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Avatar of John James Jacoby

by John James Jacoby

Vote for BuddyPress!

October 7, 2010 in News

The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects.

Now in its fifth year, the Award (formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award) is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward not only CMSes but a wider range of Open Source projects.

This year BuddyPress has the honor of being a finalist in the “Most Promising Open Source Project” category, which is for all Open Source projects that made their debut within the past 2 years. We’re up against some stiff competition with LiveStreet CMS, Pimcore, Tomato CMS, and WolfCMS, so we’re asking for your support!

I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want or care about the $2,500 prize for winning our category. Andy would really like a sweet 3D-TV, and I could use a posh new living room set myself, but we decided donating the proceeds to the WordPress Foundation was probably the best way to use any cash winnings. :)

To help make voting worth your while, PacktPub is giving away free Amazon Kindles to random voters and nominees. If showing your BuddyPress pride isn’t enough, do it for the opportunity to score a free Kindle!

So click the banner below and be whisked away to Packt Pubs voting page, where you can [help Andy enjoy Jurassic Park like it was meant to be enjoyed] [help John take epic naps on a new comfy couch] help support BuddyPress and maybe win yourself a Kindle!

Vote for your favourite Most Promising Open Source Project now!

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Avatar of Paul Gibbs

by Paul Gibbs

BuddyPress Support; introducing Boone and hnla

July 10, 2010 in Community

We’re proud to announce that Boone Gorges and hnla have joined the BuddyPress Support team. Their knowledge of BuddyPress, site deployment, theme design and plugin development complements the existing team and will expand the range of topics we are able to help you with.

Our support team, which also consists of Jeff Sayre, Paul Gibbs and Ray, frequently traffic the forums, help resolve problems, and share their advice and best practices. We’re all you’ve got, and we’re not so bad after we’ve had our coffee.

As a general reminder, if you have a support question please try to provide the information detailed in this post; it really does help us help you.

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Avatar of Andy Peatling

by Andy Peatling

Book: BuddyPress For Dummies

March 23, 2010 in Community, News

BuddyPress For DummiesLast month saw the release of the very first BuddyPress book – “BuddyPress For Dummies“. The book was written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson who is a very active contributor within the BuddyPress community. She worked tirelessly to keep up with the rapid pace of development and the book is all the better for it. It’s a fantastic introduction to the world of BuddyPress, what you can do with it, and how you can customize it to suit your needs.

If you’re interested in discovering exactly what the book has to offer, you can download a sample chapter (pdf link), or take a look inside via Amazon.com.

BuddyPress For Dummies is currently on promotion at Barnes & Noble through April 30, or you can always grab a copy at Amazon.com.

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Avatar of Andy Peatling

by Andy Peatling

Why Your BuddyPress Themes Are Future Proof

April 20, 2009 in News

In the very early releases of BuddyPress, most actions that involved entering information were done in the WordPress admin area. With blogging this works really well, you want to focus on writing and there is no need for you to be dazzled by jazzy graphics during that process. With social networking the story is a bit different. You don’t want to have to jump into the WordPress admin area to update your profile or check your messages, then head back to the themed front-facing site to continue browsing the network. All this does is break continuity, and provides a fairly scattered and clumsy user experience.

To alleviate this problem, BuddyPress themes contain template files and functions for displaying and updating information. By doing this, the user never has to jump between two different worlds and they can happily browse through a consistent interface regardless of their task.

By moving this functionality into the theme, we have something new to consider – new feature support and backwards compatibility. In WordPress new features are normally handled within the administration area. This means existing blog themes will usually always work with new WordPress versions, and only occasionally need some new template functions added.

New functionality in BuddyPress will almost always be enabled through theme upgrades. However, our policy will be that existing themes will not break and backwards compatibility will always be assured. As a theme designer it is up to you to decide which BuddyPress features you want to provide support for, and whether you want to support new features introduced in future BuddyPress versions.

With each major BuddyPress version, template functions will be added to provide access to new functionality. With each release we’ll also provide a “template cheat-sheet”, this will show theme designers how to use the new template functions and introduce new features in their themes.

As well as the cheat-sheet, designers can also take a look at the default BuddyPress themes (bundled with every installation) and the skeleton theme that provides a clean base to start from. These themes will always stay up to date with the latest feature set.

If you have any specific questions about theming, please ask them in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer.

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