 I have a doctorate in English Literature and I've been working in what we call the digital humanities for probably about 20 years. So I've picked up all my WordPress and other technology kind of on the street and a lot of what I do is work for higher education, building various sites often in WordPress and often in other CMSs to further especially teaching history professors, English professors, language professors, how to use especially the web but other digital tools to put up research projects and teach to some extent although I focus more on kind of the research aspect of that. So that's who I am and I've been using WordPress probably since at least 20 years 2007 or so, 2007 so quite a long time and I've seen just the web in general and community management on the web really go through a lot of changes just in that the last 10 years. Some of you look fairly young, some of you like me are not so young so who remembers web 2.0, most of you but not all of you. I think community management for websites has changed a lot, a lot like everything in the last 10 years and I'm going to talk about that a little bit at the end of the talk. So one of the things I wanted to ask first is who has used one of these tools? Who has used multi-site or buddy press or BB press? Some of you, half hands not all of you. I actually am interested in the topic but I use none of those. That's actually great because I have planned this as a fairly introductory overview of what these things can do and I'm going to show you some examples of sites that I've worked with that use one or more of these tools. So again not to sell you on anything, I don't even actually sell anything, I work in non-profit higher education but just because those are the sites that I've worked with and I wanted to tell you about my experience with those. So if you do find this overly introductory for you, feel free to leave, I won't be offended, you can certainly do that. But the main thing that I'm going to do in this talk is go over the differences between these and when you might want to use one and when you might want to use another, some basic features, some basic tips and as I say I'll show you specific projects that I've used them with and you can ask me questions at the end of the presentation or at the happiness bar. All right, so let's get started. First of all I want to talk a little bit about what is a community. It's a very vague term, it's probably a little bit of an overused term on the internet. Community management is in fact a job, now there are conferences for community management, there is a whole set of theory about community management and there's lots of different kinds of community and lots of different ways to manage communities. So I'll talk about some of those, but I wanted to harken back to a really old book who's heard of or read The Clutrain Manifesto, only one person. This again is showing my age, this was even before I really got heavy into the web. You can kind of see, this is a screenshot of the website at clutrain.com. Clutrain.com went live in April 1999, almost 20 years ago. It is a book, it's a great book, it was kind of a collaboratively authored manifesto, one of the authors of whom himself had a PhD in philosophy, David Weinberger who has since worked a lot in libraries and so on, but he had gone from having a PhD in philosophy to working in internet marketing really early on in the 90s, right? How do you do that? Well, it's funny because one of the things that they teach you in philosophy is logic, and it turns out that programming is a lot about logic. So there's more to it than you might think. And then also those of us in the humanities, I bet a lot of you in here have humanities degrees, English degrees, people with English degrees turn out to be really good marketers. So this is a book about marketing, and it's really a book about how marketing was changing in the early days of the internet. And if there's one sort of line that you would want to remember from this book, it was this, markets are conversations. And that was a really new thing at the time. That was a really new thing to say, because marketing before the 90s had been exclusively one way. There were exclusively one way media for communication. There was television, there was newspapers, there were magazines, this book actually talks a lot about the history of direct marketing, which is really interesting, and sort of doing contests and things that were interactive, but by mail, a lot slower. And PhD and philosopher, along with a lot of other early internet thinkers, he was hearkening back to the Greek notion of the agorah, the open marketplace, which was almost like a street fair today, a food truck rodeo where everybody is milling around and really talking with one another and going to one stall and then another, and then also having it be a social space. And again, I think this is something that we're kind of used to now. We're kind of used to the notion that we go to a website and that there are reviews on it from users, that we can have a conversation on Twitter and CC, the actual brand, with complaints or even compliments and that that brand might get involved in that. But again, it's hard to overstate how new that was in 1999. So it's a great book. If you're at all interested in marketing or internet or otherwise, I recommend it, really thoughtful. But again, very much part of its time in how new this was. Similarly, I want to say that when we use that word community, what we mean is conversation. When you're a community manager, what you're trying to do on some level is facilitate conversations. Which again is very much what we do as teachers in the humanities. If you've ever, sometimes successfully, sometimes not, you try to get a bunch of undergrads in a room and get them to talk about the reading and sometimes it goes well and sometimes it doesn't. And there are tricks they teach you and having a good book is a really key part of that. But conversation is also a really vague term. It's not even actually that much