Jason Coleman, creator of the popular Paid Memberships Pro plugin, launched his new SchoolPress app in beta this week. SchoolPress is an open source WordPress-powered web app designed for educators who want to incorporate a virtual component into their online or offline classes. The app is a demo that was created to showcase ideas from…
Developers who are new to BuddyPress sometimes find BP templates confusing to work with. Common questions include: Why are there so many? Where do I place the files? How can I override the templates in my project? BP Project Framework is a plugin from the folks at WebDevStudios that provides a boilerplate for new custom…
It’s no secret that BuddyPress sites attract a serious amount of registration spam. Plugins such as BuddyPress reCAPTCHA, BuddyPress Security Check, SI CAPTCHA Anti-Spam, and BuddyPress Honeypot are either ineffective, inconvenient, or not well maintained. The often-recommended, though unfortunately named, WangGuard plugin is moderately successful at stopping BuddyPress spam, but is linked up to a…
In January 2011, an alpha version of the Heavy Analytics plugin was released, offering WordPress administrators the ability to track and measure interaction on their sites. The project, created by Toby Cryns and Eric Johnson, aimed to make Heavy Analytics the finest WordPress reporting, BuddyPress reporting, and WordPress multisite reporting tool on the market. This…
Getting users to upload avatars can be a challenge for BuddyPress communities. Avatars aren’t like profile fields where you can require users to complete them. The problem is that a community without many real-user avatars can be somewhat uninviting. Member directories and widgets end up looking grey and white and uninspiring. Too many default “mystery…
The groups component in BuddyPress allows members to create their own mini-social networks, each with its own homepage, activity stream, member directory and administrative panel. In networks where groups play a big part of the social activity, it becomes important to have a way to label or classify groups. When a group doesn’t have a…
When testing BuddyPress themes and plugins, it’s helpful to have some data to populate the network and demo its social components. Manually adding users with avatars, activity updates, messages, etc, can be a tedious process. Fortunately, there’s a way to automate the creation of demo data. The BuddyPress Default Data plugin instantly creates a bunch…
BuddyPress Groups are one of the more social components of the plugin, as they’re used primarily for bringing members together around a shared interest, goal, or collaborative project. In some ways groups are like their own mini-networks within a social network, each having its own homepage, activity stream, member directory and administrative panel. Groups are…
At BuddyCamp Miami 2014, I learned about BuddyPress and what it’s capable of. During the first session, I learned you don’t have to worry about BuddyPress themes anymore since 1.7 introduced theme compatibility. This means that BuddyPress sites no longer require a BuddyPress-specific theme. Later in the day, there was a session devoted to BuddyPress…
WordCamp Miami was held over the weekend, drawing more than 770+ attendees who converged upon the University of Miami to connect over all things WordPress. The event celebrated its 5th anniversary (quite ancient in WordCamp years) with a world-class lineup of speakers and many opportunities for attendees to network. BuddyCamp Miami kicked off the event…
Brian Messenlehner demonstrated AppPresser‘s new AppBuddy extension at BuddyCamp Miami with a mobile app created for any WordCamps that are being broadcasted via WP Armchair. His team is releasing the AppBuddy beta today to their customers who have purchased the Agency bundle. The app is being distributed from wparmchair.com and is in both of the…
After shipping BuddyPress 2.0, the plugin’s core contributors decided to adopt WordPress’ features-as-plugins development model for working on the possibility of a new media component. Mathieu Viet, better known as @imath, has been working on an Attachments API that will allow BuddyPress to store media as attachments. Plugin developers will also be able to make…
Managed WordPress hosting company Pagely, will be hosting a BuddyPress hangout tomorrow at 11AM Pacific, 2PM Eastern. Pagely’s CTO Josh Eichorn will be interviewing BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges. The pair will discuss the differences between BuddyPress 1.9 and 2.0 as well as details surrounding the major performance improvements. Pagely CEO Joshua Strebel will moderate…
Profile field visibility settings were added to BuddyPress in version 1.6 in order to address a popular request for profile privacy. The settings had remained the same up until the recent 2.0 release. Field visibility settings were previously tacked onto each field in the profile editing screens. BuddyPress project lead John James Jacoby proposed that…
BuddyPress 2.0 was released this week with many new administrative tools that make it easier to manage communities from the backend. One of the lesser known new features is the ability to limit comment depth in the activity stream. Activity threads can sometimes get out of control when it comes to replies, which results in…