One of the early questions I had about how BuddyPress and WordPress are integrated was: “How do the user profiles for site members correspond?” I’m not familiar with the history of the two products, but BuddyPress is implemented as a plugin component within a WordPress environment. To access BuddyPress you login to a WordPress site through a WordPress login. Creating a BuddyPress user requires that user’s profile to be set up as a WordPress user. On examination, some of the profile information  established for a site member is the same and can be synchronized between the two facilities when changes are made; yet other information is different. In fact, the potential exists to have the same type of information about the same party defined by the same labels but containing different details in each area of the combined system. This didn’t seem ideal. My first thought was that I was doing something wrong in my site setup. When I asked for profile synchronization to occur as a feature on a BuddyPress administration panel, I expected full synchronization. As it turns out, my expectations were out-of-scope. Continue reading →