more specific than community. But because it's a little newer, it might be a little easier to get our hand on. So here is Eris the barista, who uploaded a photo of himself to Wikimedia Commons. And if you think about going into a Starbucks, whoops. You're gonna have a conversation with Eris. It's going to be a very ritualized conversation. It's gonna be, hey, how are you today? What can I do for you? Hey, I'd like a venti skinny vanilla latte, which is one of my go-tos unless I don't feel like the vanilla syrup. And there is a conversation there, but it's a commercial one. It's temporary and it's really not intimate. It's kind of ritual. And there are a lot of communities on the web that are fundamentally like that. I'm gonna talk a little bit about BB Press later and user forums. A lot of user forums have this kind of aspect to them. It's really very transactional. It's not intimate. It's, I need something, you need something. There's a little bit of a pretence of friendliness, have a nice day. How can I help you, that kind of thing? But fundamentally, it's a commercial transaction. So there are also a lot of commercial websites that will have spaces like that for conversation and call them a community and they're not really. Eris is not really one of your community members, maybe a little bit. But at the same time, Starbucks is a place where you do go to have more substantive conversations with your friends, right? And Starbucks allows that and encourages that and enables that. It's one of the sort of reasons that Starbucks and places like it have really succeeded. And again, I'm kind of old enough to remember to be honest when they're really, like before the coffee revolution, even the coffee revolution and the internet revolution from my perspective kind of happened at the same time. I remember when I was in high school and we wanted to go somewhere and chat and just be teenagers together, we used to have to go to Denny's. They really weren't coffee shops. So it's a much better situation that we have now where you do have, some people have called them third places. You have your home, you have your work, and then you have these third places where you can go and be social without alcohol. So there are communities, and I think that's what we more usually think of when we say the word community. There are communities like that, which is really you and your friends. And I think really most friendship is really built on conversation. I mean, what is that friendship without a conversation? You're talking about shared interests, shared people, what is so and so up to, more intimate kinds of communication, more intimate kinds of conversation. So this is usually what people mean when they talk about the kinds of communities they want to create on the web. So just some things to think about. When you're thinking about what sort of community site you want to build, these are just some things. Oops, I've got some extra lines on there at the end. Sorry about that slide mistake. Those first three things really are what I want you to look at. How autonomous are those communities? Meaning, are they already formed before you build your website? And are they looking for a way to talk to one another and engage with one another without your interference? So again, if you think about a Starbucks, the staff at Starbucks is there pretty much to give you coffee and to wipe it up when you spill it and that kind of thing, but they're not really in on your conversation with your friends. So that's what I would think of as an autonomous community is one that kind of exists already and that you don't have to bring into being. Does that community meet in person? That's a really important thing to think about because online, you can have lots of degrees of presence in that community. Some communities are online only. And it's one of the great things about the web is that you can create communities where you almost never meet the people that you're interacting with. Or you did know them a long time ago and have met them but now you live in different states and you're communicating that way. So there's a whole sort of range of that to consider. I think that actually this at WordCamp is a really interesting example for a lot of reasons, right? So we have a website here for WordCamp, built on WordPress amazingly enough with multi-site, which I'm gonna talk about. But the conversation is really happening in person and that actually is the case for a lot of these sort of community websites. We can do a little commenting. There are certainly user profiles for the speakers and things like that. But mostly our WordCamp website is there to facilitate this in person set of conversations and in the hallway and at the bar last night and that kind of thing. So that site could have baked within it all kinds of forums and conversational tools, but it has chosen not to because really the conversations are supposed to be happening there. And that too is a community website. So how technical are the users is another really important thing to think about because some of these tools are, I guess I would say that probably the more autonomous the community, the more likely they are to at least have one of those people who has a good bit of technical knowledge that can set up their own independent group. So those three things are really what I'd like to think about in terms of community and sorry for the extra lines there. All right, so let's start first talking about multi-site. Who has specifically used multi-site? So quite a few of you. Some of you may know that WordCamp itself is built on multi-site. It is the central WordPress organization automatic has said, we want everybody to be able to have their own website for their own WordCamp and so we're going to allow them to spawn that using multi-site. Here is what a multi-site back end looks like. It looks a lot like the WordPress back end, you may notice. But if you see up at the top, this is me logged into a particular project that I'll talk to you about, you have network