BuddyPress Beginner's Guide

BuddyPress is a plugin that adds social networking capabilities to the core functionality of WordPress. For example, by adding an advanced profile for blog authors, you can easily turn a regular website into a full-fledged social network. Most of the features of BuddyPress are unique in other plugins, and due to the growth of its popularity, you can always wonder how complex websites can be created on the basis of WordPress.

Despite this, BuddyPress is quite easy to use. Previously, WordPress MU would be required to install it, however, starting from version 1.2, this is not necessary, so the usual WordPress installation will do.
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BuddyPress adds the following features to WordPress:

Activity tape - users can follow the activity of their friends or groups on your site

Expanded profiles - WordPress built-in user profiles are no match for them. In the profile, you can include friends, groups, activity tapes, recent user entries, a biography, contact information - and these are just the default settings!

Friends - users can add each other as friends, thanks to which, it will become much easier for them to communicate and track events.

Personal correspondence - as it is not difficult to guess, the ability to exchange private messages between users.

Groups - users can create and join groups of any subject.

Blogging - Using the power of WPMU along with the multi-site WordPress 3.0, BuddyPress will allow you to organize a full-featured WordPress blog for all your users. The blog will be integrated into the activity feed, and users will be able to post posts there using their own account on your site.

Depending on your needs, these functions can be enabled / disabled in the control panel.

Since BuddyPress is actually a regular WordPress plugin, it’s easy for you to change it to suit your needs, if of course you are familiar with the basics of developing WordPress plugins. To help the developer, there is the BuddyPress Codex and a support forum .

No matter how good BuddyPress is, it can always be improved with additional, useful plugins. Most plugins running under regular WordPress will work on your Buddypress site, although there are many excellent plugins that require BuddyPress to work properly.

Among the one hundred and seventy-two plugins currently available on BuddyPress.org , I have selected 10 of the most useful ones.

10 useful plugins for BuddyPress

1. BP Profile Privacy
Allows users to determine the availability of their profile to other users.

2. BuddyPress Links
Adds links and media sharing features to your site. May help attract audiences to the site.

3. BuddyPress Gifts
Allows users to send each other pictures, in the form of gifts. The site administrator can add / remove gifts on your own.

4. BuddyPress Album +
Adds a photo album function to a site, much like a photo app on Facebook. It has a lot of settings, but before using this plugin, it is recommended to test it thoroughly, because it has several known problems.

5. Tweetstream
Integrates Twitter into your BuddyPress site, allowing users to publish to Twitter, links about their activity on your site.

6. Facestream
Integrates Facebook into your BuddyPress site, allowing users to publish to Facebook, links about their activity on your site.

7. Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets
Adds two new widget: "users" and "groups" that display the new, active and most popular site users.

8. CubePoints Buddypress Integration
Allows users to earn points as a reward for participation in the life of the site (for work requires CubePoints )

9. BuddyPress Followers
It works exactly the same way as BuddyPress’s built-in friends feature, except that the follower does not need user consent. Just like on Twitter.

10. BuddyPress Template Pack
Adds BuddyPress support to a regular WordPress theme. You can use any WordPress theme without having to customize it to work with BuddyPress.