I’m excited about the prospect of BuddyPress. What is it? Here’s what they have to say:
BuddyPress will completely transform a vanilla installation of Wordpress MU into a fully functional social network platform.
When I wrote about turning Wordpress MU into a social networking platform a little while back I never could have imagined the amount of interest it would generate. BuddyPress is my answer to that interest.
BuddyPress is not yet released. I’ll put that out there right now. It is in active development however, and this blog acts as a window into the decision making process and the status of BuddyPress development.
BuddyPress will come as a suite of Wordpress MU plugins that will work seamlessly together. Each plugin handles a separate BuddyPress feature, meaning you can pick and choose which features you want to include.
The proposed features are fairly awesome - it is basically turning WordPress into a full interaction-centric CMS - a bit like Drupal or Plone with all the plugins and trimmings.
Why do we need a replacement for Drupal and Plone? Why replicate what already exists? The answer is simple - WordPress is just about everywhere, and BuddyPress will allow a lot of people that want to build social communities on the web to do so (and fingers crossed, with relative ease).
If you’re interested, subscribe to notifications on the BuddyPress website.
UPDATE: The BuddyPress site is now a one page “coming soon” teaser. A missed opportunity there to use the email addresses that they gathered when asking people to subscribe to notifications - I would have let those people know that things (like the sponsorship/takeover/who knows because they aren’t saying by Automattic) had changed.
BuddyPress sounds very promising - thanks for letting us know about it.
I set up Joomla sites because of the features offered but it is a heavy, not very intuitive application and not too search engine friendly. Being able to use Wordpress as a complete CMS application makes a lot of sense.
Hi Sue,
thank you for your comment.
I’ve used Joomla myself in the past (and Plone, Drupal, and SharePoint). They are all a bit scary, and can certainly be made to really get up and dance with a lot of effort.
I’m looking forward to seeing what the BuddyPress team can come up with, and how it compares to some of the other options.
Best regards, Andrew