hmmm dunno... his current worked out method is indeed a bit more complex, but has some advantage also though (that the order doesn't matter), although this comes with the disadvantage that you need those "status:", "group:" prefixes....
The advantage of his method (if implemented right) is that you can use /xwhois without any parameters (eg: if you use it often worf busy family members, you would need to set that as defaults in the preferences). Though, this can also easly be accomplished with my first method by using a quicktext...
EDIT:
but indeed, the random order isn't a good thing todo and will make your plugin very complex to code and handle. eg: what if I have a group called
status:away mostly
then you could need to parse something like:
in case the user decides to use this order: /xwhois [group] [status]
/xwhois status:away mostly status:online
see the difficulty and bugs in that. There is no way you can determine which parameter is which (and also forget about looking up groups and comparing that to parameters etc, this is way too complex and prone to errors; furthermore what if the user typed the grouped name wrong? etc)
On the other hand, if done right (but this is actually making it even more complex I think) you can also allow for multiple statusses and groupnames...
Anyways, what Chestah said is extremely important:
I'd have a serious think about how your going to implement this before you start doing it 
Think about all the consequences of one method over the other, complexity, structure, advantages (but mostly disadvantages), etc...
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