 Today, I'm going to talk about Buddy Press. This is not going to be a technical talk. So I'm going to go fairly quickly through the slides. And my slides are already up on davidbisit.com. And I'm also live tweeting this at Dimension Media. So no need to feel like you need to catch up with your notes. First off, if I can see through the lights, how many people here know what Buddy Press is? OK, cool. We could skip like half my slides. But maybe there's a few of you that don't know. And we're going to go real quick through a real quick tour just so everybody's pretty much on the same page. So what is Buddy Press? Buddy Press is actually a plug-in. You can find it on the WordPress repo. Or you can go to buddypress.org and follow the steps from there. And Buddy Press is a plug-in, but it's a plug-in that's composed of different components. So some of these are listed here. And we're going to go through the major ones now. Registration. So Buddy Press adds social functions to your WordPress site in various forms. Of course, you're not going to get very far with a social site without registration. Buddy Press automatically creates a registration page for you and allows you to add some profile fields to it. So a new user can register. They can add their username and password. They can fill out a few fields, like their first name and last name and where they come from and so forth. But once a person registers, then they have a profile. And Buddy Press allows the site admin to create fields for a user profile. So for example, if you want your user on your network to have a drop or have a tell you, they publish what city they live in, and maybe you want to do it through a dropdown or a text box or radio buttons or something, Buddy Press allows you to set this up and without coding. This is very simple and straightforward process. And then you can take all these profile fields that you build and kind of group them. So for example, if you create a network and you're asking a user with their Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, avatars or URLs are, you can group all of that under some sort of social tab in the user profile. So this is what the user sees in the front end. They go to their profile, they see these boxes that you fill out. The previous slide was the admin look. And so when you can allow users to choose what kind of profile information they want, public or private. So public information is obviously shown to the world. Private information can be limited to a person's friends or just themselves. So maybe somebody doesn't want to publish their birthday to the world. So they can do that. Activity streams, Buddy Press has activity streams and they're kind of cousins to the Facebook walls or Twitter streams. So users can send and view updates on the activity streams. And then this activity streams can monitor like general site activity or just something specific like maybe all the people that you follow on your network or a specific group. Friends, yes, friend connections. So Buddy Press out of the box allows two-way friendship connections. So as much as I hate to use the word Facebook, I'll use Facebook, that it's similar set up to Facebook. So someone stumbles upon another user in the system, they send a friendship request and then other user confirms or denies that request. So for example, if you look at these slides later that would be the button that you would push. So once you establish friends or you're browsing around at other people you can communicate with them with private messaging. And if you've ever used direct messenger on Twitter or Facebook, this is a similar concept. Private communication. So in Buddy Press, it takes that a step further with an inbox and the ability to read a thread history of the message between you and the other person or people that you're talking to on the network. And this is what that thread would look like if you're a user responding to another person's message. Now notifications. Notifications is a new Buddy Press component. It's pretty straightforward. It sounds exactly what its name is not misleading. Modifications can alert you to things that are happening to you on your site. You can log into a Buddy Press site, see you have three notifications. The notifications can let you know that someone's sending you a new message or a friend request. Now Buddy Press groups, we could give an entire talk on Buddy Press groups because they are extremely flexible. The group API is extremely flexible. But in a nutshell, Buddy Press groups allow you to create like little mini packets. Some people call them mini social networks on your site centered on whatever you want. So people can find a group, join it, interact with a number of users that also have joined that same group. And groups can be public or private and there are the most flexible components in my opinion in Buddy Press. Now for those of you who may not be familiar with it, we do have by tonight, I will set up Buddy Press or BPtestdrive.org. You can be able to set up a Buddy, this we can play around a little bit with a simple Buddy Press installation on a default Buddy Press theme. So now that we kind of are on the same page as what Buddy Press is, let's talk about why you would wanna use Buddy Press for your social solution for your site. These seem pretty obvious. I think that my favorite is that it will, you get to control your own data and you can build the site to your own needs. So social sites typically are more complex or to address certain needs of the business or wherever it's building the site, more than a blog or a simple CMS kind of non-social based site. So you need to be able to build the certain needs. You don't wanna be another clone of another social network, right? So that's where Buddy Press can come in very, very well. And of course, again, it's very heavily supported. So now that we're more familiar with Buddy Press, let's see how Buddy Press is gonna be used. And I picked six different industries. I picked