BuddyPress is great for building niche community sites. But, in the hands of the right developer, BP can power much more than just social networks. The Activity component is a prime example of this flexibility.
bp-activity provides a rich API for storing, retrieving, and displaying a wide variety of transactional data. BP itself uses this API for tracking events of a social nature – “Boone and John became friends”, “Boone updated his profile”, etc. But bp-activity is flexible enough to store metadata about, say, e-commerce transactions or RSS items. In this way, the Activity stream defines a standardized schema and set of API functions for querying various types of data that may itself be stored in mutually incompatible ways.

This presentation will give developers an overview of the Activity component, including its data schema, the CRUD methods provided by the bp-activity API, and the activity metadata functions. We’ll talk about
how any WordPress plugin can support the Activity stream as a progressive enhancement. And we’ll discuss one or two real-life examples of Activity being used in innovative ways.