BuddyPress.org

@lordsnake

Some thoughts:

1. Forums – WordPress are developing a new approach to forums, releasing bbPress as a plugin. A beta is due mid September, with a key BuddyPress developer leading the initiative. Have a Google / Bing and check that one out

2. Tutorials – I suggest creating these in a sub-blog dedicated to tutorials (each tutorial is a separate post in the blog – video / image uploading is then no problem). Maybe use a forms plugin (e.g. gravity) if you want front end posting. There should a standard WP plugin that allows post ratings

3. Job Board – these is a plugin out there from @travel-junkie : https://buddypress.org/community/groups/third-party-components-plugins/forum/topic/introducing-jobboardr/

4. Community Store – check out some of the WP extensions for e-commerce. Shopp and WP-commerce seem to be the main contenders

5. There is a facebook connect plugin (have a search in these forums) and @modemlooper is doing some work with twitter. It depends whether you are talking about connecting accounts (e.g. facebook connect), or simply sharing activity on social sites (facebook like, tweet this, etc.). There are loads of plugins / code snippets you can install for sharing (check out shareThis and their snippets for WordPress)

Cheers, Roger

a thought on the application shop…I’ve experimented lately with hardcoding a pay pal bin button into single.php, and setting up custom fields for the unique info that it needs. that way, you could just use normal posts for the purchasable items. to make things super easy on the sellers, just use the custom field template plugin to give them a very descriptive place to enter the bin button info needed.

for the record, the only reason this method won’t work for my purposes is that I need some sort of inventory control. I don’t see why it couldn’t work for something like software, though.

As @justbishop touched on, posts with Paypal buttons are fine for occasional sales, but don’t cope with all the reporting, inventory control, complex pricing & delivery rules, tax calculations, configurable products, etc … That you might expect an ecommerce extension to handle for you.

An etsy type site might well work though with custom post types – depending on the reporting needs of the site owner. @modemlooper – we should maybe touch base on this one, as one of our current client projects has some etsy on BP characteristics

@lordsnake It’s now called multisite. Start with this: https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network