Topic: Minimal, less "social" BuddyPress?

Minimal, less "social" BuddyPress?

@riddle

Participant

15 years, 2 months ago

I need to build a site which features user-maintainable profiles for a professional network. A bit of research on my users suggests that they are turned off by “social networking” features – friends, status updates, etc. It is also not clear at this time that they need blogs, forums or groups.

Fortunately, BuddyPress will let me disable all the components except “Extended Profiles.” Has anyone else done this? Is BuddyPress a usable system with most of its features turned off? Any gotchas?

I’ve done a simple test that looks pretty good except that the “BuddyPress Default Home Theme” displays odd gaps when the only visible features are user profiles and the user directory. Any thoughts on another theme that would be more usable with a minimal feature set, or what I’d want to hack in the default theme?

Thanks.

(P.S. As an alternative to BuddyPress my other thought had been to simply use a plugin that extends user profiles in conventional WordPress. Oddly enough I haven’t found a single one that’s current.)

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

@r-a-y

Keymaster

15 years, 2 months ago

I believe GigaOM is using only extended profiles for BP:

http://pro.gigaom.com/

They’re probably haven’t upgraded to BP 1.1, since it’s a highly-customized WPMU/BP site.

—

There’s probably no “gotchas” since you’re turning everything off!

Alkivia is an alternative for user profiles:

wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alkivia/

@djpaul

Keymaster

15 years, 2 months ago

Extended profiles looks like it should be disabled.

BuddyPress will let me disable all the components except "Extended Profiles."

In the politest way possible, why use BuddyPress if you want to disable all of the components? What features are you looking for?

@designodyssey

Participant

15 years, 2 months ago

I won’t be using all the components, but I expect my design to be complex like Gigaom and Tastykitchen. I actually found BP looking for a suitable extended profile plugin to no avail. Alkivia is close, but some features have been “under development” for quite awhile in WordPress time.

I will have a single blog setup so no extra blogs and I’m trying to keep the use of “wires” to a minimum as it can get out of hand quickly.

@jazgold

Participant

15 years, 2 months ago

yeah, it seems strange to turn everything off.

but i too have some things i didn’t want to appear in the interface for users – sometimes disabling leaves the button but returns a “you can’t create a new blog” message (for example).

and it’s definitely not a bulletproof solution, but what i’m doing is just hiding those buttons, forms, etc. via CSS, or removing post-load with jquery calls. it’s true that with any developer plugins, they could turn off javascript or tweak the css, but that doesn’t bother me. if they find a way to get in there and post content that no one can see, sure it’ll get added to the database… but it’s kind of like the tree that fell in the forest that no one was there to hear. other things like the toolbar at the top you can remove via plugins.

@takeo

Participant

15 years, 2 months ago

Yeah… it’s kind of like “I’ll have a bacon cheeseburger please. Hold the cheese and bacon”. LOL. Surely there must be a simpler way just to extend user profiles than installing BuddyPress and then disabling 95% of it?

@jazgold

Participant

15 years, 2 months ago

just buy a bag of buns

there are quite a few wordpress plugins for extending user profiles…

i once used cimy extra user fields for a project, and it worked fine for my purposes. it looks like there are a bunch of options nowadays.

@johnjamesjacoby

Keymaster

15 years, 2 months ago

Using BuddyPress will ensure constant, future-proof development. I think using it instead of a random authors plugin is probably the best thing to do.

You’re still going to need to adapt to WordPress being a slave to BuddyPress for all of the ways that BP hooks into and filters things like themes.

BP assumes that you’re going to use most of its components, and if you turn them off it’s kind of up to you as the site author/admin to adjust accordingly.