BuddyPress.org

I thought it would be most useful for the BP community if I posted a link to our new site – then answer any questions and post tutorials and code snippets as the need arises.

The site – http://skiddnet.com – is an automotive social community that is designed to support our other automotive properties – SkiddMark (editorial/magazines) and SkiddPlayer (the largest branded content platform for automotive videos). You can find links to these sites in the footer.

I built SkiddNet originall on Webligo’s social engine 3 platform (using Smarty templates & PHP), then redeveloped it on social engine 4 (Zend PHP). Unlike Buddypress, social engine is a paid product and most of the add-ons and plugins are also paid with a huge amount of nulled software that makes it a minefield if you try looking for code snippets. There’s very little documentation and little sharing between developers and therefore coding standards are highly variable.

So here we have the site now redeveloped on Buddypress.

The basic premise of SkiddNet is to foster the creation of quality editorial content, so we are using Paul’s achievement plugin to reward this behavior.

The site adopts a multisite configuration based on the bpdefault theme, but using a bespoke theme for user blogs. Both themes use the wootumblog plugin to create posts using the wordpress post taxonomies (aside, video, image, quote etc..) and posts are aggregated across the network into the main site using WPMU sitewide tags plugin. This is the part that I’m least happy about – it’s still pretty clunky and I’m still working on debugging it.

I also use a series of custom functions to grap images from posts and display on index pages (although there are a few bugs that I’m still fixing on this too).

All of the design and features are contained in a child-theme of bpdefault, so it upgrades effortlessley (the recent upgrade to BP1.29 went smoothly). I have also redesigned the WP admin with changes made to menu items, dashboard widgets, login page and the header and footer.

I have also developed our own BP admin bar – which is now fixed at the bottom of the screen.

You’re welcome to take a look around and then pick my brains on how particular features were created – I’ll try and answer as many questions as I can and share any custom code.

We’re in the snagging phase ironing out the remaining bugs, so if you spot something and can suggest a fix I’d be most grateful to hear from you.

Thanks