BuddyPress Secrets Revealed

If you’ve never heard of BuddyPress before you really need to take a close look at it. Why? because I believe it’s going to totally revolutionize and transform blogging and websites in general.

Essentially BuddyPress is a plugin that adds massive amounts of social interaction to your website. What I like about blogs is you can set them up so people can comment on anything you’ve said. BuddyPress takes this to a whole new level by not only continuing with this theme of blog commenting but also making it possible for people to interact with each other and begin their own separate conversations.

BuddyPress on it’s simplest level is just a WordPress pluging you install and activate just like any other WordPress plugin. So it’s very simple to set up. However because of the extra social interaction it brings to your WordPress blog you’ll need to either do some serious modifications to your existing blog theme or use a specially created BuddyPress theme.

Thankfully BuddyPress comes with it’s own theme you can very easily modify by adding your own header graphic. You could go one step further and modify the CSS code to change fonts and colors which is extremely easy to do (I’ll show you later).

BuddyPress itself has only been around since May 2009 (a little over a year since writing this) so as a platform it’s very new. When I looked at it back then it was very limiting in what it could do and had quite a few bugs that needed ironing out. It’s biggest limitation was it only used to work on WordPress MU (Multi-User) which meant that you could give all your members the ability to create their own WordPress blogs. At that time it didn’t appeal to me.

Thanks to the help of the army of developers out there BuddyPress has evolved into something very powerful and extremely flexible. Gone are the days of it only working on WordPress MU and now the platform it taking on a life of it’s own I’m very excited to be working with.

There’s another limitation I need to tell you about that’s becoming less of a limitation with each passing day. Because it’s such a new platform there aren’t very many proven plugins out there. When I say “proven” I mean plugins that themselves aren’t full of bugs. As I say this is changing with each day new plugins being released and those already out there being made better and better.

I only began working with BuddyPress myself about 3 month ago as an experiment for a new project of  mine. And in doing this learned very quickly what works and what doesn’t. Recently I used it to develop a fan site for a well known celebrity who now has well over 3,000 members using the site and interacting with it like crazy.

If you’re into building social networks like me then I’m sure you’ve heard of SocialGo or Ning. Both are great platforms but in my opinion BuddyPress is set to walk right over both and totally dominate the social network website platform.

As a marketing strategy and a way of making more money online I highly recommend taking a closer look at BuddyPress as a social networking platform. The possibilities are limited by your imagination!

Can you imagine building a website that’s not only a blog but also gives people a platform to network and chat with each other? If your value proposition is a good fit for your niche then you can very quickly and very easily monetize the site in more ways than you had with just WordPress alone.

For now here are some links I think you’ll find useful in getting started with this insanely powerful platform for WordPress…

Download BuddyPress

(You guessed it the BuddyPress site uses BuddyPress so you can see it in action)

Get the latest BuddyPress plugins

(This is where you’ll find all the newest BuddyPress plugins being released)

This plugin helps to adapt WordPress themes to work with BuddyPress

(It’s not perfect but it gives you a head start)

Here’s where you can pick up some fee BuddyPress themes

(They’re not the best themes ever but they’ll give you a head start)

Over the next few months I plan on adapting this theme to work with BuddyPress, so look out.

Here’s a BuddyPress site I recently developed.

If you discover any new resources for BuddyPress just let me know by leaving a reply below…