First Signs Of WordPress Using BuddyPress With Project Wide Profiles

While we briefly talked about this during episode 70 of WordPress Weekly with Andy Peatling, today during the early part of the WordPress developer chat, Jane Wells passed on a link to http://profiles.wordpress.org which is the first public instance of BuddyPress in action on the WordPress.org domain. Let’s take a look at Mark Jaquith’s profile since he is a core committer and very active across the project.

Mark Jaquith Is A Very Active Man!

This profile page shows the plugins that user has created, the topics they have created in the WordPress.org forum, their replies to forum threads, ideas they have created, ideas they have replied to, their activity on Trac, plugin trac activity, and BuddyPress trac. That is what I found listed on Mark’s profile page but I’ve seen others listed as well on other profiles such as WPMU topics, WPMU Trac, bbPress Trac, etc. All of the Trac activity contains links to specific changesets as well as tickets along with a short description of the ticket. Pretty awesome to say the least!

The profile editing page gives users the chance to enter their job title, website URL etc. It covers most of what you would see in typical web profiles. However, you can also define how you use WordPress either for Personal use or Business. You can also select the option to be added to the WordPress Consultants list. This is interesting in that potential clients will have the ability to see just how active those consultants are within the WordPress project/community. Definitely worthy of a selling point for most clients.

Easy Way To Track Activity Of WordPress Consultants

Since BuddyPress is in action, we can also manage friends or friend requests. This is all part of the BuddyPress project so if anyone has used that software before, none of these features should come as any surprise.

Logging In For The First Time:

If you have a WordPress.org forum user account, that same information can be used to log into the Profiles website. Only when you log into the site for the first time -will- a site wide profile be created for your account. If you don’t login, no profile will be created for you.

This is exciting stuff! I’m already playing around with my profile and going around adding people as friends. Definitely get on board and help test out this install of BuddyPress. However, if you come across any problems, I’m not sure who to contact so I would just post a new thread in the WordPress.org support forums.

Last but not least, add me as a friend!

*Update*
I just spoke with Andy Peatling and he says that the friends feature is going to be turned off on profiles for now and that it’s not supposed to be there. So no friendships for us!