administrator. So we could talk about how technically to create a multi-site installation, but it's actually not all that difficult. It's documented in the WordPress documentation, create a network. Usually what you get is a network of sites and the sites are installed in either subdomains or subdirectories of your main domain. So you have wordcamp.org and you can get a sub directory that's Raleigh.wordcamp.org. So then you as a central administrator can control the settings for those new sites and control the contents and all kinds of things. So this project, you can see here, I've actually got on this site, I've got both BuddyPress and multi-site installed. But if you see there the little item on the left that says sites, that's where you would control all of your sites as a multi-site installation administrator. So some basic features of multi-site as the title suggests. Users get their own websites. Super admins, administrators of that network can control a lot of things, including whether users can install plugins on their own WordPress website. Whether users can create sites themselves or whether you as a super admin are going to create sites for people. What themes users can use. There are a lot of WordPress plugins that are specifically for multi-site that give multi-site a lot of other capabilities. For instance, one of the ones that I've installed on this multi-site installation that I'll talk to you about allows me to put a dashboard message on everybody's website. So that, hey, the whole network is going to be down for an hour on Sunday while we do maintenance, that kind of thing. So that's an extra plugin that isn't baked into multi-site. There's another multi-site plugin that does a little bit better user management than multi-site does out of the box. So plenty of multi-site only plugins. Multi-site is good for communities with a high degree of autonomy. So again, we here at WordCamp Raleigh, we are very separate from WordCamp Bogota in Columbia. I mean, we are obviously similar in a lot of ways. We have similar interests, but fundamentally we're not interacting with all of those other WordCamps right now. We're managing ourselves. We have our own set of WordCamp administrators and organizers. So we are pretty much an autonomous community. Multi-site is good for communities with a fairer degree of technical skill, especially if what you're doing with multi-site is setting up, which I think is really the best way to use it, setting up something where people can create their own websites. So for somebody to create and manage their own WordPress website, they need to have at least one person who is comfortable doing that. And you can make it quite easy, but nevertheless, not everybody is even comfortable with the notion of, I'm going to manage a website. So a fair degree of technical skill. I think multi-site is really good for communities who meet in person, because that's usually why that community needs a website, I think. Multi-site tips provide lots of defaults and templates, and I'll show you a few of these on the projects that I've worked on. Plugins, themes, and content provide some, but not too much, customizability. And because it's so sort of decentralized and because the communities with their own websites are so autonomous and separate from each other, it is good to make sure there's a central place for the users of those websites to ask questions. Really, honestly, every single tip for all of these should be provide good documentation as well. But that's just sort of a general life lesson. Always do provide good documentation when you're managing any kind of community. Let me show you how this works a little bit in action. So again, here's that same multi-site back end for a project called that camp, which is here. And I just wanted to show you here that what you can do as a network administrator, this is in settings, settings for my network. And there are lots more settings. But I can set the text for an email when a person creates their own website. I can create the default first post on that website. I can create the default first page. And again, what I have done with a separate tool for multi-site is I've created a default site that has all of the content on it. And has all of the plugins in it that I needed to have. And when a user on this project wants to create a site, what happens is that site gets cloned. So there's a lot of default content right away on that new site. And there's also some customizability, but there are default plugins. There are four themes that they can choose from that have their own degree of customizability, and there's quite a bit of content. So what that looks like, the project that I've primarily used multi-site on is something actually really similar to WordCamp, to be honest. So it's a global series of events. That camp, it's at thatcamp.org. That camp is an acronym. It stands for the humanities and technology camp. Humanities, of course, being history, English, languages, philosophy. So these are a bunch of WordCamp-like events that are designed to, they're actually unconferences that are designed to help humanities graduate students and faculty in particular learn about technology from one another. So this is a really recent screenshot. You can see here we've got lists of that camps coming up. People, we're at now over 300 of these. We've been going since 2008, and we've mapped. You can see up in the right-hand menu, we've mapped websites onto camps. So just like here, if you have a WordCamp, you have a website for that WordCamp. Similarly, here, if you're having an event, you get a website for that event. And we've done a fair amount of custom development to allow the users to register their site with the information that we need. And as again, we've built in that ability to clone an existing site, which is a really helpful one. And you can see that the other thing that we did was we developed four custom themes, often based on things like the default WordPress themes, 2016, 2017, 2018, and so on. And what we