 So, how many buddy press users have we have in here? I can't even see you because the light's too big. I trust all of you, your buddy press. So in 2008, I published a book called Buddy Press for Dummies. 2008, for people that have been using buddy press, for quite some time you'll know that back then, buddy press was a different creature than it is today. That book has never been updated, so don't buy it. My publisher continues to put it on the shelves for sale all the time. It's available on Amazon. It hasn't been updated since 2008, so they probably wouldn't be too happy to hear my anti-sales pitch, but you're not going to get anything out of it because buddy press is completely different today than it was back then. So, can you all hear me okay? I lost my voice. I've been sick this week. Brad Williams took me to the Monday night football game with the Eagles versus the Packers on Monday. It's pretty cold, and I've been out here in the cold weather and woke up with absolutely no voice this morning, so I'm a little bit worried about whether or not it's going to hold out. So buddy press-powered intranets, for those of you who don't know, an intranet is a private network that is accessible only to an internal group. So if you think of any company that's out there, any organization, if they have a private network that is available only to the people that work for that company or only to the people that are involved with that organization, it's considered an intranet. Some expected features of an intranet would include things like an employee directory or document sharing, a shared events calendar, webmail or communications, and collaborative workspaces. So these are all of the things that software packages like SharePoint, for example, will make available in intranets. We're just talking to somebody at one of the... I don't know which party it was last night, but it was one of them who was talking about how he knows somebody who's been working for a company for 20 years and all that person's been doing is building the intranet software for this company. And I thought that sounds like a really exciting job. I am glad that somebody else is doing that and not me. So BuddyPress is interesting. When you look at the expected features for an intranet, employee directories, collaborative workspaces, anybody who works with BuddyPress and WordPress can kind of start putting the pieces together. BuddyPress, if you're not familiar, it's a plug-in for WordPress and it adds kind of a social layer or social core to your website. Think of it as like social networking or a community plug-in that allows your people or your visitors to interact easily on the web, on your website. So it includes all of the features that you're kind of accustomed with social communities, activity walls, things like that, which I'll get into. For an intranet, building it with WordPress, BuddyPress, you use just a regular WordPress installation. Regular WordPress themes, regular WordPress plugins, BuddyPress is one of those. So the cost of building an intranet for your company, as you can imagine, is free. At least the tools are free. If you need developers, of course, that's a different story. Large groups of employees within an organization and different departments can be handled and managed through WordPress and BuddyPress, which I'll talk about in a moment. Another advantage of it is that navigation menus and content access can be adjusted by using member levels in WordPress with BuddyPress. Department or company-wide events can be managed with an event calendar. Different department or a massive company event calendar can be managed and shared efficiently with WordPress and BuddyPress. User logins can be authenticated with single sign-on. And it's cost-effective. As you all know, WordPress is free, BuddyPress is free. A lot of the plugins that you use can be downloaded from the free directory and themes as well. So with BuddyPress, you have things like user profiles, friends, groups, activity streams, user profiles. And this is just kind of a brief overview of BuddyPress for those who aren't familiar. User profiles are an area where people can upload their own avatar. They can include biography of themselves, links to their social media. You can also create custom profile fields. In BuddyPress, so as the owner and administrator of the site, you're able to ask your users to include any information that you really want and that is pertinent to your community. BuddyPress creates a membership directory. So that is very helpful in the creation of like an employee directory, for example. You can find users in a member directory, you can send friendship requests to connect, send private messages through the messaging system, and view friends and their activities within that internet community. Users can create new groups. They can invite users and colleagues to participate in those groups and you can have forums within those groups as well. So a lot of knowledge sharing, Q&A, FAQs can be handled through group forums and the creation of photo galleries and sharing of photos and viewing a stream of group activity with everybody who is participating in that community. I was talking about the profile fields, so this is a default view of the profile fields in BuddyPress. By default, BuddyPress will ask for a name and email address. However, you can create profile fields. So you can go beyond just asking for a name or asking for an email address. You can ask for their Twitter handle, their Facebook, their Instagram, their LinkedIn, their everything. And you can toggle the different field requirements to make things required or not required. And there's different field types and different visibility toggles. This is an example of a membership page, a profile page in a BuddyPress community. You can see the right side of the screenshot there shows a lot more than just my name. I've got a bio there. My website URL is there and different extras like my job title. How I use WordPress, you know, where I work, what my function is at the job. So you can really add a lot of different profile fields to user profiles to create a custom view for your community. BuddyPress comes with a fair amount of BuddyPress components already built in. But the nice thing about it is you can take what you want from BuddyPress and leave the rest. So you've