Posts Tagged ‘social community’

BuddyPress Beta Released

// December 16th, 2008 // No Comments » // Projects, Wordpress

I mentioned a few months ago a WordPress MUplugin called BuddyPress. BuddyPress is a WordPress MU plugin that turns a standard WordPress MU installation in a social community.

I have been using very early versions of the plugin at Explore With Me for the past two months or so, and today it was nice to see that the first official beta version was released.

I was almost updating BuddyPress everyday as bugs were fixed and new features added, so I can now finally work on enhancing the members theme so it fits in with the rest of the site layout and it will also be nice for the users in the way that there are no more broken links and pages that don’t work properly!

Here are a few BuddyPress features:

  • Private Messaging
  • Add Friends
  • Create Groups
  • Activity Stream
  • Post to users “wire”
  • Incorporate a users blog, comments and posts into profile
  • Group Forums
  • and more!

Now that the first beta is released there is a feature freeze on the development of BuddyPress so that any bugs can be fixed. The first official version should be released shortly.

I’d like to thank Andy Peatling who developed BuddyPress! A huge amount of work went into it and it was just what we were looking to incorporate into Explore With Me!

Now that we have a stable version of BuddyPress my focus will shift to the rest of the site and get it officially up and running in January. It has been 3 months or so of work, so we need to start seeing it grow, and grow, and grow…until when one day someone offers us a nice multi-million dollar sum for it…

Creating a Social Community with WordPress

// October 28th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // Projects, Wordpress

When the initial idea of Explore With Me was discussed, we wanted to create a travel blog as well as allow other travellers to sign up and create their own travel blog. This is when I discovered WordPress MU. After we figured out we could host other blogs, we then decided we should create an online social community for travellers.

This is when I said “OK, good idea, but how the hell do we do that!?!”

I then turned to my trusty friend – Google. I searched for “WordPress + social community” and to my surprise it actually brought some good results.

This is where I met BuddyPress.

BuddyPress is currently in development. It was created by a guy called Andy Peatling who started the development earlier this year. Since then Andy has landed a job with Automattic – the guys who develop WordPress, WordPress MU and anti comment spam plugin Akismet.

BuddyPress is a plugin designed to work with WordPress MU and allows people like me to turn their WordPress MU blog into a social community with functionalities such as adding Friends and Groups, sending Messages and writing Comments.

At the moment the plugin is still in development. The final version is due out at the end of this year.

I am currently running a beta version of the plugin on Explore With Me. Please feel free to sign up and test it out.

Check out BuddyPress.org for more information and don’t forget to visit Explore With Me!