asked people to do is to create their own logo from materials we've given them, visual logos, and then they can go to town. So this is a that camp that's coming up in Valence in France in June. And this theme is something that we provided to them. It's one of the four. And even the pages that are there along the top are default pages. And then they can go in and edit the content. We've even put a lot of default text in there. The leopard wearing headphones, the cheetah wearing headphones. I don't know what that cat is. It's their own idea, but that's obviously not default. That's their own beautiful, beautiful graphic. Here's another example of a site that exists on our network. I should show you the domain names. We've had these in subdomains. And one of the things that we did when we set up our subdomain scheme. You can see it a little bit here in the left-hand corner. This is that camp Colorado because one of the things we had to think about was domain name templates, as it were. And because just like this one, there's a word camp rally pretty much every year. So you have to distinguish word camp rally 2018 from word camp rally 2017. We encouraged people to put the year in their subdomain name. And occasionally people, it's not validated. We just have instructional tests saying, hey, when you choose a domain name, a subdomain name, please use this plus the year. And then if they don't, I have the central administrator can go in and email them and say, hey, can we please do this? So that if you want to have a Colorado 2019 that camp, it's a whole separate site. So that's the way that's working. And again, you can kind of see content really similar. I think they've even chosen the same theme here, but we do have some other ones. All right, so that's a rough overview of multi-site. Any questions about multi-site before we move on to BBPress? Yeah, it's a field. So I get into trouble when I try to go to the live web from a presentation. But I'll explain it to you and I can show it to you later. So they have to have an account on thatcamp.org, which is the major domain. So they just create a user account the ordinary way you would. We customize the form a little bit, but that's it. Once they have an account on thatcamp.org, then they can choose to organize a that camp, which means create a site. And so for that, we did a custom registration form for the site. It's actually very, it's not very customized, let's put it that way. And among the things we ask them as they are creating a site is what's the title of this site, what sub-domain do you want for the site? What else do we ask is there? I'd have to look at the actual registration form. No, it's automatic. It is automatic. I have to admit, I wish I had, I'm not sure I remember anymore what we custom developed and what multi-site does out of the box. I'm pretty sure a multi-site out of the box does not automatically provide the user with the domain they request. I can't remember. We'll have to look it up. Yeah. No, because it's- Not necessarily for your rights. No, not with multi-site because, yeah, because it's either in a sub-domain or a sub-directory of your main domain. So it's going to be something, something, yourdomain.com or yourdomain.com slash something, something. I recommend sub-domains definitely over sub-directories. It just seems better, but as usual, there are ways around that. I have also got a plugin installed called domain mapping, which means that it allows them to set up something at, like, thatcamprally.org, and then to also create a site which would be called Raleigh2018.thatcamp.org, and to basically mask the site so that when somebody goes to thatcamprally.org, it goes to the site on our domain or vice versa depending on how they want to do it. So that is possible to do, but fundamentally it's on one central domain. Yeah. What makes your perspective, does it make any difference between the folders of the sub-directories and what makes your perspective? It doesn't make any... So number one, I've only ever done it in sub-domains, so I don't have any experience with doing it in sub-directories. But there isn't really any difference. To me, it seems more clear that it's one network of sites when it's a sub-domain on a main domain. And I've had little weird technical difficulties with just installing WordPress in sub-directories before, so it made me nervous about doing it on the network. I don't know, is the question. Fundamentally no, but there's weird little, I don't know, almost superstitions that I have. Yeah. Oh, got it. So for SEO reasons, there is a pretty significant difference there, if everybody's content pulls into the same domain, then it's not a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain. So it's not a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain. It's a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain, it's a sub-domain. Interesting. So for SEO reasons, there is a pretty significant difference there, if everybody's content pulls into the same identity for SEO purposes, then you would want to sub-director there. That's interesting, yeah. And, you know, one of the things that came up after we'd been doing this for a while was analytics. So of course we do Google Analytics. I'm actually really bad at SEO and I'm not in it for the profit, so I don't need to be good at it, but we did install a plugin, a Google Analytics plugin that individual site administrators could themselves install to track the traffic or whatever on their own sub-site, but, you know, we track it every once in a while on the main site. But yeah, that's interesting, I didn't know that. Yeah. It's a plugin. I want to, I'd have to look up what the actual plugin is called, I believe it's called Site Replicator. It's got the word replicate in it. I'll look for that. Yeah, remind me to find out. Anybody else? So BBPress. How many of you have managed a site with BBPress? A couple of you, yeah. So one thing to note about all of these tools is that literally all of them can be used together. And in fact on