Reduce global touches and encapsulate remaining globals into buddypress() instance

[johnjamesjacoby]

We have a number of globals still lingering around, that should start making their way into the main BuddyPress class. These are what I found at a cursory glance:

• $activities_template
• $bp_activity_title
• $bp_activity_no_activity
• $blogs_template
• $forum_template
• $topic_template
• $members_template
• $friends_template
• $groups_template
• $requests_template
• $invites_template
• $thread_template
• $message
• $type
• $groups
• $group
• $fields
• $field
• $profile_template
• $group_name

We should do what we do for $bp and stop referencing them directly, and instead encapsulate them into the main BuddyPress class. This will pave the way for allowing us to deprecate these globals in a future version, and ideally make our coding style a bit more sane for developers to figure out.

[boonebgorges]

Yup, this sounds good. But let's be sure that, in each case, we also define the legacy global by reference to the new location, so that plugins that directly reference the global will continue to work.

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/