BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress is not used by many community sites because it is still a brand new product.

There are other platforms and have tried a few myself. As new as the bp platform is, it is by far the quickest out of the box that enables much of what you need already (together with wpmu). However other platform might offer more fine grained control, but it comes with a hefty learning curve as the platform is simply more complex. The upside to bp’s less complex architecture makes it also easier to develop for.

I’ll see if I can give some input on your requirements.

The main feature is an easy and somewhat restrictive way to post content. The only thing girls can publish is pictures of outfits, and then tag the clothes (describe, tag, categorize…).

It looks like you need a custom content type that omits the post message. Flutter allows you to create a specific post type. I haven’t tried it with wpmu. There is also a wpmu plugin called ‘toggle_meta_boxes’ which allows you to hide unneeded post boxes to make it super easy for your users to just upload content.

We want to have some level of control here. BTW not all users can upload content.

Since you only have one subject users post on I would recommend NOT giving every user a blog at sign up, but just let them post to the main blog. Keeps you in control over categories, tags, etc. Plus it lets you control the user level. I however you do want to give users a blog there are wpmu plugins which allow you to set blog defaults like categories, predefined pages and posts and such. Also you can make new blog users have an editor role rather than an admin role if you want to control what they can or can not do.

The content published by everyone goes to the main page, same of today.

This is done by buddypress through widgets or even custom loops if you are adventurous.

No problem there.

People con vote their fabs.

I haven’t looked at this, but I imagine there would be a wp plugin which would let users vote on posts. If you can find a vote plugin that serves an RSS feed you could pull that into the bp user profile. EVen link it to the activity stream with a small custom plugin.

When user is logged in, she sees the content of the girls she is following (not pictures of everyone, just pictures of the ones that inspire the user).

In bp through making friends with other users you can follow the activity of your friends only. At the moment the activity stream is text only, afaik, but I think images in the activity stream is in the pipeline?

User profile is built by the outfits she publishes

The profile page shows the latest activity, blog posts, wire messages, etc. of the profiles user.

and the outfits she favorites.

This is the most dificult part, since I haven’t looked into it. Assuming you can find a good vote/favorite plugin it should be doable.

You can search for/discover/subscribe to trends, types of clothes, styles, colors, people…

This is where bp shines as the search is very well done. Combine it with bp_contents plugin which allows your users to tag themselve, groups, blog and add categories…your archiving possibilities are endless.

Some pitfalls (already mentioned):

Privacy controls, inappropriate content flagging (is coming in 1.1 though), it is still not an out of the box solution (however for you requirements there is none that I can think of).

There are still even other approaches when I think about it, I would recommend wp and bp in a heartbeat. Especially since the backend of both are really solid. Plugins are installed and upgraded easily. It is a widely supported and growing platform and would not hesitate to recommend it to you.

I hope this helps a little bit.

Check out the skeleton component plugin. I teaches you how to make a bp component. It has examples where it sets up two custom pages with according links, etc. That’s how I re-created the dashboard, but r-a-y’s would also work.

The skeleton component takes some time studying as it will go over much more than just setting up page templates, but it is a good learn if you are developing with bp and creating a dashboard component would be a good entry level start.

If you want all of the directories to be underneath the community page, I would do exactly the same thing you just did to make the community page, and make members/groups/blogs directory pages. I’m not sure there’s a way to contain ALL of BuddyPress within a subdirectory, considering that your users and groups and blogs are all linked off of the root of the site, and not the root of a specific blog, subdomain, or subdirectory.

That is what I would do.

But keep in mind, you’d also have to make the same changes to your BP member theme.

If you’re using the default BP member theme, that would be located here:

/wp-content/bp-themes/bpmember/header.php

I’m guessing from that statement that you don’t.

You’d probably want to make some changes in your theme’s header.php.

If you’re using the BuddyPress home theme, that file can be found here:

/wp-content/themes/bphome/header.php

The part you want to look for is:

<ul id="nav">

John could probably help you better.

Not sure why the Members link is lighting up… that should only light up when you go to domain.tld/members/.

