Change terminology from 'blogs' to 'sites' to match WP 3.0

[josswinn]

WordPress 3 now refers to 'blogs' as 'sites'. BuddyPress should probably do the same and it will encourage people to think 'beyond blogging' when using BuddyPress.

[boonebgorges]

Is everyone else on board with this?

Anyone want to write the patch :-D ?

[DJPaul]

WordPress' developers (and us) might refer to its network(s) of hosted sites, but I would argue that in general, people would call them blog or blog networks. If for example on multisite we rename the blogs directory main nav to "sites", people may think that the item refers to external links to other sites.

[boonebgorges]

Paul - I personally agree with you.

And really, regular front-end BP users are a very separate class of users from WP Dashboard users - in fact they hardly overlap at all. So the argument for being consistent with WP core is perhaps not all that strong.

[wpmuguru]

Also, this is messing with the front end of existing sites. I suggest a filter and store the singular and plural values in the $bp object somewhere.

[boonebgorges]

wpmuguru - We already have language packs for that purpose. Can you elaborate on what's getting messed up on existing sites?

[wpmuguru]

Replying to boonebgorges:

Can you elaborate on what's getting messed up on existing sites?

What I was meaning was that existing BP sites that are not using translation files have Blogs on the blogs directory. If this is changed to Sites then all of those BP sites will have the interface changed without warning.

[nacin]

BuddyPress should move to Sites to be consistent with the parent project.

Any interface issues can be handled by a gettext filter.

[boonebgorges]

I'm sympathetic to Ron's point. Changing the terminology on the Dashboard of WP is one thing - a fairly small percentage of the audience of the average WP site ever looks at the Dashboard, and those who do are generally in a good position to understand the change, as they are often the site admin. Changing the terminology on the front end of BP should be handled more delicately, because it will affect every single person who uses a (MS) BP installation.

In light of the potential level of impact, I'm uneasy about telling admins of every existing site to create a language pack just for this issue. I wonder if this might be a special enough case where we provide an admin-level switch (either in the UI or in the form of a filter that can be activated in bp-custom.php) for maintaining the language of 'blogs' vs 'sites'. New installs would default to 'sites', while older ones would optionally be able to maintain 'blogs'. Over time this could maybe be phased out. Just a thought.

[DJPaul]

The activity stream has one instance that definitely can be changed: "[person] wrote a new blog post: [title] on the blog [blog name]"; about to commit this

[djpaul]

(In [4357]) Tweak activity stream text for new blog posts and blog comments on multisite. See #2164

[DJPaul]

I've changed my mind. I think most/all the references can be switched from blogs to sites. The custom menu support will let people customise a menu back to saying "blogs" if they want.

John / Boone: What do you think? I'd like to sort this ticket out one way or the other.

[boonebgorges]

Good point about the menus. Changing the text in one of the primary nav tabs is, IMO, the biggest problem with this switch, but you're right that proper WP menu support makes it better.

I say go ahead and make the change.

[djpaul]

(In [4466]) s/blogs/sites. Fixes #2164