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.

Once I saw why it was useful, I wondered where it should be used. It seems to me that it’s really for niche networks. Do you have a sports team that wants to share with each other and maybe fans as well? Use BuddyPress. Are you involved with a school? Use BuddyPress to allow all your students and staff to interact easily. Any small to medium sized group of people with shared interests would be a great place to use BuddyPress.

So enough about where and why, what’s it like? Installation is simple, but not exactly “one click simple”. You can install the plugin itself using the plugin browser in WordPress admin, but then you need to copy some theme files to their correct place. If you know how to use an FTP client, installation will be easy. Additionally it can work with BBPress Forums, but the install is currently somewhat complex. Andy assured us that in the future the BBPress install will improve.

However, the install didn’t worry me. What I really wanted to know as a developer is how BuddyPress was to extend and customize. The answer is, if you’ve been working with WordPress it’s extremely simple. It uses the same methods (actions and filters) as WordPress for extensibility. As a matter of fact, many existing WordPress plugins and widgets work on BuddyPress with no modification at all.

Theming also follows the same basic practices as any other WordPress theme but uses two themes in parallel (a WordPRess theme and a BuddyPress theme for profiles). Template files themselves are neatly ordered into directories to make them easy to find, and BuddyPress uses all clean URLs by default (which map almost exactly to the file you need to edit). Buddy Press themes use “The Loop” as you’re used to seeing in WordPress theme, but they use them for more than just posts. You can list users, groups, friends, comments, and much more! It even includes simple pagination functions to allow you to easily break content into pages.

While I was excited yet skeptical at the beginning, after watching Andy’s presentation I’m just looking forward to a good excuse to do a project using BuddyPress. It looks powerful, flexible, and simple. If you’re interested in seeing Andy’s presentation, I’m told that it should be up on WordPress.tv in the near future.

Related Posts:

• WordCamp San Francisco 2009
• Google's Matt Cutts on WordPress
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 2
• State of the Word from WordCamp – Part 1
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009

“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/

Related Posts:

• Why BuddyPress
• WordCamp San Francisco 2009

1. http://wordpress.org/development/2009/04/make-friends-with-buddypress/