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?

Tutorials

How to Reset Your bbPress Forums

by Sarah Gooding September 6^th, 2012 Leave a comment

Did you know that there is a way to completely reset your bbPress forums? This lesser-known option is hidden under the Tools >> Forums menu item in the dashboard. This is an option that you will rarely need but can be very handy for cleaning out your forums. It erases your forums, topics, replies, meta data, settings, activity, forum user roles and importer helper data.

Plugins

5 Geolocation Plugins To Help You Find Your Customers

by Matthew Tschoegl July 4^th, 2012 Leave a comment

What Can Geolocation Do For You?
With the introduction of this and other similar user-friendly geolocation plugins (great explanation of what it does here), the challenge of discovering where your visitors/users/customers are coming from and directing them to content that meets their needs has largely been met. A host of new plugins are now working on trying to extend the functions and uses of geolocation for your WordPress website.

Dynamic Backgrounds

Geolocation Can Help You Find You Customers And Your Customers Find You

Tutorials

Add Geolocation Information To Topics in bbPress

by Sarah Gooding June 2^nd, 2012 Leave a comment

The number of extensions for bbPress is growing rapidly. bbPress Topic Location is a new plugin from G.Breant that lets you add geolocation information to bbPress topics. It is powered by W3C Geolocation so the plugin can actually guess your current location if your browser has this feature.

After you activate the plugin, you’ll get a new “topic location” field added to the new topic form.

Topics will appear in the topics list with their locations beneath them.

Plugins

10 Must Have bbPress Plugins for WordPress

by Sarah Gooding March 22^nd, 2012 7 Responses

The bbPress plugin is a great option for providing your users with a forum that integrates seamlessly with WordPress, almost as if it were a natural part of the core. The goal is to keep it as speedy and light as possible. Therefore, the bbPress plugin doesn’t include everything you need for a full-featured forum for WordPress. You’ll need to add in functionality via plugins.

I’ve selected some of the best current add-ons for bbPress. These plugins will help you to be able to provide a smooth experience as well as many of the commonly-expected features of a standalone forum.

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Themes

Exclusive Discount on the New BuddyBox Theme for BuddyPress and bbPress

by Sarah Gooding March 16^th, 2012 2 Responses

There’s a new independent BuddyPress theme on the market called BuddyBox. It’s a professional theme focused on gaining new signups and created to be versatile enough to be used with many different kinds of communities.

The BuddyBox theme has several interesting features worth noting, including uniquely designed real time activity streams that auto update:

Directory pages are designed with a grid-style layout:

The BuddyBox theme focuses on encouraging signups to your community. The registration and login forms are custom designed to reinvent the clunky default WordPress interface. New users can easily register and quickly begin using the website:

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Themes

New Responsive Buddies Community Theme from Themeforest

by Sarah Gooding March 7^th, 2012 4 Responses

After Themeforest opened up its market for BuddyPress themes, there has been a flood of successful themes released. Buddies is the latest to be added. It’s a responsive, minimalist BuddyPress theme with bbPress styles integrated for a seamless design.

The Buddies theme uses the same framework as Gratitude, a previous release from ZenThemes, and it’s been hailed as one of the easiest frameworks to use. The theme also includes a unique widgetized homepage that changes when a user is logged in:

Besides being fully responsive to mobile devices, the Buddies theme features:

Customisable accent color options via the options panel
Custom Background Support

Tutorials

Give bbPress a CSS File Within Your WordPress Theme Folder

by Sarah Gooding February 29^th, 2012 1 Response

Thousands of WordPress websites are using the bbPress 2.0 plugin to seamlessly include forums. When you first install the plugin it usually fits in fairly naturally with your existing WordPress theme and most people don’t even need to create an entirely new bbPress theme.

Plugins

Top 5 Forum Plugins for WordPress

by Sarah Gooding February 3^rd, 2012 12 Responses

Hosting forums on your WordPress site is a great way to keep the conversation going and the community involved. We’re often asked on Twitter what the best forum plugin is for WordPress. The forum software you choose depends entirely on the range of features you require. A smaller, more simple plugin might be a better fit than something more robust.

Below you will find some of the major players among forum plugins, in no particular order, all of which are known for being stable and well-supported.
WPMU Dev Forum Plugin

BuddyPress, BuddyPress Themes

Feature! is a New Community Magazine Theme for BuddyPress and bbPress

by Sarah Gooding January 27^th, 2012 2 Responses

Themeforest has a new BuddyPress theme for sale. It’s called Feature! and it’s not one of your average cookie cutter BuddyPress themes. Feature! has a bold magazine style with loads of configurable options. The theme also comes with matching bbPress styles so that your forum is a seamless part of your community.

Don’t like the background and color scheme? Check out the demo to see how easy it is to change the background patterns and colors. The ease of customization is one of the many highlights about this theme. Feature! also includes:

Unbranded Admin Panel