government, nonprofits, SaaS, community, higher education and events. Now some of these, again, some of these I have more examples than others, but rest assured that these slides again are mentioned or already posted and you can take a closer look at these slides. They have the plugins being used, the URLs, some of these are private sites, but the ones that are public should have the URLs. And so I'm going to encourage you after this talk, if you're pumped up about Buddy Press, go out and look at these slides, visit these sites yourself as well, get a kind of good hands-on feel. So the first site or the first category is government. Now you don't necessarily hear a lot about WordPress and government sites. I think, or at least you used to, I think now in the last six months it's getting more popular, but that's because a lot of the sites that are being done for governments, especially where Buddy Press is concerned, are actually intranets. So intranets are websites that government people use and it's not really open to the general public. One of those examples is a site built by a WordPress company you might have heard of, Web Dev Studios. This is an internal social network just for the employees of the National Park Service. And they use a lot of standard Buddy Press features like activity streams and groups. And they use the Buddy Press, or excuse me, they use BB Press for forms, and they use a Buddy Press group tag plugin that actually allows better archiving and searching of their internal groups. So National Park Service, they exist. Great. Government, this is also another site that I like to, oh, it's a little cut off there, I guess. Another good reason to check out my slides on my website. This is called GovLoop. It's built by actually a company called TenUp. Anybody ever heard of TenUp? Okay, yes, everyone, okay. It's a resource that allows government employees to share kind of the best practices and what they call career building opportunities between each other. This site actually has over 100,000 members in its community section. So this is a more straightforward example of a Buddy Press installation. It's less customization than the previous example, but it does show you the fact that Buddy Press can scale. See. Non-for-profits. So WordPress is great for non-for-profits for a variety of reasons, including cost and simplicity. Tie in Buddy Press to that and you can come up with some pretty interesting solutions. So this particular non-for-profit, it's called Foundation of Excellence. And it's a fairly new non-for-profit that works with academic-ly trained students from low and mid-income families. It does the STEAM summer camps in South Florida and the last summer it did one from girls between ages 10 to 12. And they work on everything from Minecraft or robots to actually building WordPress blogs. But because their information about the kids needs to be secure, especially in this day and age, they actually created a very private network so that only their parents would be allowed to look in and see what their kids did that day and what courses or activities they completed and whatever photos that they put on the site so the parents would be able to send their kids to camp and be able to look remotely and see what activities their kids accomplished for the day or for the week. And this is a very similar type of idea and format that's also being used for other non-profits and educational uses. So, SAS, very briefly, I wanted to touch on this because this means software as a service. So this is something that you pay for and you're provided as a service. You don't actually have the software running on your own host. One example of BuddyPress that uses is something called FLOX. And FLOX is actually the first WordPress powered application that kind of offers full-featured social networks, but it hosts them for you. So you don't have to build your own social network. It does it and then simply charges you by the month and it uses a custom version of BuddyPress to do so. So, community. And again, because BuddyPress is accessible and has a low barrier to entry, it's been a choice for many community and local projects. So local, when we say local or social projects, we mean social projects or social networks for neighborhoods, churches, youth groups and even setting up profiles for realtors. There we go. So StudyChurch is a community based on Bible study groups and their memberships are hooked into a plugin called Restrict Content Pro. They have premium memberships. So that means that this is a site that is actually gonna be earning income when they flip the switch. And they have something called a study collaboration aspect. So, and I talked to the owner of the site and basically if you answer a question in a study group, that answer is saved as a comment and it's also saved into a BuddyPress activity. So that other people in the group can engage and read the comment and comment on that and engage in a conversation. And this conversation is all being kept in a BuddyPress activity stream. So it's kind of like a collaborative, nice way to put a bunch of comments and discussions together. Now, this one's an oldie but a goodie. The site has been around for a long time and I can only imagine that's must mean it's pretty darn successful. It's Tasty Kitchen. And Tasty Kitchen is a fun site and in fact it's so fun. I pretty much I'm just encouraging you to check it out for yourself because the slide does not do it justice. It uses BuddyPress and what happens is that basically it's a recipe sharing website in a nutshell so that you can, you log in, you register and you can follow other people just like with BuddyPress but then you can see other, you can start posting recipes. As you can see, trust me, they look good. In fact, I really, I'm hungry now. Let's just move on. The damn thing is not working. But it actually uses a plugin, it actually uses a variety of other plugins. One of the plugins it uses is called WP Post Ratings. And what happened