I’m guessing you’re using the BuddyPress home theme.

Do you have a customized BP_MEMBERS_SLUG, per chance?

Goto your blog settings and assign the front page to be the page you made for home, and make the index/blog page the one you made for your blog.

In your WPMU admin area, go to “Settings > Reading”.

Select “A static page”

Then for the “Front page” that you created, select “Home”.

For your “Posts page” that you created, select “Blog”.

As enthusiastic as you are about WordPress, most of us are about BuddyPress, so without speaking for anyone else, my opinion is biased towards using BuddyPress for every website. My moms knitting website will use BuddyPress.

If you want users to be able to blog about their own stuff without moderation, then you want WordPressMU, because each user gets their own blog to talk about whatever they want; WHATEVER they want. That means even though your site is about fashion, that doesn’t stop them from talking about puppies.

If you want these users to be able to interact with each other, and have personalities, then you want BuddyPress.BP will allow your users to talk to each other privately, form groups to talk about things with each other, and comment on each others profiles.

The reasons NOT to use BuddyPress? At the moment there’s very little restrictive control over what people do. You can’t stop someone from putting profanity in their profile. You can’t block a user from messaging you or others. Also, the platform is still evolving as much as WordPress and bbPress are. That means that if you like to keep your website on the cutting edge, you’ll find it hard to install everything and leave it alone, as enhancements and improvements are coming through at least monthly, and so far upgrading isn’t a one click thing yet (almost though)

Those is my opinionses… Not sure how helpful they is, but if you like WordPress, you will probably see the potential of BuddyPress for what you want your website to be.

I’ve used this website before as an example and I hope he doesn’t mind, but check out leadpress.com as an example.

You’re not running BuddyPress in a sub directory, but actually just stopping it from taking over the root and /blog URLs, and instead using the normal WordPress way of assigning pages.

Rename home.php to community.php.

Use the Page Template method to name that page template “Community.”

In the blog admin, Make a page for your home, a page for your blog, and a page for your community, all with similar slugs.

The community page will use the “Community” page template.

Goto your blog settings and assign the front page to be the page you made for home, and make the index/blog page the one you made for your blog.

Then, you will want to install bbPress in a folder called “/community/forums/” and be sure to create a page with the slug “forums” as a sub page of “community”

That should do it?

Take a look at https://wordpress.org/showcase/ for examples of some of the best sites built on WordPress. WordPress itself is a stable and exciting for building sites and CMSs on, and the showcase which I’ve linked you to will let you browse the highlighted best.

The ‘biggest’ BuddyPress installation – other than this site – that I am aware of, is GigaOM Pro.

I’m not going to sell the idea of using BuddyPress to you but perhaps if you make a short list of the key features and ideas that are essential, and things you would like to have, we can all comment the feasibility.

Well, if you’ve already read this https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/modifying-the-buddypress-admin-bar/ and maybe this https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2283, and do not understand, unless you are prepared to further your understanding of PHP and WordPress’ API, you need to find a developer to write the code for you.

I can see that you have cross-posted this over on the WPMU forums. You have a response from andrea_r, about an hour ago (as of time of posting), which you have replied to about 40 minutes ago.

This is definitely a WPMU question as this doesn’t involve BuddyPress, so you were right posting it there, but there was no need to post it here.

Sir

Please stop posting the same message. There is one lead developer on BuddyPress who works for Automattic, and he has a roadmap full of things to work on. The current target is BuddyPress v1.0.4 (a bugfix release) and as you can see from this thread, there are lots of known bugs to resolve to get v1.0.4 out the door, let alone implementation of any new features.

If for your website there are some priority features you require which haven’t been written yet, either learn to code/code them in yourself or hire someone to develop them for you.

Of course John is correct. I failed to notice that you were running BuddyPress hence my “This is truly a question for the WPMU forums” comment.

There is a constant set in bp-core.php (line 15) that allows you to set the blog ID on which BuddyPress will run. But as the trac ticket John referenced in his post indicates, setting it to anything other than “1” will currently cause issues.

Also, this ticket applies: https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/775