most sites it's a good idea to use some more. So BBPress is just really the gold standard plugin for creating forums, user forums. Here's the BBPress site. It's fundamentally one of these mega WordPress plugins that everybody uses. And I bet that even if you have not managed a site that uses BBPress, chances are you've been on a forum that is run by BBPress. So I had a hard time, you know, what are the features of BBPress? Well, it's forums. You know what a forum is as soon as it's a forum. So replies, topics, threads, really, really useful for technical forums. Not really user profiles. I'm going to talk quite a bit about user profiles. MultiSite also does not really give user profiles out of the box. It's just websites and then you can set up individual user profiles on that with an author's page or whatnot. But like MultiSite, BBPress is not really about user profiles. You have a little bit, right? You have your name and your avatar and that's about it, but not really substantive user profiles. So to my mind, BBPress is good for communities that aren't really communities. You and your barista, these sort of transactional, hey, I need an answer to a question. Communities with a low to medium degree of technical skill. Communities that have a central moderator. That would be key for a couple of reasons, because number one, BBPress forums are really prone to spam. And number two, because there probably are examples that counteract my claim that these are good for really loose communities. I think there's nothing. Reddit is fundamentally a forum, right? And some of those sub-threads on Reddit, it is not run by BBPress, but it's kind of a similar functionality. Some of those sub-threads on Reddit really are, you know, the people know each other and they know who they are in a really fundamental way. Just in my experience, people are mostly using BBPress for these kind of, you know, especially technical forums, that kind of thing. But with any of these sort of loosely connected communities where almost anybody can sign up for it and just ask something random, I mean, you do get not only spammers, but you get trolls, that kind of thing. So with multi-site, similarly, you do need to have a central administrator, but honestly, once those sites are built, I'm like, that's your site, you're managing that. I mean, maybe I can help you with it, but fundamentally that's your site. With BBPress, if I'm installing BBPress on my site, I really am taking on the responsibility of managing that forum of really making sure that nobody is getting into horrible arguments of making sure that, you know, it's not getting filled up with spam. I really need to kind of keep an eye on it with BBPress. So one of the things we don't do on our big multi-site installation, we don't install multi-site, sub-site administrators to install their own forums, because that would just, you know, I don't trust them to really keep an eye on them to the degree that they need. But so these are good, you know, the reason why you want to have a public forum, as opposed to relying on something like Facebook, or Twitter, or Instagram, or Slack, is that they're public, or email, right? I mean, it's good to have an email forum on almost every site, but the reason why forums are really popular for technical support is that, number one, anyone can ask a question, so that's good, but when they inevitably ask the same question that's been asked five million times before, I can give them a link to the documentation or to the thread. More and more and more forums are, BBPress has not really caught up with this, but more and more and more forums are really designed to say, look, search for the answer to your question first, because somebody has asked it and it is on here. It's not exactly baked into BBPress. There is a search bar, but a lot of people won't even let you get to the place where you can ask a question until you search to see if you can find the answer. Simple public conversations that can be referred back to, so that can't really happen in email unless you want to spend all your time forwarding. It can't really happen in private places like Slack, but with that publicity comes that potential for trolls, for vicious arguments, that kind of thing. So BBPress tips. I think these are the same tips I had earlier. Sorry about that. Let's look at some forums. Again, you have probably seen all of these before. Topics, freshness, replies. This is the same website that I was showing you earlier, and we have one central forum on the central website for either, honestly, most of the technical issues are from site administrators, sub-site administrators. So we have one forum for them, although anybody within the whole that camp community can ask a question. Questions about BBPress. I feel like that's probably one of the best known tools. I haven't done too much with it, yeah. None at all. I mean, like all of these there, you know, it's open source, it's customizable, and so on. There are themes. I mean, BBPress comes with themes packaged. So there may be, I wouldn't be surprised if you can get a Reddit theme for BBPress because it really does facilitate that. Yeah. Yeah, so this is, let me go back to that page. So again, the way that camp site works, there's one central site at thatcamp.org, and then there's all of these sub-sites. So the central site is the place where you can sign up to create a site, right? But that central site also has user forums. So I think I've got, actually, you can kind of see here. Here's the central site. That's where you go to sign up for a site, and you can even see in the menu up there, there's forums. And you, if I had, well, I've got this little bit in the screencap from the forums. I'm feeding into the sidebar the most recent replies from the forums, but all of that is only on the central site. It's actually perfectly, technically possible for me to have allowed all the sub-sites to have their own forums. But for reasons that I mentioned, I just didn't trust that because I really think they would go wrong really quickly. