BuddyPress.org

I’ve been at this for 2+ years now, doing a social niche site. Started back in August of 2007. I had always wanted to create a niche community site, but didn’t know where to go. I found WPMU first and started my community on it. WPMU alone was a great platform. I plugged and patched and mangled together to the best of my ability a “community” site. When I look back on my beginnings and site launch, it wasn’t pretty, but mostly functional. I had friends, mail, blogs, blah blah blah… I had heard about buddypress when it barely had a site, but it was never really polished enough. I think it was recommended to me by andrea over in the WPMU forums. It wasn’t polished enough at the time in it’s infancy, so I looked at Elgg and just didn’t like it either. Even the install process was clunky so I stayed the course with WPMU. I remember the second time I came upon buddypress and was like WOW, this is everything I was looking for. I couldn’t wait until launch day of 1.0.

With as little coding skills as I have (you would laugh if you saw my component code), I have been able to manage and run a VPS with buddypress for almost a year now. I love how buddypress started, the members, and Andy (in a non gay way, lol). I’m trying to slowly build my community (around 140 active) and then really expand away from the default look of buddypress, which I actually happen to love.

So, is it a good enough for a professional grade community? I would say Y-E-S!

Take a look at how fast testbp.org is with 12,229 “active” members. A lot of activity on that site and it’s still cooking!