BuddyPress.org

A tool based on WP code that enables and facilitates establishing an environment where people with common interests can share information ?

And extendable to one’s will, may I add…(if you know PHP, CSS, XHTML, coding and hacking of course…)

Very nice, this is a great conversation starter.

In one sentence I would describe BuddyPress as: “Social networking in a box. An easy way to start your own niche social network”.

Lots of other social network tools try to define themselves as a do-it-all platforms that can be manipulated in all manner of ways, but then they don’t work so well out of the box or without some extensive configuration. Even though BP is also highly extensible, I’ve always thought the primary focus should be providing something that the non-techies can work with without much time investment. This is pretty much the same philosophy as WordPress.

Thanks for starting the conversation, MrMaz.

I want to see BP more as a framework for social tools rather than the end-all-be-all for social networking. Like WP itself, the real power of BP is in its extensibility. (Which is what makes the conversation about the API all the more important.)

It seems to me that throughout the development of BP, there have been two directions of movement: one is to consolidate functionality (as with the recent rolling of some blog related tracking into the activity stream) and the other is to add functionality. The two aren’t inherently at odds, but they do have a tendency to fight against one another. For ease of development, solidity of platform, etc, my tendency would be to err in favor of consolidation. The discussion that was floated a few months ago about moving more kinds of content creation into the activity stream is one example of this. I’m not really 1337 enough to say what this means from the point of view of scalability, but I can say that having fewer points of input/output make third-party plugin development a lot easier.

So, I were to think of the BP toolkit as a swiss army knife, I would want BP to be the handle and maybe the big blade or two. Corkscrews, nail clippers, can openers and stuff like that are cool, but they should be options.

But will it melt our heads?

Wow ! The” what” and the “how” the same day on the same forum: the hazards of life ?

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/so-your-bp-site-is-up-now-how-to-bring-the-people-in-and-start-using-it

buddypress > Facebook

@21cdb “at the end the developers should identify what is most important … they have more knowledge and a better foresight as a common user like me.”

Yep. Agreed. And Activity stream control & manipulation — double plus good. But I wonder whether biting off bbpress at the same time would just be too much?

Buddypress is the people based framework that you integrate into projects to solve user needs that a regular content management system doesn’t address off the shelf. It’s the layer thats based on people, not posts or pages. This is what I will rely on it for – a standard way to incorporate user accounts, profiles, person to person interactions, commenting, collaboration, and all the things that have to do with people and how they connect with other people, content, tools, and the management of their identity on a site or ideally across any other buddypress enabled site – a unified people plaftorm. I see people/users as the most indivisible core element of buddypress from which everything else builds upon and attaches to.

“Social Networking in a Box”

3. Add missing core functionality that is deemed to be of a high value to the BuddyPress community and to plugin developers.

I agree with this but would not one to be locked into a specific media capabilities like pics and videos. Creating core functions that devs can plug in to yes but to not say “this is the only media capability you get, deal”.

Great thread, Mr Maz.

For my part, I am very very leery of the phrase of the moment, ‘social networking’. It’s a buzzphrase, and even when it’s used specifically and accurately, it makes me want to punch throats, a little bit, because it doesn’t mean much when you dig right into it, and to me, it evokes cheesy cheap-suited salesman making currency of faux friendship.

But I’m kinda old skool that way.

For those of us — most, probably — who’ve been working or at least dabbling in the data for decades, we’ve seen dozens of bandwagons boarded and polluted and just as quickly disembarked and abandoned when the next thing came along. The avalanche of ‘social networking gurus’ and all the rest will fade in time, too.

For me, the real thing at the highest handwavy level is ‘community’ and more specifically, community on the web. Tools and toolsets and platforms and apps and APIs and all the loosely- and tightly-coupled stuff that enables people who share some set of interests, no matter how specific or broad, to get together and interact and form communities, with all the real-world parallels but also all the special because-it’s-on-the-internet factors rolled in.

This means a couple of things, and again, talking at a much higher level than the technical here — it means that the platform itself disappears for the user after they become accustomed to it. That it’s designed in terms of interface and functionality to not only provide the features users want, even if they don’t know it, but also to be as invisible as possible as they use it.

It also means that the platform has to have a robust set of tools for the administrator and moderators of the community (because these things are necessary, to some extent, in community on the web) to use a light hand in keeping the community on an even keel.

I think web community, more perhaps for people who are not so much of the disposable, in-the-moment, ritalin-riddled, post-it-and-forget it generation, needs to have feet solidly planted in not only the ongoing ephemeral stream of conversation, but also in a more long-term, permanent ‘space’ of shared history, shared interactions that are performed in public and can be gone back to, interactions that more than any set of xprofile fields or avatars build a mutual understanding between users based on personality and past discussion. Build, in other words, community.

This last is why I keep mentioning how important I believe the forum component of Buddypress to be, and why I’ve spent the bulk of my time on my current not-yet-launched BP site for an existing community trying to beef it up (with the help of some of the excellent plugins that people have been releasing).

‘Social networking’ doesn’t excite me. Communities of people from all over the place, communities that can only exist because they are on the internet, that’s what excites me. Buddypress, to me, is a toolset for building communities on the web. It may be a distinction without a difference for many, but I think it’s an important one.

OK, enough handwaving.

To me BudyPress is more about being able to build a niche community.

You can take an existing blog/site where people comment on posts and turn it into a site where people can converse and share.

Basic functionality that is solid is a huge must. Well documented APIs to extend the basic functionality is a high priority.

I have to agree with @Peterverkooijen that BuddyPress doesn’t need to be everything. In fact, I sort of wish BuddyPress didn’t advertise itself as “social networking in a box” because it attracts a lot of people looking for the quick and easy way to make their “millions” a la-Facebook.

@stwc: “social networking” is a buzzword but like all buzzwords, they have a fundamental definition. “Social networking” means community to me.