BuddyPress.org

We just began using BuddyPress for a K-12 District in Dearborn, Michigan. As a pilot, Dearborn public schools began using BuddyPress as a student ePortfolio/journal network about three weeks ago.

Our student blogging world is quickly growing – particularly at the high school and middle school level where several teachers were clamoring for a controlled and safe environment for students to blog. Keeping the blog world safe was easy to solve.

We used several plugins to in-effect create an environment where students and staff need to log in in order to participate or view any of the content generated in our blog world. With this same plugin we are also able to allow certain blogs to be “public” and both students and teachers can publish posts to a blog that can be read by all. This feature is useful when the teacher wants to have a classroom website where all parties can participate in sharing and building knowledge. Of course, the teacher is ultimately the one who approves the postings of students before they go “live” much like approving comments.

The response from students has overall been very positive. They enjoy having the freedom to create blogs on their own as well as take ownership of the learning process as they write and reflect on classroom topics. BuddyPress gives students the look and feel of other web tools they use outside of school so they feel at home using it.

As a reference, here are the main plugins that we used:

• WPMU LDAP for authentication (We have over 18,000 students and several thousand staff members who all have access)
• Site-wide Privacy Settings
• Community Blogs for BuddyPress
• Content Monitoring (Finds keywords and alerts site admin of bad content from blogs)

This post was written by Chris Kenniburg, a member of the BuddyPress developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress blog, please log in and head to the “Write Post” link in the menu bar.

When my wife became pregnant, as a first time dad I was over the moon. At that point, your life sort of changes. You start to read baby books and leaflets, meet health advisers and hospital staff. You’re plunged into a world of baby care, lactation, compromise and change. It can be quite daunting at first. I would say it’s quite common to feel a little out of your depth. You certainly start wanting answers to questions that doctors and midwives can’t answer like – can I really be a dad? I can’t even look after myself! Or, how will my life change when the baby is born?

After weeks of contemplation (possibly confusion to some degree), I read a book – a baby diary. What a revelation! The raw truths of mother and fatherhood were reassuring. Many of my questions were answered in that book, the rest were answered by speaking to other mums and dads, reassuring me that these questions I had were normal. It was a weight lifted from my shoulders.

So, what has me becoming a dad got to do with BuddyPress? Well, about 3 months into the pregnancy, after reading this baby diary I had an idea. I was so reassured by the raw truths of parenting that I thought, why not build a web site that lets mums and dads create their own pregnancy diary or baby diaries and chat with each other? Not only will it allow parents to remember and read back on the unforgettable special moments, it will also serve as a really useful tool to reassure others on the quirks of parenting like I was reassured by the book i read.

As I started on my quest to build such a site I already knew I was going to use WordPress MU. I’ve used it a lot in the past (and practically daily for my job) nothing else comes close. Shortly after setting up the foundations of my site I came across BuddyPress. Initially I was looking for a messaging / chat plugin for WPMU when I stumbled on this wonderful social networking plugin suite. I took one look at the site which was running an early incarnation of BuddyPress and I was hooked – and quite frankly taken aback by what it could offer.

In fact, BuddyPress opened up a whole host of opportunity for my conquest for an online community for parents. It is feature rich, built on an already excellent WP platform and supported, built and maintained by people like me and you. Who wants software supported by the hardcore of coders who speak to you in pseudo bable?

The customization of BuddyPress didn’t stop at the first glance. As soon as I installed it I managed to customize the language to suit my needs, branding my site as a diary site and not a blogging site. I created and plugged in a parent based theme and concentrated heavily on usability.

The administration of BuddyPress also allowed me to completely customize the member profile pages. Not long after the first few releases in alpha and beta, I had forums integrated into groups for my network. Honestly, I could be here all day singing its praises. It opened my eyes and allowed me to take my idea that extra step, a fully fledged social networking platform that’s actually easy to use.

In fact the BP guys have included most of the important features any good social network should have and it’s only a beta! Social networking is the future, it’s even taking over email for some people here in the UK. BuddyPress 1.0 looks to solidify those excellent features with yet more in the pipeline.

I’m very happy with the results, I’m giving something back to the parent community now. Even though it is early days, I’ve already had very positive feedback. I’ve even had the local paper contact us and we have an article going in next week!

Parent Diary.co.uk – with special thanks to BP and WPMU.

This post was written by Ben (oldskoo1), a member of the BuddyPress developer community. If you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress blog, please log in and head to the “Write Post” link in the menu bar.

If you’re reading this post in a feed reader, it’s time to head on over to BuddyPress.org and take a look at our shiny new look.

This site has been built from the ground up using WordPress and BuddyPress and now also acts as a complete developer network.

We’ve got a new plugin repository, theme browser, developer landing page, not to mention developer groups, integrated forums and developer profiles.

One thing you’ll notice as you begin to use the new site is the deep integration of all features. If you log in once, you’re logged into everything – the forums, developer network, codex and site blog.

Your activity stream will also track everything you do here, and that includes forum posts, trac tickets, blog comments and codex changes. We’re tracking your every move!