got the extended profiles I just talked about, friend connections, private messaging, activity streams, notifications, user groups, site tracking, all of those things can either be activated or not in a WordPress BuddyPress installation. So for example, if you just want to have the extended profiles and maybe a member directory but you don't want to have the forms or the groups, you can deactivate the groups. But then six months from now, people are like, I want groups though. You can go back in and you can activate the groups. So you can really take what you want and leave the rest. So this is an example of an activity stream. So in an activity stream, users can view what's going on real time in your community or in the internet as we call it. They can see when new posts are created on a blog or they can see when new groups are created, they can update their own status much like on Facebook. You can talk about what you're eating for dinner or your cat. Comment on statuses when people update their own status. You can leave comments, things like that. So this is a screenshot from an internet that we did for a company called Starbucks. And you can see the activity stream is in the middle and over on the left they've got, I'm sorry on the right, they've got some other metadata about the community group, including groups and event calendars. So speaking of Starbucks, what I want to do is kind of give you some insight and maybe some case studies on body press, WordPress-powered internets that we've worked on at Web Dev Studios. And Starbucks is one of them. And who's, anybody not know who Starbucks is? Good. Starbucks trains their baristas on how to make all those great coffees that you guys love. They also train them on how to make all that great foam art, the latte foam art, you ever see that? So they have a lot of training programs. And internally these baristas need to, anybody here work at Starbucks? No. Okay. You're what? You have a son who did? So these baristas, they get trained on new equipment, new drinks. Whenever they put out a new drink, they get trained on it. And there's these training videos that they take. And in this internet community, all of the baristas are logging in and they are assigned a store location. So in body press, each store location is a group. And each barista is assigned to that group. And within that group, they are able to share and talk to other baristas in the area. But they also have quizzes. And learning modules are in LMS where they have to watch a video and then they take a quiz on that video. So this is how you make a pumpkin spice latte. You put the pumpkin in, you put the coffee in. And they watch this video and then they have to take the quiz. If they reach 80% of that quiz, they get a score of 80% or greater, they're able to progress to the next quiz or progress. If they're not, then they have to take the quiz over. They miss it three different times than the manager gets flagged in the communities that the manager is aware that maybe this barista is struggling with the caramel macchiato. So it's kind of a nice internal tool that they use not only for training and learning and management tracking of employee progress, but also a really good tool for employees to communicate with other baristas as well. I've got another screenshot of the activity stream. Hang on one second, my voice is holding up, I'm excited. So the baristas interact with other ones and they make friends at store locations, share their progress. So in this case, the buddy press groups, like I said, are store locations. So they've got different locations like Philly or Harrisburg or anywhere else, Main Street, South Street, different locations for the stores so that managers and employees are assigned to those groups. But, you know, it doesn't matter where they live in the world, they can interact with other baristas as well through the use of a directory of employees. They do the quizzes. They have a leaderboard and we added a layer of gamification with a plugin called BadgeOS. Anybody familiar with BadgeOS? BadgeOS is a badging system for buddy press. And out of the box, you can tell BadgeOS to assign badges to different achievements people reach in your buddy press community. So whoever the top commenter is gets the Chattie Cathy badge or something. But with Starbucks, they used BadgeOS to give people achievement badges every time they completed one of the quizzes or any time they progressed through a certain training or learning module that they put in place in their intranet. It's pretty easy, by the way, to create custom badges. BadgeOS comes with like a default set of maybe 20 or 25 default badges that just are installed with WordPress and buddy press. But it's pretty easy to create new badges and set up achievements that users can compile and complete and earn within your community. Another intranet site that we did was for our national park system. All of the national parks across the country from Alaska to Florida to Hawaii and New York, all of those national parks have rangers. And those rangers are located at the spot where the national parks are. So they're not all sitting in, you know, the National Park Service Office in Washington, DC. So what they wanted to do in the challenge that they had, the solution that they needed, was a training area, an internal training area for all of these rangers and all these national park service employees to be able to not only communicate with one another but access knowledge and access libraries and content and training materials that they put out. Because a ranger in Alaska is not necessarily going to be able to fly into DC to attend, you know, a certain training week that they're having on like moose, I don't know what they're training people on in Alaska. So what we did is we put together this private buddy press installation with WordPress. They call it their commons, so the National Park Service Commons. And the NPS employees really have the opportunity now to communicate with one another, share resources, tips and tricks and give each other advice but then also access the knowledge base and access the training materials that they have for all of their rangers and national park service employees across the country. So now they have a system where all of these people who were never connected before now have the