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About the Author
- Mark Ghosh
An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.
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“Having a common signup between comments, ratings, forums and blog posts would be a fantastic feature”
Absolutely it would.
We have had it for years though, called bbPress…
That said, given how much Andy and the buddyPress team have had to heck bbPress to take out all the BackPress stuff added in the RC1.0 release, this should signal the death of bbPress.
I have never heard of this plugin before but it looks interesting. I’m thinking about setting it up on my blog about perfumes but I’m not sure it would work with that kind of site.
On the other hand if I build up a community full of perfume lovers this would be a ultimate money maker…
I switched my regular WordPress blog for a BuddyPress install, I’m really enjoying it, all I need is subscribers.
My only concern is that it seems that with every release, previous plug-ins break as well as previous themes.
I expect this to be the case much less with future versions. The first couple of releases were focusing on “getting it right”. However, there is also the option of installing the backwards compatibility plugin that is available on the plugin repo.
There is a plugin that provides backward compatibility. Have you tried that? As a developer I have also noticed that many plugins are coded as quick solutions without regard to the fact that the BP core files might change in new versions. Plugins that are coded the right way do not break from version to version.
I’ve used BuddyPress on a few sites in the past – and honestly I think it’s a great setup. I’ve yet to use it on a single WordPress install – but I think that will be coming soon!
While trying to integrate bbPress with BuddyPress on this site, you will find that the Forums module is centered around groups and the normal bbPress topic sections are gone.
That’s a deal-breaker for me
You can disable the bbPress module in BuddyPress and use a stand-alone installation of bbPress which integrates with WordPress. (Just a suggestion)
I think BP working on a regular WP install is going to boost the downloads of BP. Actually, I try to look into it for a client who wants to use a “social network” tool … guess what they already use WP, so what’s easier than BP!?
We have a number of WP users upgrading to MU for the multi-blog setups and buddypress. I wonder how many of them will stick with the standard version of WP now.
I tried but everytime i try to install it, i got 505 error. i hope they solve this problem soon
Sounds like a problem with your server.
I’m developing 2 single user WP with Buddypress right now and I’m really happy with almost everything.
The bbpress forum integration is easy but lacking in features to have a real site wide forum. Hopefully future releases will improve this or buddypress will have it’s own forum that is not tied to bbpress.
WP/BP together is a very powerful tool from everything I’ve seen so far.
Loving it!
It’s fantastic news, but no theme for 1.2 version at time.
BuddyPress relembers yorkut for me.
I hate yorkut, so I didn’t like buddypress at all.
bbPress is much better.
I’m already using Buddypress on MU, but I’m very glad MU and regular wordpress will be merging so I can soon manage one set of software and plugins for all my sites.
BuddyPress is a fantastic bit of software. The only other free community software that comes close is Elgg, but I found that a bit slow and clunky…
My two cents
Buddypress is a strange beast
From a technical point of view its a gem, it’s the first time someone succeed in integrating really BBpress and WP (what BBPress team didn’t do, BBPress and WP are totally separate applications, that is not very convenient when you want to integrate a forum to a WP install).
For existing communities perhaps Buddypress is perfect.
But building community its a complex stuff. Usually people read your blog, participate in forums then (and only then) all these interactions slowly become a community
With buddypress, people need first to integrate « groups » in order to access to forums. I think this makes buddypres unsuitable for someone who want to build a community.
For someone who has an existing a community and search for a suitable application, it’s a totally different story, buddypress is likely perfect
I disagree, I think people underestimate just how powerful groups are, and can become. With a group you get everything a standard forum can provide and so much more. Groups are containers, they might have forums, pages, file repositories, activity streams. The list goes on, and the number of group extension plugins keeps on growing.
I am running both WPMU & BuddyPress on 14 separate domains and love them both ! my Question-comment is this ;
alot
Is it or will it be possible to offer the ability to my users who have blog-sites under any of my WPMU-BP sites I own to start their own community’s as with the (Mingle) plug in only it being buddypress ?
And if so is there or could I Add a link in the regular WP (Subscribers) admin to do so?Or a plugin ?? I don’t know if it is possable but I would love to offer it as maybe an upgrade or option at singup ? just wondering
Stated-Asked another way can I add this to my existing WPMU-BuddyPress installs in any way so as to offer the ability to my users to have their own community s ?
I am looking forward to no more conflicts of plug-ins to
We love you all thanks for all the hard work man!!!
Faith
I really want to like BP, but it’s look and feel is very user un-friendly.
I was hoping I could replace my vBulletin forum with it, but it’s logic is very different from a default ‘web 1.0′ community.
I love the idea of BuddyPress … but I think there’s a “karmic” flaw with the concept behind it…
There’s a very slim chance that I will ever register with or partake in a BuddyPress community – because my point of origin is my own blog. Everything I write or place online is there and I don’t want another one anywhere else.
I would want to be able to participate and link to others and to form communities… but I would wish for myself and all the others to be able to do it from their own site/blog/WordPress… their online home… to be individual within a community without having their home bound to that community…
Weblogtools is a classic example – in effect it is a community. Most of the authors have (at least) a personal blog. If I were an author in this community, I would want to have my posts in my blog and to be able to share them into this community.
I would wish for a future where social networks are meeting places where I am free to come and go… it seems to me that in this context BuddyPress is a compromise and for now heading in the wrong direction…
I would want to see a BuddyPress that creates a junction of independent blogs rather then a collection of dependent ones.
I think there is a lot of potential in this area and it’s quite an exciting prospect. Most of the work on BuddyPress up until this point has been setting a solid foundation and actually building something people will want to use. The open stack is on the roadmap.
