Review of BuddyPress Social Networking Software

“Social networking.” That’s a buzzword (or buzz-phrase) these days. It basically means “A space like MySpace or Facebook, where all the users have their occupy page and interact with each other in some way.” And while MySpace and Facebook have the teenage through college markets in hand, there are plenty of other niches … We Heart This, for example, bills itself as “Your one-stop source for all things worth loving!” And Flokka.com is a blogging community for women in business.

What these two sites have in common is the software that powers them. Both are powered by BuddyPress, a station of Free / Open-Source extensions for WordPress … the Free / Open-Source blogging platform that’s taking over the Internet. But where WordPress is just for blogging, BuddyPress turns it into a social networking platform. It lets users sign up for their own accounts and their own blogs, and it gives them forums to chat in and everything.

I haven’t frail BuddyPress myself, but it’s one platform I’ve considered for my website. I also evaluated competing platforms like Joomla and Drupal. Here’s what I conception of BuddyPress, and what I found out.

What BuddyPress does

In a BuddyPress installation, users who sign up for accounts with your blog don’t just get the good to comment on it. They get their own blog, which is still a part of your site. They also have an “Activity Stream” which shows everything that they’ve been up to … all the blog posts, comments, and forum posts that they’ve made.

Did I mention that it includes forums? A BuddyPress install comes with its own BBPress forums. BBPress forums are a lot more lightweight than phpBB forums, and have decidedly fewer features. There are a lot of extensions and add-ons for them, though, and they’re also a lot more secure than other forum platforms.

BuddyPress is not an add-on for your existing WordPress blog. It’s a software package built on top of WordPress MU — WordPress for multiple users. You can migrate the content from your existing single-user blog to a BuddyPress install, but you can’t just turn your blog into BuddyPress unless you’re already using the multiple user version of WordPress.

The downside of BuddyPress

When I first looked at BuddyPress’ features, I was excited. Here was the all-in-one social networking platform I wanted! And it was built on top of my accepted blogging platform, WordPress. What could go wrong?

A lot, as it turned out. Several of the example sites they featured on their homepage were confusing or had low levels of activity, as of the time of this writing. Individual users’ blogs were often buried, and the over-compartmentalization of BuddyPress groups, users, blogs and activities made it hard to find the content you wanted. There were forums, subforums and micronetworks everywhere, but none had achieved critical mass. They were usually either neglected or abandoned.

This is not to say that a successful social network can’t be built using BuddyPress. Far from it — some of the sites that they’ve linked to are very active. I think that what it means is that BuddyPress is still early in its development cycle, and that not all of the people deploying it are sure how to effectively use it yet. Maybe you’ll notice something they missed?

The Upshot

BuddyPress’ advantages are numerous … a thriving developer community, and a clean and light codebase built on top of perhaps the world’s most popular Free / Open-Source blogging platform. It’s gotten enough people enthusiastic that it seems to have reached critical mass, and to all appearances it can only go up from here.

Will it outdo Joomla and Drupal, and other Free / Open-Source content management systems and social networking platforms? Maybe. It’s certainly off to a good start! But is it the best solution for you and your organization? That depends.

Rob a look at their homepage, http://buddypress.org/, and gape what they’re up to. Writing ages fast on the Internet, and they’ve probably gotten a lot more done since the time this was published. But the best draw to see what BuddyPress is capable of is probably to go to http://buddypress.org/demo/, and check out their example sites. Which ones are active? Which features seem to work for which sites, and which ones seem superfluous? Try to think for yourself if it meets your needs, and if your target audience would devour it. Most importantly, have fun!