ability to be connected and share that information which then increases the knowledge of each park service employee because they're able to access all of that. One final intranet build that we did was for an energy company in Oklahoma called Chaparral Energy. They use buddy press for the company directory. They utilize groups for each department. So if you can imagine like accounting, finance, HR, each group within the company is a group in buddy press. And then you've got the group directory. So you've got a department directory as well as an employee directory. And departments can create sub-departments to branch off of the main group. And then there is an events calendar that they added in there to track company events and we created a custom document management system for document sharing. So it's kind of a trimmed down version of SharePoint built with WordPress and buddy press. You can imagine a lot less expensive. The screenshot you're looking at kind of shows some areas in their intranet that they felt were important for their employees like the weather, the documents. They, on the bottom left hand side, they've got some employee recognition. So some featured content fields that we could put in there with a custom post type. They've got a jobs custom post type as well to list out the different jobs that are available within the company and broadcast that out to the employees within that intranet. It's like a custom build of just the members directory, like a buddy press members directory to create that internal employee directory. And then like I said, the group directory becomes their department directory. And all of these directories are searchable and filterable. So employees can go in and really drill down to find what department they're looking for or what particular employee they're looking for. This is another screenshot of Chaparral, kind of the internal internet that we did. This isn't like buddy press specific. You can see a lot of WordPress stuff that's in there like featured posts and news feeds. There's a little banner rotator across the bottom, that big red banner with the gifts. That's where they kind of make holiday announcements or company-wide announcements to the employees. They've got the calendar listed there. They've got their stock ticker so that employees always have like real-time data on how the company is doing. So in addition to the functionality of buddy press, we kind of looked at the functionality of WordPress as well to hook in and expand those intranet offerings. So all of these tools together with WordPress and buddy press builds a pretty neat company intranet and private directory for companies to use. And we're doing a lot of this. We're doing more of this now than we ever have been because companies are looking for a way to connect the employees that work for them and really try and organize the communications, the collaboration, and the document sharing that happens within their company. So that is my talk on buddy press powered intranets. I hope you take a look at buddypress.org. If you have any questions, don't buy my book. You can come up and ask. I'm happy to answer any questions you have. But it's nice to know that these types of tools are available to create a very cost-effective and efficient way for companies to really manage those internal communications. And it's interesting to hear about how people are using tools like buddypress for things other than, you know, a public-facing social community as well. So I uploaded my slides to the intranet, not an intranet. And you can see the link is up there. My username is lswilson and it's buddypresspoweredintranets, not that big long title you see outside on the card. So thank you very much for your time today and enjoy lunch and the rest of work camp U.S. Thank you very much, Lisa. That was great. If you want to form a single file line behind the mic in the middle, we can do a Q and A. That's a great light. I need sunglasses up here. Go ahead. You got sunglasses for me. Hi. So we've been told that your book is something that we shouldn't purchase. But if we're looking to learn more about buddypress, are you considering working on a second edition of the book or is there somewhere else that we could find that information? So the question is about books on buddypress. I know. Is Tammy in the room? Tammy Lister? She's got a book out on buddypress and the title fails me right now. Anybody know the title? Buddypress themes. She had another buddypress book out. Buddypress for theme developers. Thank you. That is a book that Tammy has written. I am not currently, I don't have any plans currently to write a buddypress book that's kind of driven by my publisher. They kind of tell me what I need to write and then I just do. So I don't have any plans currently to write a new buddypress book or update the old one. Excellent. Thank you. Sure. Thanks. Hi. When you showed the Starbucks example, you mentioned the LMS. Was that LMS built by you or was that another LMS that was integrated into the Intranet site? Great question. She had asked if the LMS that we showed on the Starbucks example was built by us or if it was something that was already in place and it was already in place. It was an LMS I think called Learning Times that they used and we integrated that with the Intranet. Great. Thanks. Hi Lisa. My name is Shanta and I won. You won? I won the fight with my friend back here to get first. So. Nice. Congratulations. Thank you. And I do own your book but that's because I bought it initially to actually start my career in WordPress. So I thank you for that. So I teach at a college. We actually use buddypress as part of our way of getting our students engaged and the biggest thing that I find and that I'm having a challenge with if you have any advice is getting them to use the forum. We've given out participation marks and said use the forum. You get five marks if you use this. Like it's really not hard to do. Sure. And yet they will still create their own small groups elsewhere on Facebook and everything else and then we say, well you never asked us. It saves us getting emails. It allows them to collaborate. Like I don't know how else I can get them to do this thing. Money. So if you have any advice. Pay them. So the question is if I don't pay me that much though, sorry. Other than that. The question