Just one month after launching its WordPress beginner’s course, Treehouse has added BuddyPress education to its collection of interactive learning resources. The “Learn BuddyPress” course is geared toward BuddyPress beginners and covers all the basics of setup, user management, and core social components.
After reviewing the course, I was impressed by how quickly Gordon is able to communicate all the basics for gaining competence with BuddyPress, including the following:
- Getting Started With BuddyPress: How to Install BP and configure its settings, register users and use the codex
- BuddyPress Member Profiles: Setting up extended profile user fields, members page, status updates, etc.
- Social Interactions in BuddyPress: Friend connections, private messaging, mentioning users, notifications, activity, groups
- Customizing BuddyPress: BP plugins, themes and customizations
Each component is covered in great detail from both a user and community manager perspective. If you learn best by watching videos, then this course may be a good option for you, as it also includes an accompanying video transcript for each section. The lessons include links to the BuddyPress codex for further reference on the topics discussed.
Treehouse Plans to Add More BuddyPress Education Resources
Zac Gordon, Treehouse’s instructor for the course, said that they’ve been experiencing an increase in demand for BuddyPress education resources. He plans to create a BuddyPress Theme Development course to follow and may add a plugin development course sometime further down the road.
With Treehouse’s expansion into resources for major WordPress plugins, I asked him if other extensions will be featured. “bbPress is definitely on my radar, although I’ve had no requests for it,” Gordon said. “Jetpack would be a cool idea too, since we just did the WordPress.com course.” He’s currently experimenting with different course lengths and may produce a quick Jetpack resource within the next month or two.
The Learn BuddyPress course is the first of its kind with in-depth video tutorials for every aspect of using BuddyPress. This is a great resource for teaching yourself the basics of BuddyPress over a weekend. The course is also a high quality option for BuddyPress developers to recommend to clients for basic support on how to use BuddyPress’ core features.
Let me be the first to request he do the same thing for bbPress. I’m looking for installation, configuration, and most importantly, how to make sure a theme supports bbPress out of the box and if not, how to utilize the default theme in bbPress.