WordCamp Whistler – Andy Peatling on BuddyPress

Andy Peatling is not only a friend of mine, but also a fantastic WP developer. Andy is the Social Engineer at Automattic. This presentation is an overview of BuddyPress in early 2009. BuddyPress will transform an installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform.

BuddyPress is actually a suite of 8 plugins. You can specifically pick and choose which plugins you want to use. If you want to add profiles you can just install the Extended Networks component. You can just drop in the Messaging module. It’s very module, none of the other plugins need each other, but they extend them. Andy is going to provide an overview of the first 8 plugins.

1. EXTENDED PROFILES – Lets administrators to create descriptions of themselves and the users of the network.

2. PRIVATE MESSAGING – Internal email, threaded messaging – any user can respond to other users.

3. FRIENDS – Creates friend-like relationships amongst the users.

4. BLOGS – Activates all your blogging activity across all your network.

5. GROUPS – Allows any user to create 3 types of groups – public, private and hidden.

6. WIRE – You get a wire on your profile page (kinda the wall on Facebook).

7. ACTIVITY STREAMS.

8. FORUMS – Makes use of BBPress – people can create conversations in a forum style.

9. STATUS UPDATES

10. ALBUMS

Plugins 9 and 10 are slated to come out in 2009. There are two themes. Default Home Theme — WP theme (basic) – creates a static page on the front page. The second theme is the Member theme. A WordPress blog theme can be converted to a BuddyPress member theme with a few simple steps.

All the members on a site can be searched (by name or specific content on their profile).

Installation is pretty simple. Plugin Files (wp-content/mu-plugins) – Home Theme (wp-content/themes) and – Member Theme (wp-content/member-themes). You can drop the widgets (about 8).

Potential uses
- Business or school internal social networks
- Niche social networks
- Adding social networking features to existing blog networks
- Interacting with fellow bloggers on WordPress.com

Gives the administrator full control (something I appreciate from BuddyPress and is sorely lacking on Facebook!)

WHY USE WORDPRESS

- Easy database access and manipulation.
- User management and control.
- Powerful XML support, importing, exporting, XML-RPC
- Active and supportive community
- Localization support built right in

Existing plugins and themes with BuddyPress
- Add new features to already existing plugins
- Use any Wordpress theme (with some easy steps)
- A complete developer platform already exists – if you can write a WordPress plugin, you already know how to create or extend BuddyPress components.

All components follow the same file and code structure. Standardization and consistency makes happy developers.

UPDATE – 3:05 PM – Andy is telling us the view to the future for BP.

- Beta 2 – next week / final early February ‘09
- Albums and Status Updates components
- BuddyPress.org developer community site
- Open standards support/distribution of data
- BuddyPress for WordPress

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