We’ve been keeping an eye on the BuddyPress QuickPress plugin for awhile, which was put out as an alpha release at the end of November 2009. It contained a slew of known bugs yet also tremendous potential. The plugin allows users to post blogs “quickpress” style without having to access the dashboard for their blogs. Yesterday I downloaded an updated version of this plugin from our friends over at cosydale.com. Hopefully the changes will be committed to the original plugin that is currently in the repository.
This plugin is really helpful if you want your users to be able to interact with your site and blog quickly without having to learn the in and outs of the WordPress dashboard. Some of us could probably install WordPress and post blogs in our sleep, but there are many people out there to whom the WordPress dashboard is a completely foreign place. If you want to make blog posting a cinch, pop this plugin into your BuddyPress installation and watch your user contribution grow.
As you can see from the screenshot, this plugin adds Quickpress under the user options of the blogs component:
How to Install BuddyPress Quickpress Plugin
1. Download the zip file here: http://cosydale.com/public/plugins/buddypress-quickpress-ru_RU.zip
2. Put the folder in the plugin folder /wp-content/plugins/
3. A default theme is included into the plugin. If you want to customize it, copy the subdirectory /quickpress from /theme into your current theme directory, then customize the files.
The custom files will be loaded prior to the default ones.
For example: Copy this directory /wp-content/plugins/buddypress-quickpress/theme/quickpress /
over to
/wp-content/themes/bp-default/quickpress/
…and customize the theme from there.
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January 14, 2010 
Thanks Sarah, I wasn’t aware of this plugin, but it definitely fills a user adoption void!
I agree. The more new users don’t have to use the dashboard, the better, in my opinion.
Sarah– Thanks for sharing: this looks great. Would be even better if it could be integrated into the BuddyPress Groupblog plugin. Any ideas on how difficult that would be? I might have a go at it.
Thanks, Sarah, for this post.
I’m glad to see you found what I did on my cosydale.com site useful :)
Doesn’t work. I am using BuddyPress Social theme. The QuickPress link appears in the menu but when clicked it just takes you back to the index page.
The plugin works. You are having a conflict with your theme. Try activating the default theme.
Well then this theme needs to be updated by the Dev Premium team.
Maybe you can start a thread in their support forums and find out what the conflict is with the Quickpress plugin. It might be something that could be changed in the plugin itself or maybe an easy mod to your theme.
Another great post Sarah, thank you. You are quickly joining the ranks of other WordPressmu vets that I admire (donncha, andrea, ron, etc.) Do you know if there is a way to disable the dashboard all together? This plugin really fills my last holdout on Buddypress sites. I too thought the dashboard would be too complicated for average users, or atleast the users im trying to attract. Thanks again!
This would be a great tool for businesses in an industry who’s audience is not necessarily very tech-savvy. It allows users who don’t have a lot of experience with the web to still contribute a voice to blog posts. This is valuable because user feedback is the essence of good user interface web design. Having feedback from a wider range of people provides a more accurately representative user sample group of all individuals that use your product/services. I like it alot!
problem, i can see Quickpress only under admin. if i use any other user (who also has a blog), i don’t see the quickpress menu, when i insert the URL manually (domain/members/MEMBER-NAME/blogs/quickpress) i’m redirected to the homepage.
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