profile pages which move some way to a social networking function. The work we have done has produced extended profiles, which also run feeds, a mini-blog and comments. We did this by cannibalising the proto-plugin Tribe (designed as a tool for gamer teams) and re-formatting the author page with among other things a double-loop and a RSS feed.