is how to get the people and the members in your community motivated to utilize the tools that you've provided for them, the forums, the groups, things like that. It's hard. I mean when you're up against other social networks like Facebook pages that everybody's on Facebook and that's where they are. That's where your students are and that's where they're used to communicating. So I mean it is very, very difficult to try and get them to do that. I don't know that there's any one clear answer except maybe look at some integration tools that integrate things like Facebook with your community to try and see if you can pull that content in because I don't think you're really going to, are your students like regular college age students? Yes. Yes. I don't think you're really going to get them off Facebook. That's where they're at. That's where they're interacting with their peers and other students. So it's probably better to look at how you can integrate that with your community rather than trying to fight the system. Thank you very much. Sure. So yeah, so Shanta did beat me to the punch, but anyways. So I'm Jonathan. I work in higher ed also. And I'm wondering when you've got 1,000 people trying to get into one buddy-press site, how do you manage the caching and the servers to handle that? That kind of load when they're logged in? You need a really good host to start with. And that's no joke. I mean, a good hosting environment is going to really help when you've got a relatively large community. Because running a large community like that with a number of users that are creating content on your website, uploading photos, uploading videos, chatting, sharing activity, that's more of a load than a regular website. And that's more database calls and all of that type of thing. So you need a really good foundation with a hosting platform, with a good CDN, try and cache and do any of the transient storage for any of the queries that you've got in there. So really get a good developer to go through and do that site audit to make sure that things are being cached where they can be and where it makes sense to cache them. And then utilize third-party services as much as possible with your single sign-on or social sharing or video hosting and try and optimize. I think optimization speed is like a daily, ongoing thing that you just constantly tweak. OK, great. Thank you. Sure. Hi, Lisa. Hi. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about data security. That's one of my big concerns. What's automatically included with BuddyPress? And if you used any extra security for the data that people are putting into the system? There's a fair amount of security plugins available. You've got iThemE Security. You've got services like Security. You've got plenty of plugins out there that kind of help with that. BuddyPress and WordPress are pretty secure out of the box. If you're doing any custom development, I think that's where a lot of risks come in. If you're having developers who are not sanitizing fields and who are not using good security practices, so make sure you're using a solid developer. And if you are certainly very concerned about the security of the code that you're using, it's worth it to do a site audit, to have somebody who is knowledgeable in that area kind of do an audit of your code, of the plugins that you're using, your themes, because a lot of times when you run into those security issues, it really comes down to the code that's running on the website. And a lot of misconception around WordPress or BuddyPress is insecure usually comes down to the code that's in the theme you're using or the code that's in an errant plugin that's installed in the network, particularly, I think, with BuddyPress. Because BuddyPress has gone through so many different phases over the years that themes and plugins that used to work with BuddyPress don't anymore or kind of work with BuddyPress, and they may or may not be secure. So just be real careful about what you're using to build the network. Thank you. Sure. My name is also Lisa. Good name. And I have worked on an intranet for the last 20 years. I might be the person that was mentioned to you. So you're the person I'm talking about. Perhaps. It was totally hypothetical. That's fine. So my question was sort of already asked, but can you tell us how many users the Starbucks site got up to and did they have any scaling problems because of the number of users? The question was how many users the Starbucks site got up to, it was a pilot intranet. So I think they were running in the thousands and thousands of users. There were a lot. Several stores that were implementing that training program had a lot of baristas. I think there were maybe, is Brad in here? Brad Williams, he just left, of course. Brad, hi. Hi, see you. Do you know how many users that Starbucks intranet ended up using? A few thousand or so, yeah. I don't recall any problems with scalability or issues around that. OK, thank you. Sure. Hi. Hi. You talked about quite a lot of additional functionality in a lot of these builds. I was wondering if you experienced any stability issues or any maintenance issues with these sites. And then I guess the follow-up question to that is how long did it take you to get a build like this stable? I'll use the Chaparral Energy one as an example, just because it's the most recent. So the question is, with building these, how long did it take us to build them? And have we experienced any stability issues or? Maintenance issues. Maintenance issues. Maintenance is always an issue, depending on who your client is. The Chaparral Energy one took about eight to 10 weeks to build, but that had a custom design component to it as well. So if you layer on custom design and then custom development, it's about an eight to 10 week project to build that up. Because it's WordPress and BuddyPress, you're utilizing WordPress and BuddyPress themes, not themes, but plugins, that are available to run the things like the weather, the stock ticker, the banner rotator, custom post types, things like that. Didn't really run into any stability issues at all, because we do a lot of that code review and optimization prior to deployment. And it is an intranet, so it's not a public-facing website to where the whole world can access it. It's really limited, and with that company, it