[lordsnake]

Hi Chaps,

got a new community rebuild on the go and am feeling quite enamoured with wordpress so far so thought I would try buddypress instead of Dolphin which I was originally planning on using. I am however having trouble finding out if all the plugins I need exist as am not getting and results when searching and others I am findng lots of results and not sure which to choose. If I give a list hopefully you guys can point me in the right direction. I realise some of these things may be wordpress plugins rather than wordpress plugins or that I may need to get some customisation done.

1. Forums – I have found the forum plugins, but wonder how they compare to the popular standalone forums like SMF or PHPBB.
2. Tutorials – This one I am having trouble with. The site is for developers and want a section where they can write tutorials or do video tutorials, and these can be voted on by other users so I can have a top 20 or whatever.
3. job board – a section where employers can post jobs and members can post their CV/availability
4. community store – where users can sell their applications through the site. I am pretty open as to how this one would work, either the site handles everything or I just host the descriptions and a link off to paypal buy now or something similar.
5. integration with services like facebook, twitter linkedin etc

[Roger Coathup]

@lordsnake

Some thoughts:

1. Forums – WordPress are developing a new approach to forums, releasing bbPress as a plugin. A beta is due mid September, with a key BuddyPress developer leading the initiative. Have a Google / Bing and check that one out

2. Tutorials – I suggest creating these in a sub-blog dedicated to tutorials (each tutorial is a separate post in the blog – video / image uploading is then no problem). Maybe use a forms plugin (e.g. gravity) if you want front end posting. There should a standard WP plugin that allows post ratings

3. Job Board – these is a plugin out there from @travel-junkie : https://buddypress.org/community/groups/third-party-components-plugins/forum/topic/introducing-jobboardr/

4. Community Store – check out some of the WP extensions for e-commerce. Shopp and WP-commerce seem to be the main contenders

5. There is a facebook connect plugin (have a search in these forums) and @modemlooper is doing some work with twitter. It depends whether you are talking about connecting accounts (e.g. facebook connect), or simply sharing activity on social sites (facebook like, tweet this, etc.). There are loads of plugins / code snippets you can install for sharing (check out shareThis and their snippets for WordPress)

Cheers, Roger

[lordsnake]

thanks Roger.

[justbishop]

a thought on the application shop…I’ve experimented lately with hardcoding a pay pal bin button into single.php, and setting up custom fields for the unique info that it needs. that way, you could just use normal posts for the purchasable items. to make things super easy on the sellers, just use the custom field template plugin to give them a very descriptive place to enter the bin button info needed.

for the record, the only reason this method won’t work for my purposes is that I need some sort of inventory control. I don’t see why it couldn’t work for something like software, though.

[modemlooper]

I’d use post types instead of using custom fields for using as a shop. Custom fields was the old way but now that post types are available it’s better to use those. You can create admin panels that are user friendly.

I’m creating a theme for ‘eshops’ that use post types. Basically a BuddyPress version of etsy.

[Roger Coathup]

As @justbishop touched on, posts with Paypal buttons are fine for occasional sales, but don’t cope with all the reporting, inventory control, complex pricing & delivery rules, tax calculations, configurable products, etc … That you might expect an ecommerce extension to handle for you.

An etsy type site might well work though with custom post types – depending on the reporting needs of the site owner. @modemlooper – we should maybe touch base on this one, as one of our current client projects has some etsy on BP characteristics

[lordsnake]

OK so WPMU is not built into wordpress 3.0 so I guess I don;t need anything extra to host multiple blog, but how do I go about allow registered members to actually create their own blog ?

[intimez]

@lordsnake It’s now called multisite. Start with this: https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

[lordsnake]

not = now

[lordsnake]

I have been playing with the mU and buddypress and so far so good.
However with MU it seems I can only allow registration with blog creation or registrations only. Now I know from previous experience that I am am going to get bogus registrations so I don’t really want to allow blogs to created at registration time, as this will waste system resources if a blog gets created by the bots.
Is is possible to have it so that the registered user has to then login to create his blog if he wants one ?

[Hugo Ashmore]

MU = MS now!

and yes simply prevent the script from parsing and returning the fieldset section that contains the blog signup option. I do it on a site – blog creation appears to be especially targeted – and users have no problem understanding and dealing with signing up for an account and then later when logged in creating their blog if they wish one.