Use WordPress to start a Social Network with BuddyPress

This is the second time I’ve written this article so it’ll be much shorter now. Damn you back button!

I’ve been using vBulletin to create a webmaster social network at MySpacePros.com for the past month now and while it has all the features I need, I can’t imagine using vB for a social network that wasn’t aimed towards webmasters. As awesome as it is, it’s a beast to work with. What would I use then? WordPress. Or more specifically, BuddyPress. Take that last sentence with a grain of salt though, because I’ve never actually seen it in action. This is all just speculation.

Given automattic’s track record with offshoot products, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that while well-implemented, these new features are going to be light. Let’s take a quick look at those features. Again…

Extended Profiles
This should be “Extensible Profiles” as you need to do all the leg work. It works much like the Custom Fields option in wordpress. Well, exactly like it actually.

Personal Blog
Opening the door to use WordPress as a competitor to wordpress.com, users will get their own blog at either “/membername/blog/” or “/membername.domain.com/blog”. Finally!

Private Messaging
An internal mail system between users is pretty mandatory.

Friends
The friends aspect is tied into the Extended Profiles so you can match make based on those fields. Very Cool.

Groups
The most notable part of the Groups feature is the (option?) ability to tie it into bbpress and give each group their own discussion forum. Keep something in mind though: When you do this, it will kill a lot of forum activity - which is why I haven’t and probably won’t do it on MySpacePros.

The Wire
Apparently The Wire is the name for the bastard child of a 3-way between twitter, myspace’s profile comments and facebook’s The Wall…

Albums
One of the best ways to get traffic from Google.

Status Updates
I.e: Mood. Not important enough to make a bullet in my opinion.

It may seem like I’m being hard on BuddyPress, but I’m not. They’re just a couple years late to the party and they didn’t dress for the occasion. I’m sure it’ll provide a good foundation for the community to improve on, but at least it’s something.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 9th, 2008 at 8:38 pm You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.