Hot off the press is the announcement of the BuddyPress template packs plugin. This plugin makes it very easy to use your current theme with BuddyPress on a single site install of WordPress instead of having to use the default BuddyPress theme. Kudos to Andy Peatling for making it even easier for people to use BuddyPress without reconfiguring their entire site. Note that the template pack won’t do anything unless you have BuddyPress installed.
@Otto – Have you watched any of the videos on WordPress.TV covering BuddyPress?
@Jeffro – No, I generally don’t do video. I read, not watch. Actually, making a video tutorial is a very good way to have me ignore you. :D
And this video didn’t really answer my question. Yes, it adds activity streams, forums, and friending and such. Okay, but what are those? What do those do for you? How do they work? Where’s the technical documentation on how I can use them? Why do I want them in my “community”?
BuddyPress just strikes me as poorly documented and I have no idea why I’d use any of it instead of using other pieces to build what I wanted. If I wanted to make a forum, for example, I wouldn’t even think of BuddyPress. I didn’t even know it had forums in it until just now.
It’s like they are assuming I just know what they’re talking about with these terms, when I have no idea what those terms even mean in the given context. Like “Friends” with WordPress? That doesn’t even begin to make the slightest bit of sense to me. I know what “friends” are on Facebook and similar, but I don’t see how that applies to WordPress at all.
I grant you that it is entirely possible that I don’t get it because I lack any sort of valid use case for it. This is most likely.
Here’s a couple of links for you to read:
http://buddypress.org/about/ – includes some use cases.
http://codex.buddypress.org/ – technical documentation.
BuddyPress is really aimed at the niche social networking market. Sports teams, newspaper sites, company and product sites, intranets. Building community around a specific topic or interest.
Why you would be getting spam from the test site I don’t know, it’s fairly spam free. Unless you consider email notifications of replies as spam.
BuddyPress is really aimed at the niche social networking market. Sports teams, newspaper sites, company and product sites, intranets. Building community around a specific topic or interest.
And that happens to be exactly the kind of site I’m building – a niche social networking site around a very specific demographic. For this purpose, BuddyPress is the perfect tool and framework. It allows the users a place to meet, get to know, and support one another: friends, groups, forums, activity streams, etc.
Personally I really like buddypress, I am using it on a new personal interest website actually based around wordpress.
Its still early days yet however, I have found it to be very flexible and easy to use, hopefully my community site will grow.
The reason I chose buddypress, is I want a site that has a real community experience, rather than a blog with a few entries (which I will still have) but I want people to interact, create groups, post useful links, make friends/network, share tips and more.
I believe that buddypress has a way to go, but it really is off to a good start and credit to Andy Peatling and his team for creating something a little bit different.
Otto when you have this arrogant and negative attitude towards video or any media that can help you understand the concept behind Buddypress how do you expect to understand how it really works and what can it do for you? Bottom of line is, if you can’t comprehend what it can do for you, it’s definitely not for you mate :)
[…] BuddyPress. But the guys at BP just went into overdrive and unleashed a stupid-friendly update. Jeffro explains it far better than I ever could – but suffice to say, you can now host your own social network easily and with impact by […]
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I still have yet to see a satisfactory explanation of what, exactly, BuddyPress does. “Social networking” is not an answer.
I even tried the test site. All it did was send me spam, and I’m still no closer to understanding it.