was limited to about three to 400 employees at that time. But again, I go back to vetting the plugins that you're using for the network and making sure that they are secure, making sure that they use best practices, making sure that they're optimized so that the site runs very, very well. From a maintenance standpoint, I think for any site like this, it's really going to depend on the level of knowledge and education of the client that's working with it. So sometimes we do need to be there to kind of hold their hand post launch to answer any questions. A lot of times their users have, because when, and this is true for an intranet or just a website, a lot of times when organizations use a plugin like WordPress and they've got a user base that is generating traffic and content and forums and things like that, their users want to know how to use the features on the website and the site owner doesn't necessarily have those answers. So I always caution people to educate themselves so that you can educate your users, because now you are a community manager and these people who want to use your website are looking to you for those answers, so be prepared to answer them. So sometimes we hang around for that type of maintenance as well. Thanks. Sure. Hi, I'm from the higher ed as well. And I have a bunch of questions about groups, but in the way you use them, in the way they're created, et cetera. But the first question is, is there any way to integrate with an enterprise group system if you already have groups existing? I'm sorry, an enterprise what system? An enterprise group system. Oh, I mean you can integrate WordPress and BuddyPress with pretty much anything that's out there as long as it's got tools to allow you to communicate with it, like an API for example. So we could use a REST call to get groups for people and use those instead of... Yeah, I mean you can integrate with things like Salesforce for example and this is just a hypothetical example. If you've got group data that is stored in Salesforce or your organizations or company Salesforce installation, you can use that API to build that bridge to kind of pull that data into a WordPress BuddyPress installation. Okay, but that would be development that we would have to do. It's nothing that's built in. No, that's definitely not something that's built in. Yeah, okay, thank you. Sure. Hi Lisa, first of all great talk. Thanks. Second, I like big projects and I cannot lie. Do you have any examples of a city or a community using BuddyPress on a front-facing, not intranet, front-facing level for community members or schools and just basically a city with a front-facing BuddyPress instance? Do you have any examples that we could look at? Or can you think of any? I can think of a recent one and I think Cameron, a gentleman named Cameron Barrett actually spoke here yesterday from Newark Public Schools. Yes. Yes. So that would be a really good example and it's like a multi-site BuddyPress using forward-facing platform for Newark Public Schools that we worked with him on. So that might be one of them. I'm trying to think of, we've worked on a number of them in the past. Trying to think of one that's still public. So the one that I'm thinking of is one that was out of Tennessee and they were doing like hyper-local community groups allowing local businesses to advertise within the group, things like that, but I don't think it's active anymore. Newark Public Schools would be the biggest one that I could think of. Does anybody in the audience have examples of public-facing BuddyPress website that schools or cities are using? Who said me? I can't see you because that's a very bright light. David? So you have a bunch of wear in your slide deck. When do you talk? Here, are you talking here? Well, how can this gentleman get a hold of you? You just talk to this guy right here in the second row. I don't move very quickly. Well, you have a lot of... So a lot of colleges and schools use that. Can you think of one off the top of your head? All right, that kind of answered your question a little bit, maybe. We have one more left back there. Hi. Hi, this is a little similar to a previous question. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about getting data out of an existing employee database into BuddyPress profiles and how to manage divergence in those datasets. So if you've got, I mean, what format is your data in? It's just in a database, just in a MySQL database. MySQL database. So I mean, as with anything else, you have to map that data. So with users, you would map user names, any of the profile data, any of the metadata into the corresponding database tables in WordPress and run that import. I mean, data really can be ported from any system into WordPress and BuddyPress as long as you understand the mapping and getting the scripts to work and run the data import. So would you disable edit fields so people couldn't change their data in BuddyPress or would you send data back from BuddyPress profiles into your employee database? I mean, it really depends on what your goals are for your community. Her question was, if you allow users to edit their data, if you would send that data back into your original, right, your original data source. So in my experience for people that have, like are maintaining their group and employee information in like a Salesforce instance, we're not editing it at the BuddyPress level or on the internet level. They're literally editing, changing, manipulating that data in Salesforce. And then there's a timed sync that happens on a daily, hourly, weekly, whatever basis that syncs that data and sucks it from Salesforce into WordPress. But then if you want your people to be able to change their photo, change their name if they got married, whatever, if you wanna give them that ability then that is completely up to you. But what you need to do at that point is determine if that data sync that's happening with Salesforce is gonna overwrite their changes or not. Or if you kind of write the logic that says, if these fields have been changed then don't overwrite them. So it's just kind of that forethought that you need to do before you start manipulating and pulling data from one point to another. Thank you. Sure. I get that. Thank you very much. Let's give Lisa one more round of applause. Thank you and enjoy lunch.