Coolrazor Blog

Most people know about MySpace and FaceBook, but few know just how expansive the coding is behind such websites.  The reality is that sites like those have thousands of lines of code and are rather complex.  What most people don’t know is that BuddyPress, an open source project, is working to make it easy to setup your own social networking website.

BuddyPress is built upon WordPress, the famous blogging software.  WordPress is considered one of the, if not the, best blogging engines ever made.  It is used by many organizations and individuals, everyone from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olson to the Library of Congress.  To name a few more users: Azusa Pacific University, eBay Insider, Mark Shuttlesworth, Harvard Law, Ford Motor Company – Global Auto Shows and The Wall Street Journal Law Blog.  WordPress is amazing in that it is open source and thereby free.  The source code is freely available to the public.  This makes it easy for any programmers to work on and create plugins for.  Out of the box, WordPress is just a single user blog.  Meaning that once it is installed an a webserver you have one blog or one site.  Now, the makers of WordPress have expanded their endeavors and created  WordPress Multi-User or WordPress-MU.  This is a multi-user version of WordPress that allows for one site to house and administer multiple blogs.  So, if you install WordPress-MU on your webserver you get a site that can allow people to sign up for a blog and then they can start blogging away on your site with their own blog.  By itself, WordPress-MU is not all that glamerous.  It can handle most of the plugins that WordPress can handle, but it is still just a blogging software, a very powerful blogging software that can handle thousands of blogging users.

Enter in BuddyPress, BuddyPress is a project to take a vanilla (default) install of WordPress-MU and add features that you would see in a typical social networking site.  The idea is to have a website where users can sign up for accounts and create profiles.  These profiles would then have the ability to send messages between each other, write on each other’s board/wall/wire area and even have a friend or buddy list.  The heart and soul of WordPress is blogging so you will definitely see a prominant blogging feature as well.

The beauty of all this is that in order to create a complex social networking site you will just have to setup a WordPress-MU website and add in BuddyPress plugins.  No coding needed!  Further, the technology is open source so it would not cost you anything to implement it other than your web space or web host costs (in my case, I just use a server at home hosting over dynamic DNS).  Seeing as how it is open source you will get free updates for life as well.

Currently, BuddyPress is in the first release candidate stage of its development.  The software is still working out its kinks, but it is built upon the super stable WordPress-MU platform.  This is a project to watch out for.  You may one day start the next MySpace or FaceBook with it.

Sources:

Who uses WordPress?  http://wordpress.org/showcase/archives/

WordPress  http://wordpress.org/

WordPress-MU  http://wpmu.org/

BuddyPress  http://buddypress.org/

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