The final release of BuddyPress is very close. We’re currently looking forward to the release of WordPress MU 2.7.1. After that you’ll see some changes to adapt BuddyPress to the new plugin update functionality and then 1.0 release.

Happy BuddyPress-ing.

There are a couple of announcements to make that will effect both the BuddyPress project, and the WordPress MU project.

Over 300 commits and almost 200 bugs have been reported, confirmed and fixed since beta one versions of the BuddyPress plugins were released on December 15, 2008. Tomorrow the final versions are due, however instead of the final, release candidate versions of all plugins will be made available for download.

We don’t expect there to be any major changes between these release candidates and the final versions. We’re holding off on releasing the final versions for one specific reason, which brings me to the second announcement.

As it stands, site-wide plugin support in WordPress MU is fairly limited. You cannot activate or deactivate plugins, nor can you hook into the new automatic upgrade features introduced in version 2.7.

Over the next few weeks there will be work done to add integrated support for site-wide plugins in WordPress MU. Site-wide plugin support will provide the ability for plugins to be activated and deactivated site-wide via the administration panel. More importantly however, they will be able hook into the automatic upgrade features.

Once this feature is in place you will be able to download, install and update BuddyPress through your WordPress MU site administration panel. Having the ability to do this will greatly reduce the inconvenience of point release upgrades, which are an inevitable part of new product releases.

Tomorrow the download links for the release candidate will be posted on the downloads page. We’ll be putting the final version out as soon as site-wide plugin support in WordPress MU is completed.

Update: The download links for RC-1 are now live.

1.0b2 versions of all components and themes are now available for download.

This release fixes hundreds of bugs found since beta 1, the vast majority found and reported by you, the community. Thank you for all the feedback, bug reports and patches so far.

We’re not quite done yet, please test this second beta as much as possible. Bugs should be reported on the BuddyPress Trac server, but you can also discuss potential issues with other users on the BuddyPress forums.

We’re three days later than expected with this beta. WordPress MU 2.7 was released yesterday, it made much more sense to sync up the release schedules to ensure there were no compatibility problems. The 1.0 release will now be February 12th, exactly two weeks from today.

To avoid any unforeseen incompatibilities as WordPress MU ramps up to version 2.7, the second beta of the BuddyPress components will be delayed until WPMU 2.7 goes final.

The final 1.0 release of the BuddyPress components will also be offset by this amount of time.

I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Year break.

Looking at the community involvement with beta one, many of you must have decided to skip the turkey and give BuddyPress a whirl! We’ve seen more than 8,000 zip downloads, a fantastic number for such a new project. This has translated into some excellent feedback and quality bug reporting. Thank you to everyone who has given their time to provide bug reports and feedback so far.

Now that there has been time to assess the quantity and severity of bugs coming in, it’s possible to set some dates.

There will be a second beta release available on January 26th, and the final 1.0 version of all component plugins and themes on February 9th.

As always, you can track all known bugs via the BuddyPress trac site. If you’re interested in helping out with bug fixing, there is a useful thread you can read on the BuddyPress forums.

If you’d like to keep up with the latest fixes as they are made, please use the trunk version of BuddyPress via Subversion.

The first beta release of completed BuddyPress components and themes is now available via the download page.

Each component and theme in this beta stage is feature complete for its 1.0 version. The purpose of the beta is to weed out any bugs not found in the pre-release stage and ramp up the plugins to production quality.

If you install BuddyPress and give it a test run, we’d really appreciate your feedback and bug reports in trac. You can also find a list of known bugs.

Thank you to everyone who has helped make this first beta a reality. It’s been ten months of hard work to get to this stage. We’re almost there, there’s only a little bit further to go.

Some updates on the release status of BuddyPress:

– The target is to release beta versions of all the available plugins on Dec 15.

– From then, there will be a feature freeze and there will be a period of bug fixing to stabilize the plugins ready for a 1.0 release.

– Each component will be released as an individual 1.0. There will be no ”BuddyPress 1.0”. BuddyPress is a collection of official component plugins, each adding a new feature with its own roadmap. However, there will always be a zip file available with the current versions of official component plugins to download in one package.

– As soon as all major issues have been resolved, 1.0 versions of each official component plugin will be released. As it’s around Christmas time (most people will be too busy eating turkey to test) I’m not attaching a final date. Each component will be released ASAP after its beta one by one, when ready. By doing this you won’t have to wait for all components to reach release quality before any are made available.

– The photo gallery and status update components will not be available along with the first release of available official components. These will be a priority after the first release and can be added to any installation at a later date. There just wasn’t enough time to fit these in.

So what’s left to do before Dec 15?

– Filtering of friends and groups lists to show ”Recently Active Friends”, ”Recently Added Friends” etc. In groups ”Groups I’ve Created”, ”Groups Recently Updated”, ”Groups Recently Joined”, etc.

– Finish the members directory as well as adding blog and group directories, accessible via ”domain.com/groups/”, ”domain.com/members/”. ”domain.com/blogs/”.

– bbPress forums for groups.

– Private messaging autocomplete on friend names.

– RSS Feeds for activity streams.

Not long to go now, thank you all for helping to test and your contributions. I’m really excited to see what people will do with release quality components. Rock on!