is you can probably tell from the name of that, it allows people to actually rate the recipes too. So people rate other people's recipes, try out other people's recipes and rate people's recipes and you can see how many people of, like the more influential people in the network have higher rated recipes or more recipes than more people. I would just check it out and probably on a full stomach. There we go. Okay, whoops, here we go back. Sorry. Higher education. So BuddyPress has been actually, BuddyPress has been growing in the higher education space for a long time. And it's popular enough that basically, I could give just another talk just on higher education and how BuddyPress works within it. Excuse me. So, but we have a few examples. So if you ever talk about higher education in BuddyPress, one of the biggest and oldest sites is an academic social network called, for the City University of New York. Their developers have been working on this site for years and it actually holds a very integrated part with some of the developers at BuddyPress Core. The developers have built this site and have taken this site and built plugins and code snippets and have given back to the BuddyPress community in a tremendous way. And the site just is probably one of the largest network of members for a higher educational site. And they also use or built, and they've built a plugin out of this that's something called commons in a box. So if commons in a box is definitely a plugin then you need to check out if you run any sort of higher education site and want to use BuddyPress with it. But moving on, that is kind of a well-known example especially within BuddyPress developers. So I tried to find some other examples of BuddyPress and I found again quite a few in the higher education. So one of these is something called parent net from the Michigan Tech School. And what parent net is is just simply, it's not a very complex site but it does serve a purpose. It's a network of parents of the Michigan Tech students basically all gathered together and swap information. It's kind of like a support group for their parents, for the kids that go to the school I guess. But there's hundreds of parents and it's a seriously used site. It's very active and it uses more or less a default BuddyPress installation. Now some of you might recognize this temple university school of business since it's based here in Philly. It's actually a WordPress multi-site network and there's a thousand members that teach and take courses via the blogs and engage with each other through BuddyPress and they actually aggregate their knowledge. That means they publish what they type in through RSS feeds and various other forms. So since this is practically in your backyard, it's a good thing to check out. Dawson College has a community of teachers and what's cool is they use a plugin called BP Groups Documents so that people can upload and share documents within the groups that they're members of. So they have these BuddyPress groups and they share documents between the groups which is great because those documents aren't flooding other people trying to figure out and other groups are not creating so much noise. So they're sharing documents within BuddyPress groups, PDF Docs Word documents the whole nine yards. John Carroll University uses the WordPress and BuddyPress to connect students with alumni. So the alumni enter their information through a gravity form and that gravity form creates a mentor custom post type and BuddyPress allows the students to log in, browse these members within these categories and then they connect and they share stories. Actually pretty cool. So conferences and events. So there have been WordPress conference themes before. That's not new but there was something then, and there was a particular need that I've been working with for a number of years and this was one example that you can check out later of what a custom BuddyPress app would look like if it was built from the ground up and how it could actually fit a particular niche. So in this niche in particular is conferences and events. So the site uses gravity forms for enhanced registration. BuddyPress does again offer regular registration but if you're familiar with the gravity forms plugin it has a, gravity forms is a plugin but it also has a plugin for itself called user registration that ties into BuddyPress. So that gives you kind of a more enhanced registration capability. And the site also uses the followers plugin. Remember what we said with BuddyPress there was a two way type of Facebook connection, friend request and so forth. So the followers plugin actually changes that so you can actually follow other people without their consent but that sounds bad but Twitter does it, it's what Twitter does. It also uses something called a front end login form plugin so that essentially pushes some particular logins, password resets and stuff to the front end in the template. And it also uses some custom plugins that pull in conference tweets and Instagram posts and stuff like that. But from a technical side, if you ever take a look at the site there is what happens is that it actually monitors events. So actually right now it's monitoring the events you're in. So WordCamp US is actually monitoring that. And what happens is that there are actual BuddyPress groups. Remember I said the BuddyPress group API was very flexible. You can attend the event, which is what you're attending the event right now and you can actually check in. So you have to check in to a location like you would with Foursquare. That means that you would join the actual BuddyPress group. So you go to the event, click attend. Well that's joining a BuddyPress group, there we go. So in the activity of that group, the activity of this event is a BuddyPress stream, right? A BuddyPress activity stream. And then when the group is created, it's actually a WordPress multi-site installation. So when a BuddyPress group is created a WordPress multi-site