Daniel Felice

Projects Update

// February 13th, 2009 // Projects

Explore With Me

Project Explore With Mewas launched in October 2008. Since then we have been testing and adding features to the site such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress, forums, various plugins, new themes and a whole lot more. The site is about 95% complete and we want to launch as soon as possible.

I had originally set my launch date for early January but then decided to wait for the final release of BuddyPress and WordPress MU 2.7. I updated the site to WPMU 2.7 two weeks ago and now we are also running BuddyPress Beta 2.

BP v1.0 was due to be launched yesterday however they have decided to release it as a “Release Candidate” due to pending changes to WordPress MU.

The site is fairly bug free at the moment and everything is ready to go. We do get very good traffic and also are finding that users are joining which is a good sign.

I think we will hold off the “official” launch date until BP v1 and WPMU 2.7(.1?). That is when we will start pushing for advertising and concentrate on bringing the traffic in.

Free BuddyPress Themes

Project Free BuddyPress Themes went live in early January. It was an idea that turned into reality in about 2 hours so there wasn’t much planning involved. The good thing is that I have had time to work on small updates to the blog as BuddyPress is yet to be in final release so the uptake has been a bit slow.

I am happy with the blog in its present form, it is effective and gets the job done. Small updates here and then are always something I’ll do.

At the moment we have 6 themes available for users to download, with 2 of them being the default BP theme. We got three new ones this week so I am hoping that once the word spreads about BuddyPress designers will start designing custom themes and upload them to the site so other users can download them.

I am thinking of putting together a BuddyPress Theme contest to try to encourage users to start designing. I am just trying to put some prizes together. Once I get a few responses I will launch the contest. It is still in its very early planning stages but hopefully we can run the contest sometime in March if all works out well.