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Dave posted an update in the group
Does anyone else think BuddyPress is a confusing mess?: 1 year, 11 months ago
”Confusing mess” is maybe a bit strong, but I’m suffering from some confusion on first look. Its the ’group’ object I think that causes most of it. There is only one forum per group, so why have the group object at all – why not just have forums? I guess it enables a dialog, like this one, without creation of a forum topic. But the group title and updates is something like a forum topic. Hmm. Not sure…
There are a lot of ’streams’ of updates – from groups, personal activity, forums. I’m looking at this as a new user would and thinking that I’ll need to present this differently or remove parts of the functionality to avoid confusing them. Its all logical enough, but on first visit there are bits that don’t seem right somehow.
Groups are containers. They can have a forum and be extended with lots of extra functionality. A group could have a gallery, file repository, wiki, activity stream as well as a plain old forum.
Ok. I didn’t know that. I think any confusion is because we are familiar with the concept of a ’forum’ and ’user’ (and have pre-formed expectations), but not a ’group’. So it may need a bit more explanation. Sorry can’t be more constructive – short of time…
Why are people freaking out this is how 400 million facebook users deal with facebook. On facebook the groups are called pages. Each page as an activity stream, forum, photo galleries.
I think the problem is not with the concept of a group, but how the default skin presents things.
e.g I come to this site. I click on ’Forums’. I see a list of the latest topics. Cool. I click on one and see a page dominated by an image and description of the group. The thing I clicked on – the thing I was interested in and wanted to see – is pushed well down at the very bottom of the page on my laptop screen. Then I struggle to find a link back to those latest topics. Its actually the ’groups forums directory’ button, but that caption doesn’t describe its function very well to me, just as the ’group forum’ caption on the button next to it doesn’t. ”All topics” would be a much more descriptive caption for the latter, but what’s happened is that I’m not thinking as group-centrically as the person that’s designed the skin.
This stuff is very difficult to get right. I much prefer ”All topics” as a caption than ”Group Forum” probably because I’m new to BP (and don’t use Facebook much) and I’m thinking forums rather than groups.
You can change that text to whatever you want.