blog is created. And so the tweets and the Instagrams don't are limited to that WordPress blog and are stored in that database. And this is an example of what a custom BuddyPress membership thing should look like. Thing, I'm getting technical here, excuse me. But this is what a membership list could look like if it was done basically from the ground up. So the site is also has a component in it where people can monitor, they can follow events and they get alerts and tweets and stuff based upon of that event is opening up speaker calls or ticket sales. So, but anyway, all the examples I've showed you today took a good amount of time and create from their creators. And it pays off because unless you're a developer you probably wouldn't know this functionality was designed by BuddyPress. And one of the best quotes I've come up with originally, in fact it's probably the only one I've come up with originally, is that for the best BuddyPress sites are the ones that you can't tell BuddyPress was used. So the more and the more slick it in, so you may be using BuddyPress or seeing sites that may run on some component BuddyPress and may not have ever realized it. So if you are running something on BuddyPress this is a quick list of things to consider you can review them at your own leisure. But it is important I think to call out that it's important to spec out your features first and then look for the desired themes in existing plugins next. And then I always encourage clients and people if they want to take a test drive install default BuddyPress WordPress on some server somewhere throw the plugins in and see if it does the kind of thing that you want it to do because it's a social site things aren't always straightforward as they seem. And with basic customization with BuddyPress the themes do exist for it but for advanced customization typically you do have to get some help if you're not a developer or an agency already. And we just also remember we talk about code a lot with BuddyPress but design and the user experience is just as important as the code because you are designing a site for social you're encouraging people to follow pass get involved be interactive on the BuddyPress site. And also a quick note that we should start adding possibly SSL for secure logins I don't think anybody's gonna fight on that one but Firefox and other browsers now are starting to mark login forms that don't have HTTPS as insecure. And I can share that I think that link will be tweeted out in a second if you want to look at that more. So anyway I put resources in the slides it's gonna be possible to read that up there but you can download it for later books, videos and hopefully places that you can find dedicated events for BuddyPress like BuddyCamp. I've found a list of people to follow I hope they forgive me but those are all people they can follow on Twitter they're involved into the BuddyPress project. And that's it. So thank you very much if you're interested in BuddyPress. Oh thank you, thank you. It's amazing because only half of you have been paid for that. If you are interested in BuddyPress or have BuddyPress questions, where will I be? Well I'll be in the men's room for a few minutes breathing deeply because I've finished the talk but I will be around tomorrow. So or if you can tweet me at Dimension Media. So any questions? I have no idea because I have a light shining in my eye. Someone can tell me if there's a question. Yes there is. Oh there's a voice. Thank you for the great examples. Tasty kitchen, holy crow. That is heavily, heavily customized. I was 30 pounds lighter before I saw it. Aside from the BuddyPress knowledge base is there anything or any place that you would recommend for guidance in customizing that heavily? I know that WP Tavern does some especially for the membership page but any place else that comes to mind that you'd recommend? When you say customize, what are you referring to? To really aesthetically customize the pages that are core in BuddyPress. Well the customization that I find is more because BuddyPress works with WordPress themes or at least the good ones or at least proper ones. So when you're looking at it from a design perspective when you're designing around the BuddyPress or making BuddyPress look like it belongs on the theme that's standard more or less theme development theme customization, the customization that you saw here is more on the coding side of things. So I'm sure people can chime in if there's any resources that they know if that's good for that, but that is a good question. Probably after I'm done heavy breathing I might be able to find a resource or two. The BuddyPress forms on the BuddyPress.org would be an excellent place to at least start off with with asking some of those questions. There isn't a formal site that's dedicated to BuddyPress coding as far as I'm concerned unless I'm missing something. But the support forms would be an excellent place to start. And I might think of something later. It happens. Hi there. So we have the BBPress plugin which does forums and we have the BuddyPress which does social. Can you speak to how are they different if at all? Which is a larger question of is Facebook like a forum or is a forum like a Facebook? Which should people use? Well, BBPress is a forum plugin. It's actually a very nice simple, relatively simple straightforward plugin. BuddyPress has social features but nothing like a forum, like a traditional forum. So BuddyPress and BBPress actually can work together. You can actually have a forum within your BuddyPress group, for example. You can have a site-wide forum that people can log in and use and it's sitting perfectly next to BuddyPress in the two hour long through the like best buddies. That's sort of things. There is very little overlap between the fact that they're just people communicating with each other but if you want a forum plugin on a social site you would use both plugins, for example. Does that answer your question? Yeah, thank