I will follow all of your terrific suggestions and advice. One follow-up that might take this conversation on a different course: The ultimate goal is to service our patrons *at* the conference, so this community site will really function as a mobile app (integrated with a WP plugin that will create schedules and speaker bios). Are there specific solutions for mobile-enabling BP communities, apart from the myriad of mobile themes that WP offers?
Many, many thanks, Asynaptic. It helped tremendously to clear up my misconception that BP messaging used the standard blog posting engine. Knowing that those two are separate makes it much easier to get my head around all of this.
I do not need any sort of membership for the main part of our site so I do not need tiers of membership. Furthermore, we don’t mind if casual visitors to the site want to join the community; that just becomes good advertising for the conference. So we do not need to limit or segment membership; anyone can join.
I think that should make life easier for me, no? Does it also argue for one particular plug-in over another?
Thank you, Asynaptic — I’m sure you are right that my lack of knowledge and experience prevent me from speaking intelligibly about this. That is why I have been willing to buy an hour of time from a BP expert; I just couldn’t find one!
I want those who join the community to be able to send messages to one another, and I want to be able to send messages out to the entire community. I want this to go on without disrupting our normal posting of articles using standard WP posting procedures.
That is as clear as I am able to state it, given that I have yet to log even the first hour of time with BP. I’m still trying to get off the dime!
I’m still hoping to gain some insight into this dilemma I have here, as I am in a holding pattern until I resolve how to move forward. So anyone who can help me better understand this, I’d be grateful for hearing from them.
As the original poster, I would like to return to this discussion, as I am having a difficult time getting started. I’m not sure if the capability I seek is native to BP and I’m just not figuring out how to get results, or if I need plugins and haven’t found the right ones. Let’s take these one at a time:
Q: How might I create a schedule of seminars with the following components:
– Column layout to show three-across seminars for concurrent tracks
– Title, description, link to speaker bio
– Ability to favorite specific sessions and create a personal calendar.
I would want attendees of our conference to be able to do the following:
– Browse a schedule of seminars
– See bios of speakers
– Access files uploaded by speakers
– See a directory of other attendees
– Communicate with them, by direct message and some sort of group post
– Post to the conference’s FB page
– Send tweets with our hashtag autopopulated
