BuddyPress opens social networking opportunities

For some weeks the Wordpress community has been buzzing with rumours. Rumours of a social networking orientated release of Wordpress, which will extend the publishing platforms potential into yet a new area.

The rumours turned out to be true. Developer Andy Peatling had started on the social networking incarnation of Wordpress and two days ago some of the social networking features being built into “Buddypress” was announced.

Buddypress will be based on Wordpress MU - the multi-user version of the Wordpress platform.

It’s various social networking features will be available as plugins. Giving administrators the option of choosing the extent of their sites social networking functionality.

The features currently being worked on include:

• A permissioned based Friends system;
  • ‘Each member will have a visible list of their friends on the site. Friends lists are browsable and members can click on each friend to see more information or add them as their own friend. Profiles are NOT restricted as a whole. Alternatively members can select which information is visible to the general public in finer detail in much the same way your blog is open, but you can make some posts private.’
  • ‘The ability to search for members by username, email or full name will also be included in a “friend finder”.’
• Extended and admin customisable user Profiles;
• Status updates a la Facebook or Twitter;
• Private messaging of users on Friend list;
• The Wire, where Friends can come along and post to a members profile; Similar to Facebook’s Wall post functionality.
• Personal Blog
• Groups in BuddyPress are a gathering of members, blog posts, photos and any other user generated content.
  • ‘Any member can create a group in BuddyPress. They then become the group administrator’.
  • ‘Every member can write blog posts and upload images to their own profile. Instead of specifically uploading content into a group, members can tag their content with a unique group tag (each group is given a unique tag once created). Once it has been tagged with the group tag, it will be placed in the approval list for the group admin to either accept or reject. Once it is accepted it will appear on the group overview page.’
• Photo Albums that can be shared; Photos that can be posted to Groups via tags as explained above in the Groups.

To Web developers this is a very interesting development indeed. The Wordpress platform is free, open, flexible and reliable and will make for more than just a viable alternative when considering the build of a new social networking site.

Facebook is still a closed shop, allowing you to build on their platform, but using its functionality on your own site is still not on.

Google’s OpenSocial project is still in its infancy, and geared to building social apps rather than a social networking home. In any event OpenSocial apps should be easy to integrate into a BuddyPress installation.

With BuddyPress one can mix and match Wordpress and other sites’ features: you could decide to dump the BuddyPress status updates in favour of users installing a Twitter feed for instance. In short, this is great news for social networking site developers.

You can join in the development of BuddyPress by signing up to the BuddyPress dev mailing list.

One feature Zuluzulu would like to see is the adition of an activity feed. The feature (also called the Personal News Feed) is the one that so revolutionised Facebook.