you. Awesome, I'm like one for one. Hey, thank you, great talk. I work for a large environmental nonprofit and I wanted to ask a question. We have sort of a network that we've been using based on Drupal which allows people to form like city chapters and create events and get involved with certain things. That's something we could build on BuddyPress but I'm wondering what your take is on why isn't there more functionality built in the BuddyPress core like events managers or petitions or things for nonprofits. It seems like the basic functionality, private messaging and these things haven't evolved much. And the second part of that question, do you think the WordPress community has embraced BuddyPress to the extent that they could because it's another layer giving functionality to WordPress but it seems sort of fringe sometimes. Thanks. Well, I'm not gonna answer any, I'm not part of the core team. I know there's people in the audience if they want to stand up and answer that question, I will allow them. But I don't think I'm qualified to address that question. Pause for effects. Just waiting to see if anybody was gonna jump up or yell out for something like that. I didn't mean BuddyPress in the WordPress core but I meant more core functionality in the BuddyPress plugins. Well, I know what you meant. BuddyPress has a core team just like WordPress has a core team. So I'm not gonna put anybody on the spot in this audience and have them answer that question. But the second question, repeat that one more time just to make sure I got it and then I can answer the second part of that question. Do you think BuddyPress will or should be more widely embraced by the WordPress community to make more WordPress sites social? I think it's decently embraced now. I think it's just, I'm up here today as part of the, like telling you what BuddyPress can do. Social sites are not, are probably a very small minority of the projects that agencies get a lot of times. So not every site an agency gets is okay, this has to have BuddyPress. The exception, but more people kind of need to start thinking a little bit outside the box when it comes to BuddyPress. Not thinking of it as simply something that you activate in your plugins folder. And then all of a sudden now you've got all these and God help me, I gotta say it again. Facebook-like qualities. The purpose of this talk actually was just to get people to start thinking a bit outside the box. And I think if more people could think outside the box then that will increase the uses that BuddyPress has. I think that WordPress community is, I think it's, I don't think it's a, I think it's been decently embraced, but I think there's still a lot of education that needs to happen. I think people, a lot of everybody raised their hands. They kind of knew what BuddyPress was, right? But hopefully if you walked out of here, now you're thinking, yeah, I can't actually use this part of BuddyPress for this particular project or I can bring this up to my clients the next time I get pitched something. You know, something along those lines. That's my opinion and I can't see them so I have no idea if I, this facial expression. Hey David. Hey. It's Boone. Hi, sir. Hi, I am from the BuddyPress core team. I know. I just, I knew you were looking at me or so. Here I am. I just wanted to, great talk, thank you. So I just wanted to, I thought I'd help you out with that response a little bit. Social stuff is hard. What people think when they say let's add social features to a WordPress site is kind of a complicated question, right? If you want to, let's say, let's take WordPress out of the box. You want to publish something. That means you get a post box, you hit publish and then it shows up on a page. That's relatively straightforward in most ways. But when people say social, they mean a lot of different kinds of things. And sometimes they mean the ability for people to collaborate. Sometimes they mean the ability for people to share media. Sometimes they mean the ability for people to find new friends, right? So there's a lot of different aspects to social. The way that BuddyPress is built is intended to be a sort of small pieces, loosely joined philosophy in the sense that we have these different components. And the components are meant to be fairly general and they're meant to work together in various ways. But in most situations you're not gonna use all of them. You're gonna use the things that you actually need. As far as things like events calendar and stuff, it's true that these are often used in conjunction with BuddyPress. But I guess the way that I often think of this as somebody who builds BuddyPress sites is that certain things come with BuddyPress because they're needed on most social sites. But then because those small pieces are loosely joined, you're able to bring other pieces into the puzzle as well. So things like calendar plugins that you would use for WordPress often integrate directly into BuddyPress. So you're bringing, if you think of BuddyPress as a sort of collection of many plugins that enable social things, you're able to bring other plugins in as a sort of larger piece of that social puzzle. So it's a hard problem to solve. But I think that's the philosophy we've been going for. Instead of like a turnkey solution, it's like a framework for building social websites. Yeah, I've been doing BuddyPress work for at least three years. And I can tell you that as soon as I think I can build a solution or a plugin and another user has come along, they have a, I don't think I've used my code more than once on a particular project because everybody has particular needs even if it's like I wanna show events on my website. When you get down and dirty with the social aspects, it's very different. So it's, thank you Boone for that. Did he just magically just, wow, that's cool. All right, was there any other questions BuddyPress related TikTok? I can't, all right. Nope, faked, all right. All right. That came good, dang, there.