Wordpress MU as a Social Networking Platform

Last month whilst setting up my wordpress mu domain parking system, I came across Andy Peatling’s post about how he pulled together a bunch of plugins and hacked away at wordpress mu until he came up with a working social network that he used for his college girl site chickspeak.

It’s pretty neat reading about other hackers exploits and seeing the fruition of their works. ChickSpeak looks awesome - the design really fits in with it’s girls diary marketing. The plugins that Andy wrote for this included photos, private messaging, extended profiles, polls, and user credentials. He also integrated bbpress as the forum for members to hang out.

Since ChickSpeak’s launch, Andy has extended this to create BuddyPress which is intended to be a full scale wordpress mu social network platform for public release that we can all use (ie. it’s not just hardcoded for chickspeak). BuddyPress was quickly snapped up by the Automattic Wordpress gang (especially since they’ve just raised millions in VC funding!) and Andy has joined the Automattic permy staff team.

Today, the official BuddyPress.org website is finally live. The code source is still very much in it’s infancy and it’s no where near usable but it’s feature list look very promising…

• Extended Profiles: The extended profile component allows site admins to create specific profile fields for their members to fill in. They can create as few or as many profile fields as they like, be as specific or vague as they want. Profile fields can then be grouped…
• Personal Blog: This is everything WordPress has to offer for publishing a blog. The only difference is that all administration tabs will be moved underneath a “Blog” tab…
• Private Messaging: BuddyPress private messaging works like internal site email. Members can message people on their friends list as well as forward and reply to received messages…
• Friends: Members of a BuddyPress social network can be connected together by one member adding another as a “friend” and then the other member accepting the friend request…
• Groups: Groups in BuddyPress are a gathering of members, blog posts, photos and any other user generated content…
• The Wire: This is a place where friends can come along and post to a members profile. This would be a short message and could include a picture and some basic HTML. The TinyMCE editor will be used to allow for basic formatting…
• Status Updates: Status updates in BuddyPress will appear on a member’s profile page. A member can update their status as frequently as they want to. All status updates are logged in a member’s activity log…
• Albums: Members of a BuddyPress installation will be able to create their own photo albums. These albums can be shared with friends and groups. Each member is given a certain amount of space, which can be set by the site administrator…
• …

so basically, this will be the open source version of myspace.. but much much better, cleaner, faster, friendlier! I’m a big fan of this and will definitely be watching this space. I’ve always thought that if you can somehow combine the blog, the forum, and the social networking, you could create a really addictive service. MySpace was v1.0 and BuddyPress is definitely shouting v2.0. Let’s hope it can live up to the hype cos I’ve got the perfect domain name to maximise on this platform - muhahaha :P

Extra info: You can keep up with Andy in his data stream page: Andy in Life

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Tags: andy peatling, buddypress, chickspeak, social networking, wordpress mu

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