The Ultimate Beginners Guide To BuddyPress

by Raelene Wilson May 7^th, 2013 10 Responses

Are you thinking about setting up a social network for your university’s onesie appreciation society? Are you suffering analysis paralysis after installing BuddyPress because you don’t know which boxes you should tick? Or maybe you’ve set up version 1.7 and have a truck load of questions?

Well, you’ve come to the right place.

In this guide I’ll go through the ins and outs of BuddyPress, or as everyone and their dog likes to call it, social networking in a box.

I’ll cover:

What is BuddyPress?
Features
Why you should use it
Installation
bbPress forums
Plugins
Themes
Who uses it
Support
The future of BuddyPress

Okay, So What Is BuddyPress?

How to Create A Custom BuddyPress Members Directory

by Sarah Gooding March 6^th, 2013 39 Responses

One of main reasons that BuddyPress communities fail is because members don’t connect and interact with each other. One way to improve that is through design that keeps members interested.

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Plugins, BuddyPress Tutorials

Add Personalized Messages To BuddyPress Friend Requests

by Sarah Gooding December 10^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Today’s tip is something that could benefit friendship interactions in any BuddyPress community. Just last week, BuddyPress developer Brajesh Singh released a new plugin. The BuddyPress Extended Friendship Request plugin takes friendship requests to the next level by supplementing the “Add Friend” button with a bit of personalization.

Once installed, this plugin causes a click on the “Add Friend” button to pop up a little message window, enabling a user to send a message along with the friendship request.

Here’s a screenshot of the plugin in action:

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Plugins, BuddyPress Tutorials

Add Attachments to BuddyPress Private Messages

by Sarah Gooding October 25^th, 2012 2 Responses

Want BuddyPress private messages to work a little more like email? BuddyPress Message Attachment is a new plugin that gives your community members the ability to attach files to private messages. The plugin’s settings page lets site administrators customize the allowed file types for the attachments as well as the maximum size.

Here’s what your messaging compose screen will look like with attachments allowed:

Attachments are then shown on the recipient’s message screen:

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Plugins, BuddyPress Tutorials

How to Tackle Spam With The BuddyPress Spam Link Plugin

by Sarah Gooding October 10^th, 2012 9 Responses

BuddyPress spam is a perennial problem that can negatively affect your social network. At times it can seem like weeds taking over your beautiful garden. Everyone knows what it’s like to receive spam emails but when your members begin receiving spam messages through your community, they may feel as though their profile, participation and experiences are not secure. That is why, when building a community, it’s important to maintain good spam protection; a spam-free experience produces subtle confidence that will keep your users returning.

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Themes, BuddyPress Tutorials

Tutorial: Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress – Part 3

by Craig Grella September 28^th, 2012 2 Responses

This is the final part of the 3 part series, Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress, in which we will perform some basic styling, edit our custom.css file, and create a unique BuddyPress experience using the Thesis Theme Framework for WordPress multisite.

As a quick recap, In Part 1 of Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress - we covered installing WordPress Multisite (briefly), reviewed the network and site dashboards, and then moved on to a detailed video installation of BuddyPress.

In Part 2 of Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress, we focus on the installation of the Thesis Theme Framework and the Thesis BuddyPress Child Theme.

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Tutorials, Tutorials

Tutorial: Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress – Part 2

by Craig Grella September 26^th, 2012 24 Responses

In Part 1 of Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress – we covered installing WordPress Multisite (briefly), reviewed the network and site dashboards, and then moved on to a detailed video installation of BuddyPress.

In this article, Part 2 of Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress, we focus on the installation of the Thesis Theme Framework and the Thesis BuddyPress Child Theme.

Right now your site should look like a basic install of WordPress. If you are using the basic Twenty Eleven theme, it probably looks like this:

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Themes, BuddyPress Tutorials

Tutorial: Integrating Thesis and BuddyPress – Part 1

by Craig Grella September 24^th, 2012 5 Responses

In this three-part tutorial you’ll learn how to install the BuddyPress Child Theme for Thesis on a live WordPress multisite installation, and make a few custom code edits that turn a standard thesis install into a unique BuddyPress network site.

If you were not aware that BuddyPress had been integrated with the Thesis premium framework you can read the precursor to this article: BuddyPress and Thesis Together at Last.

Marrying these two frameworks makes great sense. You get the speed and customizability of Thesis with all the cool functionality of BuddyPress – like forums, groups, users profiles, and activity streams.

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Tutorials

How to Change the Default BuddyPress Avatar Sizes

by Sarah Gooding August 27^th, 2012 4 Responses

If you want to totally customize your BuddyPress community, at some point you’ll probably be interested in changing the default avatar sizes. BuddyPress avatars are nicely sized for the default theme, but your custom theme might benefit from sizing up or down from there.

The two most often used default avatars are the thumbnail and the full size, which are 50px and 150px respectively. They basically look like this in the default theme:

The BuddyPress codex has a list of the avatar settings that can be easily changed using internal configuration settings:

{code type=php}
define ( ‘BP_AVATAR_THUMB_WIDTH’, 50 );

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Tutorials

How to Clean Out the BuddyPress Activity Stream

by Sarah Gooding August 22^nd, 2012 2 Responses

When creating a BuddyPress site you will probably do lots of testing before officially launching. If you’ve filled up your activity stream with test comments, you’ll want to dump it before opening the site to your community. There are a couple of ways to do this.

Option 1: Empty the Activity table in your database.

This option involves getting into your database. Find the wp_bp_activity table and empty it.

Option 2: Empty all Activity entries in the Dashboard.