Why BuddyPress
For those that don’t know, BuddyPress is a plugin (or more accurately a suite of about 12 plugins) for WordPress MU (Multi-user) that turns it into a social network. My first thought when I heard about BuddyPress was “neat” immediately followed by “why?” I doubt I’m the only one that was thinking this. I mean, there’s already MySpace, FaceBook, etc right? What exactly does BuddyPress do that these don’t? The conclusion I came to after listening to Andy Peatling today was “BuddyPress doesn’t do that much more, but it’s definitely useful and overall it’s an amazing project”.
First, why should you use BuddyPress rather than building on an existing service? Andy pointed out that BuddyPress allows you to BYOTOS (Bring Your Own Terms Of Service), which means you’re not vulnerable to the whims of the terms of service of some other site, which could change at the least opportune time. Additionally, BuddyPress is built on WordPress, which gives you the stability that has come with years of development. It’s also open source and better yet GPL, which means that in the absolute worst case scenario you could fork the project and continue to use it. Lastly, BuddyPress piggybacks itself on the WordPress community which is huge and helpful.
Automattic releases BuddyPress – Official “Sister Project” to WordPress
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress and Automattic, announced the release of BuddyPress last week on the official WordPress site. The BuddyPress site is live, with free downloads and installation instructions for BuddyPress 1.0 – which expands a typical WordPress blog installation into a full social network with most of the features of mySpace, Facebook, Ning, and other popular sites. This looks like a very important move in the future evolution of the WordPress platform and something that will encourage many social network developers to build with the CMS. BuddyPress includes user profiles, private messaging, friends / buddylists, groups, activity streams, a wall / stream like section called “the wire” for status updates and tweet-like on-site micro-blogging, in addition to multi-user blogs and forums.
“What if there was software with the elegance and extensibility of WordPress but all the features you’ve come to expect from social networks like Facebook? Now there is: check out BuddyPress. BuddyPress is an official sister project of WordPress. The idea behind it was to see what would happen to the web if it was as easy for anyone to create a social network as it is to create a blog today. There’s been an explosion of social activity on the web, it’s probably the most important trend of the past few years, but there’s been a dearth of Open Source tools that enable the social web. In WordPress we have a robust and extensible base that can scale to many millions of users, and BuddyPress is essentially a set of plugins on top of WordPress that add private messaging, profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, and everything else you’ve come to expect from your favorite social network, like a Facebook-in-a-box.”1
Combined with WordPress themes and publishing ease, the addition of full social network functionality to the platform with the release of BuddyPress 1.0 is a slam dunk / home run for Automattic, bloggers, traditional WordPress users, and social network developers. Look to see this on even more websites than WordPress in the future, and to pull a lot of development away from Drupal, which still lacks a unified offering that builds a social network as simply and easily as BuddyPress.
References & Links:
BuddyPress: http://buddypress.org/
BuddyPress demo site: http://testbp.org/
Sample demo profile page: http://testbp.org/members/galen/
Sites that have been built with BuddyPress:
WannaNetwork – Online Real Estate Community: http://wannanetwork.com/
Flokka – Women in Business: http://flokka.com/
GrungePress – Online Music Community: http://grungepress.com/