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay. Anything else? Okay, BuddyPress. I see a lot of anticipation. This seems to be the one that people are really here for. So the site that I was showing also uses BuddyPress. You know, it does not use Commons in the box, which is the fourth thing that I'm going to talk about. But it does use BuddyPress. Who has used BuddyPress before? Again, used in the sense of managed site. That has it. I'd actually be interested before I get into this. What are your impressions of BuddyPress? Good and bad? Yeah, that's true. No, I think that's true. Yeah, I've definitely had the experience of, hey, I need BuddyPress to do this one weird thing. Here's the perfect plugin to do it. Oh, it's five years old and no one has updated it. It doesn't work with the current version of BuddyPress. Yeah, I've definitely had that one. Ask me about my user directory that I will show you in a little bit. I think that's true. There is a small community of committed, committed committers, one of whom I've worked with a lot, both on this site that I was showing you, Boon Gerges. I don't know if anybody knows Boon. A couple of people, yeah. So he's really great. He's fantastic and he taught me a lot and is really responsive. You're right. And actually, weirdly enough, Commons in a Box, which I'm going to show later, is one solution to that problem, not necessarily the best solution, but essentially all Commons in a Box is, spoiler alert, is BuddyPress wrapped up with a curated set of plugins and themes that they do maintain. So they're like, okay, Commons in a Box is BuddyPress with a bunch of extras that they have said these are the most useful ones and they make sure that those are updated. It's one solution to that. It probably doesn't have all of the plugins that you want, even still, you know. So yeah, other reactions to BuddyPress, impressions of it. Okay, we'll just get into it. Here's what BuddyPress is. Has anybody worked with Drupal? Yeah, a few people. So Drupal has evolved a lot over the years, but both Drupal and BuddyPress were really, they were artifacts of this Web 2.0 era that I started out talking about, where people started realizing that you didn't, you didn't just need a website. I remember when websites, every website had a link on it called links, and they would list a bunch of links to other websites. And then round about the mid-2000s, everybody said, oh, my website needs to be social. It needs to be a social network. And BuddyPress was the way, the first way, I think, that people started doing that with WordPress, just as Drupal's big, Drupal, of course, is modular and extensible and all of that, just like WordPress, but Drupal really had built-in social features that WordPress at that time did not have. So that's kind of where BuddyPress comes from, is online communities, teams and groups. The features here, my next slide is just about the BuddyPress features, but honestly, they're listed exactly on the screenshot. User profiles with custom profile fields, visibility levels and common field types. This is one of my favorite features of BuddyPress. And honestly, on a lot of the sites that I manage, I install BuddyPress just for this reason, because it has wonderful user profiles. And then I turn off a lot of the other features. You know, like a lot of things, it works really well. But I can't stress enough how much I really like this for this feature of BuddyPress. Settings, email notifications, BuddyPress lately has gotten really, really good about user emails, too. And you can template them. So for communicating with your users via email, BuddyPress is really good. Groups. Groups are really interesting. And I'm going to show you a site that uses, well, really comes in a box, but comes in a box is itself based on BuddyPress. I've never myself found a use for groups, but that doesn't mean that there aren't any. Groups are a really interesting feature of BuddyPress that are kind of in between multi-site and BBPress in terms of allowing people to create their own, what they call here micro-communities. So as I said with multi-site, multi-site really allows you to have people create their own very separate, very autonomous community. Groups are sort of not quite as autonomous as a site, but they're still more of their own little world than, say, you know, a forum thread is. A forum topic is. Yeah. Classes. Yes. Exactly. So when it is a group, I know exactly, and that so far is the only really good use case that I've found for groups. You could use it for teams, you know, project teams, that kind of thing. I think there are other better sort of project management, you know, pieces of software that are better for teams. But yeah, for classes, of course, the class discussions and the example that I'll show is really about that. Groups are great because they're a community that meets in person, but they're not always together but, you know, they may be, you know, only together a couple of times a week but you want to enable discussion that way but they don't need a whole website of their own, usually, right? It's temporary. It's going to go away after the end of the semester. But yeah, so that's groups. Activity streams. I'll show you some of this. Actually, I don't think I've screen shot of this but it is useful and we do have it. One of the really key things about managing community sites is that it's important to make sure that the community doesn't look dead, that it doesn't look abandoned, that it isn't dead or abandoned unless, of course, it is dead or abandoned like your class is over, you know, and then, so activity streams, they'll show so-and-so has friended someone, so-and-so has created a group, someone has joined a group. By the way, one of the things about groups that's kind of interesting with Buddy Press is, again, there are really fine-grained settings for access controls for those groups. Is this a group that anyone can join? Is this a group that people need to be invited to? Is this a group that is