Integrating MediaWiki into BuddyPress Activity Streams

Boone Gorges developed this pretty slick extension for MediaWiki which makes the loose integration of MediaWiki, WPMu, and BuddyPress that much more useful. You can read his post about the extension here, but short version is that edits made in MediaWiki by anyone within the user community will show up in the BuddyPress activity feed. This is a rather simple bit of information that makes the integration of these tools that much more relevant and powerful. For, in the end, the whole idea of BuddyPress is making what’s happening within a community that much more visible to the members (something extremely difficult with WPMu alone), and the shifting focus from the blog to the individual’s profile page points towards a larger shift in thinking about blogs as aggregation points of all of one’s activity around the web. All I have to say is very, very cool—I will be testing this out shortly.

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2 Responses to Integrating MediaWiki into BuddyPress Activity Streams

  1. Boone says:

    Thanks for the shout-out. I am really anxious to start touting the activity feeds as a real center for the CUNY Academic Commons. It seems to me that these kinds of streams, along with the personal profiles, play a key role in making people feel at home and fostering community. This is one thing that Facebook gets right – they split the focus between the persona that the individual actively creates and the group persona that emerges from the activity that the community engages in. Put together, these two personae have the potential to give the site a real, distinct personality. Extensions like this one are baby steps in that direction.

  2. Reverend says:

    Boone,

    I agree, and add to it the ability for people to add and stream feeds of their activity from a variety of sites like flickr, youtube, twitter, an external blog, delicious, etc., and you have a really powerful hub of activity and relevance. The key would be to connect users based on those incoming data feeds, and make the idea of relationships that much clearer. It is the right model, and the future of all of this.

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