Optaros Labs

Social Networking on WordPress? Meet BuddyPress

Back in July of 2007, Andy Peatling posted on his blog about creating a social network called ChickSpeak on top of WordPressMU, the multi-user version of the popular open source blog platform . It was a compelling possibility – compelling enough that Automattic (the company behind WordPress) hired him to work on it full time.

BuddyPress 1.0, the result of that effort, was released on April 30th of this year, and is an option that should be seriously considered anywhere a new content-centered community is being built.

It doesn’t have the community size or custom-development flexibility of Drupal, but it represents a strong step in that direction for the otherwise very blog-centric WordPress. Given that WordPress is arguably the best blogging software in existence (at least that’s what I’d suggest) BuddyPress should be on the shortlist of any team looking to build a social network style community site.

BuddyPress 1.0.1 is the current release, which works with WordPressMU 2.7.1 and BBPress 1.0a6 or later (I think – I tried it with the current trunk from BBPress SVN repo and it worked well). It’s delivered as a series of plugins and themes for WordPressMU and BBPress, which can make installation and configuration a bit difficult, but there’s plenty of community help and a few tutorials already to help move you along.

In addition to the expected blogging functionality (every user can have multiple blogs; individual blogs can be multi-author), BuddyPress also includes:

• Extended profiles – including the ability for developers and site administrators to define additional profile fields
• Private messaging – ability to send and recieve messages within the system
• Friends – bidirectional, request-accept model. (Not a one-way unconfirmed model like Twitter’s follow/following, but a confirmed two-way model like Facebook).
• Groups – including the ability of individual members to create new groups, and mechanisms for surfacing groups when they are created
• The Wire – a commenting / messaging system I think of as something like a Facebook wall. Messages on the wire can be seen by others. User profiles have an associated wire, as do group pages. Custom components could also leverage this feature.
• Activity Streams – a view of all of your activity as well as a view of your friends’ activity within the system. Doesn’t (yet, out of the box) import activity from other sites, though custom components can and will undoubtedly be developed for these kinds of purposes
• Forums – based on BBPress, also an Automattic product. By default in the provided theme, forums are attached to groups – but the architecture provides for forums to be sitewide and/or attached to other objects in the system, including custom components.

These core features (maybe even leaving out private messaging) represent the bulk of the necessary features for an online community, and probably meet the 80% of requirements critical to a communities success. Not all the bells and whistles have been developed yet (microblogging, location awareness, iphone apps, lifestream imports from external services) but this is a solid framework on which you can expect a developer community to grow.

The platform inherits WordPress’s easy to use blog platform and lightweight system requirements (PHP4, MySQL), as well as its license (GPL v2) but adds significant new capabilities.

As with any 1.0 1.0.1 release, there are some caveats for the potential user.

For example, because it relies on WordPressMU and BBPress, but each has to be installed and configured separately, the whole installation process is a bit wonky, and will likely require consulting some online tutorials. Similarly, because the framework ships as a series of plugins to and themes for WordPressMU and BBPress, configuration and customization takes some getting used to. There are two different admin dashboards and multiple folders where plugins and themes might go. Some functionality is controlled via admin screens, but other changes (like determining the buttons across the navigation bar) are controlled by the theme, or by constants defined in wp-config.

BuddyPress Demo Site, showing the default theme (click for fullsize)

Also, unlike the WordPress-based-social-network imagined by the DiSO project, BuddyPress doesn’t support OpenID, Open Social, OAuth, ActivityStreams, Portable Contacts, or any of the other distributed social networking related standards currently being developed. Out of the box, BuddyPress is very much a “walled garden” community, albeit one which the site owner controls and anyone can set up. I suspect this will change as the community around BuddyPress evolves. (Though, to be clear, many WordPressMU compliant plugins will work with BuddyPress, so this will soon be rectified).

Similarly, in the current release the configuration options are sometimes limited. You can add fields to extended profiles, but the provided “prebuilt” fields are only State, Country, and Language, and the mechanism for editing the provided lists is rather clunky:

BuddyPress Editing States Prebuilt Field (Click for Full Size)

Additionally, many of the components are “enabled” or “disabled” – without all the additional control one might expect to have over their functionality:

BuddyPress Component Admin (Click for Full Size)

Finally, the theme and plugin pool is somewhat restricted. WordPressMU plugins should more-or-less work out of the box, as will themes for individual blogs – but sitewide BuddyPress themes will emerge as people get used to the framework. The theme and plugin developer community isn’t starting from scratch, and will quickly ramp up by leveraging their skills form WordPress and BBPress code bases, but it will take time for mature themes to emerge that rival some of the best WordPress themes in look and feel and functionality.

Ultimately, BuddyPress truly is a 1.0 product, in the sense that it can be used out of the box but will certainly mature and become more capable as people start developing additional components, and the user interface undoubtedly will evolve.

That said, I still believe this platform will jump directly to the shortlist for anyone looking to build a content-centric community on open source.

What does BuddyPress compete with? Drupal and Joomla!, certainly. Ning as well, though many folks who set up networks on Ning won’t have the technical chops to create a custom BuddyPress theme, and for now the configuration is a bit too hands on for that. (Perhaps Automatic will offer a hosted, simplified version of BuddyPress down the road, as it does with WordPress.com?). Movable Type Pro and Enterprise, as well – given their recent push into the social networking space. (The open source version of Movable Type, however, does not include these community features.)

To a lesser extent BuddyPress could be competitive with offerings from companies like Awareness, Jive, Telligent, Blogtronix and the like.

You can check out a live demo of BuddyPress, download it and try it out yourself (remember you’ll need to download WordPressMU and BBPress, which you should get from SVN, as well), or check out some of these sites built on BuddyPress:

• Volkswagon TDI Tank Wars
• GigaOm Pro
• Wanna Network?
• Flokka
• We Heart This
• Kodingen
• Petomundo

If you do try it out, let us know what you think in the comments.

Tags: Automattic, BBPress, Blog, BuddyPress, community, Forum, GPL, Multiuser Blog, open source, Platform, Social Network, wordpress, WordPressMU

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 18th, 2009 at 8:39 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.