totally private and no one can find, you know? So that's important to know. But when the groups are public and people are posting, you know, updates to them and so on, an activity stream will show all of that. All the group activity across the entire domain, you know, so-and-so has just joined this site, all of that stuff. So they can be useful. Lots of great notifications in Buddy Press. Again, I turn off a lot of them. People can control their own notifications. Friendships, which again, I've never used. Private messaging, which is good. Lots of infrequently updated Buddy Press-specific plugins that are great. That sometimes do get, just like in WordPress, get incorporated into the main code base. So for a long time, they had a plugin called Custom Profile Fields that was great and they've begun to kind of incorporate that into Buddy Press itself. Let me show you a little bit more about features. I've talked about really all of these. Buddy Press is good for user profiles. I'm going to show you some examples of what it can do with regard to user profiles. Buddy Press is good for centralized communities with the exception of these groups, right? So if you've used Buddy Press for groups for class groups, you probably didn't set up one whole Buddy Press instance for that class, right? You've got a Buddy Press for your school, right? And then all the different classes are maybe forming their own individual groups, right? So you have the centralized community in the sense of it's NC State or whatever, probably a much smaller school than that, I would think. But, well, although I'll show you a really big one, communities that don't necessarily meet in person or at least not that often, communities with a fairly low degree of autonomy. So again, I was just talking about, you know, sites being the most autonomous. You manage your own thing. Groups being sort of moderated but not really. They're still pretty autonomous but not as autonomous. And communities with a pretty low degree of technical knowledge because there's a lot about Buddy Press that functions in the way that we expect social networks to do with friending and favoriting and messaging and so on. So people, and we're talking about users here, not you setting it up as the administrator. People usually find it fairly easy to use with the exception that it has so many features that it helps to turn a lot of them off because it can be a little confusing. It's not difficult to use, but it can be a little bit overwhelming. So here's a site that I've been working on that, as I mentioned, that campsite that I was showing you does also use Buddy Press primarily for the user profiles and the activity streams. Turned off friending, turned off messaging because on that central site, I felt people didn't really need to do that. They're all hanging out on their own multi-sites. But we do have every single user profile that site thatcamp.org has 11,000 something users. They tend to organize themselves into about 100 people per camp. But we do have one big overwhelming user directory of those, I think maybe 2,000 of them are spam before about 9,000 or so people. And then we also do have an activity stream for all the stuff that's happening on all the sites. This is another site where I'm using a really kind of pared down version of Buddy Press. So this is Frankenreeds. This is going on right now. 2018 is the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein. The novel was first published in 1818 by Mary Shelley, who was then 19 or 20 years old. And what we're doing is we're, this is a sort of a, we're inviting people around the world, again in a quite decentralized fashion, to organize their own events celebrating the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein. So a lot of schools, a lot of libraries, a lot of museums exhibit, especially reading Frankenstein aloud. So you can see here, we've got Join the Community, Call to Action, really big, you know, it's important to have those calls for action. But what I'm using Buddy Press here for right now is almost exclusively the user profiles. And I have enabled messaging on this, but so far nobody has used it. We are talking about maybe setting up groups in a while. We haven't had any demand for that. It might be the case, but, again, this is so decentralized that I think the groups are a little bit overly, they don't need to have those conversations on our website. They're having them elsewhere. So I'll show you what this looks like. So this is our partners' page. These are users, essentially, the people who are themselves organizing events celebrating Frankenstein. And, you know, yeah, speaking of Buddy Press plugins, an early version of this page had an embedded Google spreadsheet and you can see everybody on it. So there's about 300 some partners right now. And that was managed separately from user registration on the site, which was a big pain. I'm like, no, we just need people to register on the site and have that show up in the directory. But the big, you know, issue is that we wanted it to be one long directory, not have to page through several. You know, you can do beautiful directories with this where you have 10 people with their nice, beautiful avatar, right, and your title and so on. But then you have, with 300 users, you've got to page through a bunch. You know, we wanted them all listed on one page. There was a plugin that did it. Sadly, it did not work. So I wound up doing this. If you scroll down, you can see all 300 of them. We did now integrate user registration with this partners' page. And these are the fields. I'm going to show you the registration page that we asked for from people when they show up, the custom fields. And I managed to get this to do by installing a table plugin. This is displaying in a table. And then the table plugin allows the sorting and so on. So it's not a buddy press plugin at all, but it's working beautifully. So this page lists essentially all our users, all our registered users on the site. And what we ask, you know, this site