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WP and BuddyPress(WPMU)

  • Inactive

    15 years, 7 months ago

    My friend and I run a local community website for our city and would love to add BuddyPress functionality for our readers. The first snag we’ll come across is that we’re using WordPress 2.7 (not MU) so we’re left with two choices: 1) Switch to WPMU/BP or 2) Install WPMU/BP in a subdirectory.

    My first question is this: Am I right about our two choices above?

    My second question is: Does anyone have a suggestion as to which route we should take? My concerns with switching completely to WPMU are: We have over 1000 posts, a dozen authors, thousands of comments, a few dozen pages and some advertisers that are very used to things being the way they currently are in terms of our theme, layout, etc. I’m also slightly concerned about the many plugins we have and whether or not things would smoothly translate. Plus, it seems like a TON of work to switch to a brand new install since our site has been around a while and has a lot of content.

    The only drawback we have with installing WPMU/BP in a subdirectory is that we’d lose the ability to pull in BP features onto the homepage of our current site such as recent blog activity, avatars, etc. Is that correct or is there some way for the two to communicate even if on separate installs? I don’t know a whole lot about database structure and whether or not two installs could share a database and/or effectively communicate with each other.

    Thanks so very much in advance to anyone who can respond.

    -Todd

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • @perywinkle

    Participant

    15 years, 7 months ago

    Hi Todd,

    I’m in the same boat as you.

    Wondering about the same sort of issues…

    Mic

    @andrea_r

    Participant

    15 years, 7 months ago

    ” so we’re left with two choices: 1) Switch to WPMU/BP or 2) Install WPMU/BP in a subdirectory.

    My first question is this: Am I right about our two choices above?”

    Yes.

    Switching the whole thing over to WPMU is actually not so bad. The biggest worry there is plugins. Depending on what ones they are, and which ones are a dealbreaker, you will need to test them somewhere ahead of time before even deciding which option to pick.

    posts, comments, users, the theme itself and ad placement – ALL those can be *exactly* the same in WPMU.

    “The only drawback we have with installing WPMU/BP in a subdirectory is that we’d lose the ability to pull in BP features onto the homepage of our current site such as recent blog activity, avatars, etc. Is that correct or is there some way for the two to communicate even if on separate installs?”

    Actually, you can do that. We did it here on http://wanderlustandlipstick.com, a client site. Note it’s not a BP site, but the main site is a single WP install and the WPMU part is under /blogs/. With some lightweight custom code, we pulled in avatars & recent posts to the front of the main blog.

    Overall, your choices are pretty much 50/50. The big kicker here is how you want your URLs to be formed in the end.

    If you want or don’t care about an extra folder name in the URL where WPMU will live, then it may be “easier” to have it as an add-on, and share databases to share users.

    Personally, I’d lean towards moving the whole site to WPMU. Do the move in a dev environment, then in a low-traffic time planned ahead with full notice, make the switch to the new WPMU site (at the same URL basically).

    @perywinkle

    Participant

    15 years, 7 months ago

    @Andrea_r, Thanks for your wisdom!

    BTW. What’s the term to refer to WP ( single blog) ’round these parts?

    Looks like it’s time to investigate moving from WP to WPMU.

    We’ve been developing profiles with Cimy Extra Fields… and have put a fair amount of work into the Member Profile Fields…

    http://nbnetwork.org/directory

    Some of our users are not ‘active website users’ per say, so the Web Team updates the profiles for them. Seems like there’s no way for admin’s to do that in the Buddpress profile system.

    That said, BP is doing what we’ve been trying to do all along, and doing a much better job of it!

    @andrea_r

    Participant

    15 years, 7 months ago

    tangent: the house behind us is straw bale. :)

    (By “behind” I mean a good 300 yards away down the field on the edge of the lake)

    Inactive

    15 years, 7 months ago

    @Andrea_r, Thanks a ton for your response. That was a huge help. You rock.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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