I figured that it would be the best place to ask prior to going down the rabbit hole with the BuddyPress documentation and website. It’s been labeled as rather archaic, cryptic, and unreadable by many people that I asked for advice. I contribute to several other open source projects and might jump in on your docs/forum if the platform seems like something that will be handy for me in the future.
As for the project being a copy, it’s really just identical in feature sets but not a literal copy of the site. Design is very different and it’s not dog sitters that are members. This site is for parents and babysitters which is highly similar to dogvacay.com in feature set. Yep, their site is built in Java. ::vomits a little::
The key features that need to be included:
– two member types (parents and babysitters)
– they should be able to message each other privately
– parents can schedule a date for the sitting to happen
– parents can browse babysitters
– custom profiles for each with different sets of information (based on a conditional of type)
It appears that I was able to answer my own question over the past few days by utilizing the codex and going through all of the code. BuddyPress looks to be the best option for handling all of this unless I was to custom code a plugin (I am actually a PHP developer NOT a wordpress dev). I was looking at utilizing BuddyPress for cutting down time by using the friend associations and messaging system.
BP might be a little much for this project but I can see value in several features that they might want in the future.
I apologize for posting this in err to this forum if it’s not really a good place for asking whether it’s a good platform for such a situation. All of the documentation/about is written in a fashion that presents it as useful in only one way. It made it rather difficult to decipher how I could rip the plugin apart to do what I need instead of using it as “out-of-the-box.”
Might there be some advance blogs out there where people have written about different ways to use the plugin? Just so that I can dig into the community a little more.
I apologize, thought that I had removed the other post. Was trying to change it to a more appropriate area in the forum. Can’t wait to hear some feedback from the community.