I don’t know what you mean by “open stack” but I’d love to learn more and chime in with my two cents if it can help you in anyway!
(iamronen [at] iamronen [dot] com)
@iamronen
I do agree with your comment, but.. but current 1.2 of BP may be what you’re looking for as it works with a single WP install (and no more WPMU) so the users can interact but keep their respective “digital homes”
Luc
Luc,
From what I have been able to understand about BuddyPress (I managed to do a test installation a few months ago) – we would have to be registered user and working within the same WordPress installation to interact.
It would be so great if you and I could “hook up” somehow, in some context and communicate with each other directly from within our separate WordPress installations… without having to co-register and operate in each others environments… it is, I believe, a challenging and far reaching concept…
A BuddyPress installation on my WordPress should enable me to interact with you through a BuddyPress installation on your installation of WordPress… our interactions should create separate/independent/self-sustained footprints on both our sites respectively (like when you send an email, it exists separately in your outbox and in my inbox)…
I don’t think this is what BuddyPress is offering… I am hoping it evolves to make this possible
BuddyPress offers a community like Facebook. Two BuddyPress communities can hook-up with each other via a plugin of some sort (I’m not sure there is one, but it can be made rather easily), just like you connect a vBulletin user with their facebook account and everything they post on vBulletin will appear on their facebook wall — there is a FB-WP bridge also.
However, what I think you are hinting at is that BP should be a service like FB — a central repository that collects what people do elsewhere. BP is all that if you have the right finances to provide the infrastructure for such volumes. BP enables you to do everything you see in facebook if you want, while allowing you to have a small community of users on your $3.00/mo shared hosting account.
Alin,
Actually the more you dig in the simpler it becomes. There is no need for a central repository of any kind.
My social network is a collection of people I want to be connected to. I don’t ever need to “leave my blog” to be in my social network.
What if my blogroll was more advanced (hey BuddyPress!)If I had an ability to connect to the authors of Weblogtools (maybe an RSS reader in my WordPress admin?) – their aggregated feeds could be grouped together into “Weblogtools”. Heck, I could even choose to have my own version of Weblogtools by removing one of the authors and adding another of my own. Or one of them could do me a favor by sharing a group called “WEblogtools” so I don’t need to collect the authors one by one…
This has far reaching implications? Where would the advertising go? It may reshuffle a lot of obvious things we take for granted… but it goes to the heart of the core ideas of WordPress (as I experience them) – personal expression and freedom for everyone.
I wish for a future without Facebooks of any kind – where everyone has a home on the web from which they can share and connect with others
In some ways we are already there, except that every Facebook (and all the other social sites) is also a hostage when it comes to freedom of expression, sustainability and privacy!
I can’t think of a better platform then open-source and WordPress to make this a reality.
Just installed BP on a fresh WP installation and had a couple of issues (the issues may be due, in part, to the fact that WP is installed in a subdirectory, but uses the root as the home page).
Using the Unplugged child theme, had to modify the functions for internal links in both the theme header.php file and some of the core files, otherwise, the links used the WP subdirectory as part of the internal link structure.
Just a word of caution to anyone in a similar situation.
Likely a problem with the child theme. Did the default work ok?
Well, I haven’t decided yet, but I was thinking about using buddypress to turn my single author wordpress.org blog into not just a personal blog, but a whole community. The only thing stopping me, is I don’t have multiple authors, just me, so I was trying to decide if buddypress would be even worth installing for just a single author blog. The thing is though, I was thinking it might be worth it just to incorporate a discussion forum into the blog alone, I guess what I’ve always been looking for in wordpress, is something similar to phpnuke or pokenuke for phpBB, you know what I’m saying? I would say, a contant management system, but I know you guyes definition of a CMS is different then mine. To me, a CMS is like phpnuke or pokenuke is for phpBB, thats what I’ve been looking for in wordpress, and I just don’t know if buddypress would be that kind of solution or not? I mean yeah phpnuke sucks thats not the point though, I’m just saying, that kind of CMS system is what I’ve been looking for in wordpress.
you know what I mean? like a blog + community forum wrapped together in some kind of portal type thing, thats what I’ve been looking for, because, I don’t want my users to have to register for 2 different accounts to leave comments on my blog, and post in the forum, you know what I mean? thats why I’ve been looking for something like that, so the blog and forum can use the same user database and same theme structure.
A few question.
1) Is this possible to be installed as a widget?
2) Is there a comparable for Drupal as a I prefer Drupal over wordpress but the blog I am currently building out – http://www.asklala.com – needs to be a WP because real estate end users just “get” wordpress backends alot easier than Drupal. Which is unfortunate because I am a hardcore Drupler and think that if they can ease the backend experience like buddy press, then the platform could rule the nyc apartments specialist market.
3) Will these kind of tools finally make WordPress the Content Management System that Drupal is?
I’m trying BP in my sandbox site right now.. so far, seems to be working. I’ve never used it before, so I’m still in a learning curve. Thanks!
I’ve got Buddypress working with WordPress single install on two sites. There is one other site I would love to convert, but I have the following problems:
Using the template pack is all very well, but it doesn’t solve the CSS issues, and they can be pretty tricky. At the end of the day its easier for me to take a proper buddypress template and convert it to my needs.
Secondly and more importantly: I have a functioning bbpress install on this site with around 270 posts. If I convert to buddypress, what happens to the forum? Is there a way to take over, import, whatever, this forum, and put the posts into groups (Forum = Group)? If not, what other options do I have? Starting from scratch I may add is not an option.
Cheers
Dave
I have never heard of this plugin before but it looks interesting.I switched my regular WordPress blog for a BuddyPress install, I’m really enjoying it