[Icethrill]

I got this client that wants this functionality for a member:

* Each member should have their own private blog ONLY them can access, kinda like a diary.
* Each member should have their own “Notes” blog, which is also gonna be private for that member only
* Each member should have their own “Link-list” page
* A forum where all members can ask questions and get answers from experts. All members can also answer a topic. You should also be able to follow specific topics of your choosing.
* The blogs need to have front end posting, no WP back end posting for members. This is a requirement!

Thats the kind of community a client of mine wants. I thought of BP as a possible solution for this. Since I have never developed for BP before, I have been using WP for over 1.5 year now. So I am very familiar with WP coding. Do you guys think I would have to develop custom solutions/my own plugins for BP to get the functionality I need? Or use much of the plugins that exist to help me achieve this? Am I choosing the right plattform for this project? Would it be much hassle to achieve this with BP + WP multi site?

[Boone Gorges]

Sounds to me like most of your requirements could be met with WP Multisite plus a few selected plugins and themes.
– P2 allows for front-end posting
– https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/more-privacy-options/ expands WP’s default privacy options to allow blog admins to hide their blogs from everyone but themselves
– Forums could be accomplished with bbPress or a forum-specific WP plugin

Depending on what you need out of “blogs”, you might also be able to repurpose BuddyPress groups to do something similar. For instance:
– Each member is the sole member of a private/hidden group, and uses BP activity to “blog”. Since this happens through BP, there is no WP Dashboard involved.
– Likewise with Notes
– Depending on what you want with “Link List”, that can be pretty easily done with an additional profile field.
– Forums would of course be built in, in the form of non-private groups that the user could join.

How to decide? If you don’t need the rich functionality of blogs (post revision history, out of the box multimedia support, etc), then actually giving each user two WP blogs might be too much overhead. In that case, BP would be a good choice. The functionality that you’d need is all already there; your work would be limited to customizing and configuring the interface.

[Icethrill]

Thanks for the answer. Will think about the right way to go from here.