Last week I saw an introduction to BuddyPress 1.5. BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin for creating a social community. Like WordPress it's really more of a platform, on which others can add value with plug-ins of their own.

BuddyPress hasn't had a good update in a  while, and the 1.5 release is quite an important one as it turns out.

What I found really interesting was that a large focus of this release is making it a "good community member". Meaning, it integrates much more cleanly with WordPress than in the past. It behaves just like other plugins now - in the past, being a close part of WordPress the developers had taken some short cuts… short cuts that made it harder for other developers to work with.

Why is it so important for BuddyPress to be developer friendly?

Because in today's "game" your value is only partly what you provide out of the box. It's also important for others to be able to innovate on your platform.

While BuddyPress behaved badly, developers were reluctant to innovate because it made their lives more difficult. In particular, BuddyPress used to throw all these unnecessary error/debug messages, so when developers had to debug their own code it was a nightmare. Similarly, developers had little confidence in the quality of BuddyPress itself when their experience developing to it was so difficult.

TheRightAPI is a solution to help developers make sure that their API's are supportive of the community of innovators around them. It's a language for setting and delivering on expectations, so that developers on both sides of the API know exactly how things should work, how they are working, and what's needed in the future.

By the way, if your API is not listed on theRightAPI, let us know please.