moderators: I am unable to respond – I’ve tried several times. There is an error which doesn’t allow my posts to show.
@synaptic i’ve noticed that sometimes there is a lag with forum posts showing up.
@richardicanie buddypress is designed to be fully integrated with your primary wordpress installation. If you are using multisite then you would network activate buddypress. Be advised that although the various sub sites are part of the buddypress integration for the most part their activity shows up only on the primary site of your network (widgets and possibly themes can still access and display the network wide bp activity).
@richardicanie BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress. Hence, you need WordPress installed in order to install BuddyPress. For the forums, you install bbPress plugin in WordPress installation. You may install BuddyPress as well, but it is not necessary if you only want forums in your WP install.
If you already have a large membership in your WordPress site, then I suggest that you upgrade to at least VPS or better yet a dedicated server before activating BuddyPress.
Guys, thanks you for your responses – very helpful!
See i have a very active web site built in WP (well i will – its just being built). The Community/Forum elements (with BuddyPress and BBPress) will be an integral part of it also. When i done a few test’s on activating BuddyPress and BBPress, i found that this doubled the site queries which i’m just monitoring very closely as i’m trying to keep everything as efficient as possible. The site will be on a dedicated server with the database on a separate dedicated database server so i think we should be OK if we keep queries down as small as possible.
Sorry @synaptic, i was aware that BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress, it was more the approach i was questioning – ie when you’re starting off with a site, do you think that the site is going to be a community site everything focused on BuddyPress or is safe to say that you could have a large active non community site and simply append a community with BuddyPress as secondary and have the site still run efficiently. I see in some sites that the community element is on a separate sub domain site – for example see http://www.babycentre.co.uk – they community element of this is on a separate install (possibly WP multi site?) at http://community.babycentre.co.uk/. I’m sort of wondering is there any reason why they do this? Is it because its physically easier to manage? Is it because the load of a community may affect the normal running of the website? I’m just wondering what the general convention is?
If the convention is to separate say – then why would it make sense to have a multi site install as the community BuddyPress tables are still in the same database? You get waht i mean? Actually why use multi site at all? (http://www.onextrapixel.com/2011/06/06/how-to-integrate-buddypress-with-wordpress-multi-site-seamlessly/)
Thanks for all your help everyone! Appreciate it!
Just one last question here. If you did install multi site and network activated BuddyPress then on your first child site community.site.com has all the buddypress activity – would a user signing up on the community be a user on the parent site?
as far as why other sites are doing things the way they are we are making a bunch of assumptions right off the bat but from outside appearances the site you mentioned does not appear to be using buddypress. often times the forum/community software is a different platform from wordpress this is not the case with buddypress, that might explain why some other site would be compartmentalizing their community sections.
the only reason to use multisite is to create totally separate blogs/sites under one network setting. if you do not want to create (or let your users create) other sub-sites then chances you want to go multi are not great. You can also switch to that later if you choose (i had buddypress on a site for over two years before i took it multi).
once you go multi, new users are actually added to the network first they may then be added to a particular site either when you as either super admin or one of your sub-site admins manually adds them to a site or automatically based on activity i believe, that part still baffles me a bit honestly.
@richardicanie your response sounds like you got my original message but I can’t see it on this thread (the forum here stopped it from being published and gave me an error when I tried to resubmit it).
anyway, about the site you mention: http://community.babycentre.co.uk/
it doesn’t look like they are using wordpress at all. my guess after looking at the source code is that it is drupal
in the future you can also check with builtwith.com
@synaptic I can see your post for what that’s worth also thanks for the link neat tool!
ah, ok so the plot thickens! now why can’t I see my own post then? very strange! I’ve also tried logging out and viewing the thread as well as viewing with another browser with no history of buddypress.com/support
Brilliant answer! Thank you very much for the help!