really is very much about events. So people are, this is so distributed and the events are so very different that people, we're not giving people websites because they're just managing it on their own, from their own organizations. With that camp, the events were all kind of the same event, right? So we could create one kind of website and just spin it off for them. And we knew that they would need a website. Not all of these need websites. So we didn't install a multi-site on this. Let me show you what the user profiles. But we do have a beautiful events management plugin that we installed so that people can then register events in their events listing. But that's outside of BuddyPress. But BuddyPress is doing this user page. And here's what a user profile looks like. These fields, name, organization, city, state, province, or region, and country are all custom fields that I set up on the registration form. It's interesting, yeah, for this, what they have is subscriber access. But I did tweak the settings so that they could upload media for their events, which is not by default something subscribers are allowed to do. So when they're contributing events with this other plugin that has nothing to do with BuddyPress, they can have really any level of... I can set that plugin to allow contributions from anybody. But the one thing that I didn't want them to have contributor access, but I did want them to be able to do their event. So I tweaked it so that subscribers could upload media. So these are subscribers, all. Yeah. Yeah, it just maps them on to the WordPress. Again, these profile fields, even name really, but these are obviously not default WordPress user profiles. What it... I said yes, and it's ever so slightly more complicated than that. User profile, which just has essentially username and password, you know, display name, that kind of thing. But what it does is it syncs to the custom BuddyPress profile. So there's a built-in thing to BuddyPress that is sync the profiles. Yeah. I do not let them see the WordPress... In fact, the next slide should be... This is the registration form. So I don't use that plugin, but we customize this. It has... BuddyPress is technically a plugin, but it's a really big plugin. It has many, many, many subdirectories, many of which include, for instance, a customizable template for the registration form. So this is a BuddyPress registration form, and I styled this and added in the custom profile fields for this. So yeah, my users do not go to the WordPress registration form. They go to this. That makes sense, but then it syncs with their regular WordPress profile, and I think the reset password page is just the default WordPress reset password. So yeah, makes sense. And in fact, there are... Obviously, one of the things that we're collecting is location, and I have a feeling that I didn't do quite enough work to look for BuddyPress. There are some plugins that are collecting basically geolocated location data, which I haven't just gotten around to doing. There's one called GeoMyWP, which again, when you look for WordPress plugins, a lot of them will say whether they're BuddyPress-compatible, and a lot of them are because it is a very popular plugin, and so on, and a lot of them are mostly whether they're multi-site compatible, so this right now is plain text data for city and state, province, or region, and it's not validated. I'm working on this project technically five hours a week, so I didn't have time to do it, and the text was good enough for 300 users, and then we have a separate way of putting them on a map with a different tool, but I think there are ways to collect geolocated location data when users register and to have that automatically feed into a map. Are events listening? I don't know why I'm forgetting all the names of plugins today. I think it's called Events Manager. It again, too, is a big, it's probably, yeah, and it's great, so we have Attendant Event, and that's a list of events that people have submitted, and then for each event, it locates that on a Google map, and I think there's, again, I haven't gotten into the way to get all of the events displayed on a map, but what we have is all our users displayed on a map, but that's a slightly manual process that I'm doing right now, which again, I could automate, but then it takes time to automate it, actually. I feel like there's probably a lot of questions about BuddyPress, but any further? I actually would love to show you a little bit more of BuddyPress in action on the live web, but yeah. The important thing to know about BuddyPress is that BuddyPress has its own forum software built in, but it allows you to choose that or BBPress, and almost always when I've used BuddyPress with a forum, I've chosen to use BBPress with BuddyPress. The way I, let's see, the way I usually do it is that anybody who registers for the site immediately gets granted participant access on the forum so that they can post to the forums, and that most of the forums that I have, you have to have a user account on the site in order to post to the forums. That's not the only way to do it. You can create forums that anyone can post to without logging in. You can create forums that only, you know, people with a certain access level. Yeah, that's all quite pretty much the latter. It sounds like more of a happiness bar thing. Let's go through it and see what they do. But basically, oh, we are out of time. Are you kidding? Oh really? I'm sorry. Very quickly. Comes in a box. Is BuddyPress with a bunch of selected plugins? The end. The site that it's used on is this. It's used for CUNY, the CUNY system, which has a bunch of distributed campuses and it attempts to let them work together. One really important thing to note about Commons in a Box is that it has wikis and documents built in so that it allows their users to have their own wikis and documents. Sorry we're out of time. I'm going to go right from here to the happiness bar and then we can perhaps talk about your question about access controls. Okay?