 All righty, then. Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen, to this action-packed, non-stop, fun ride, fiasco, train wreck, kaleidoscope, adventure time. All right. So I slight change of plan what I propose to us, because this is not a democracy, but I like to pretend it is, just like real government. I'm going to talk to you for a half hour. I'm going to do some, I'm going to show you some examples of how body press is used in multiple industries. These slides are going to be made available afterwards. You don't have to write everything down. This is some of the information I presented before. So if you've seen some of my talks, then some of this might be familiar. And then we're going to end at 11.30. And I propose at 11.30, we end early and beat everyone to lunch. If my advice, and again, I'll give you directions. We have food vouchers for you. My advice to you is that make sure I stop at 11.30. And then we do have to do a little bit of a walk to a building, which I'll show you where that is. And my advice to you is grab the food and then bring it back here, because we only technically have about an hour for lunch. So you go there, get food, bring it back, and then I don't care if you eat while I talk after lunch. At least we'll all be here, and we'll beat all the other workshops and the other children that are also here. Excuse me, young teens. All right, so let me boot this sucker up. Get the gerbil running here. And we'll also talk about a little miscellaneous body press things along the way. Okay, so before we go into some real-world examples, let's talk about why you would want to use body press in the first place. And maybe as a developer, you're excited about body press. You know the advantages. But sometimes it's hard to communicate that to a client, where they go, what's this body press stuff? Is this software? It's a plug-in? Okay, well, there's other plug-ins available where I can get this custom developed. And sometimes those solutions may work for them. But generally speaking, the advantages that I walk away with with body press for clients is, first of all, of course, it's open source, just like WordPress. And just like John mentioned earlier, it works with almost every well-like good WordPress theme. I use the word good in there for a reason. I think if your body press isn't working with whatever WordPress theme you're using, I wouldn't use that WordPress theme. It's probably not built. It probably doesn't have all its marbles. You get to also control your own data. Ning used to be big. But I think once that collapsed, or at least the free version of it collapsed, a lot of people started to realize. Yes, we have a question in the back. They're having a problem with my voice? Okay. David, can you message poppersoft in general? Okay, can you look into that? It's the noise background noise. And maybe we have to go knock on the door downstairs to forgive you and maybe we'll bear with us here. They can put it on mute and I can just, you know, do a puppet show or something. I'm not sure yet. Remember I said this was a trial run? All right. So anyway, customization, obviously using body press allows you to customize it to whatever you want. And we'll see those examples in a minute. And you know what? Body press doesn't have to be the solution either for complete projects. People kind of forget that a little bit. But so I've done a numerous projects before where there are just people, Internet are still things people want built. Intranets, right? Things that don't see the time of day publicly. What body press is great for those. And also proof of concepts. So you have someone approaching you who is a startup company. And either they are, they're basically looking for investors, many of them. So what they will do is they will use word press as a platform and body press to, as a proof of concept, to show their investors, This is pretty much a minimal viable product. Please give us money or whatever they want to do with it. And sometimes I build projects and that's as far as they've gotten. Basically they take it, they take the money and they go rewrite or do whatever they want with it. And other times they go forward with it. But it's good for proof of concepts. And of course body press is obviously heavily supported. So now that we're familiar with body press, we're going to see how they're being used in six different industries. And some of these I'm going to go more quickly than others. But like I said, the slides are available online. And many of these sites are public. Some of them are a little bit more public than others, especially mainly the educational sites. First of all, we're going to talk about government. Now you don't hear a lot about word pressing government sites, at least in the U.S. Word press and government, there are some notable examples, but still working on that. And that's probably because word presses presence in the government also relies a lot on the internet. So it's the network that you don't see, but the government uses internally. One of the examples of this is the National Park Service. And this was actually built by a company called web dev studios. I'm not sure some of you may be familiar with web dev studios. This is an internal social network just for the employees for the national park service. They use the standard body press features, like activity streams and groups. And they use the bb press, oh, yeah, I got to mention today, for forms. And also they use this group tag plugin. So they tag the groups so they can better archive and search for them. So in the slides, I've put the prominent plugin url. So when you go back to the slides, you can go find these plugins for yourself. The other example is gov loop. And it's built by people called ten up. Still hiring. This is a resource that actually allows Government employees to share best practices and career building opportunities. If you want to know what that is, exactly go look at the site. I just wrote that. Actually, this is a good example of a Body press site having over 100,000 members in its community section alone. Some of its groups i think are in at least the five digits group Memberships for body press groups. This is actually a more Straight forward example of body press integration. So as you can see, it looks more like a default body press site Than some of the other examples. So non-profits. Yeah. Yay for non-profits, right? And this is a web, one of the non-profits that i'm familiar with Is a company called, or non-profit called foundation of excellence. It's fairly new and it basically works with academically Talented students from low income families. So they basically, if these kids like have, when you go to College, you're supposed to tour a bunch of colleges and pick one, right? But if you are from a low income family, you don't have that Opportunity. So this non-profit gives them kids Those opportunities. It also does dean camps and you Probably, you will see some of those people helping out Volunteering on sunday for our kids activities. But basically, what they do for their camps is that they Create this body press network that's private. So it's publicly accessible but obviously you can't get into It unless you have a secure username and password. And it allows the parents to see what their kids have done at the Camps on that day. They can list achievements and their Courses that they're completed and they actually can upload Some pictures. Some of the pictures are actually Uploaded by the students themselves if they're old enough Because they're actually taught word press or blogging skills In the camps. And this is just one way Educational and non-for-profits can use body press Especially if you have kids involved and parents involved. Software as a service. I know i wasn't here but john Maybe john talked about this. John is involved with something Called flocks which is the first word press powered Application to do the full hosting, full featured social Networks. So you don't have to build your Own social network anymore. Now that flocks does it and they Charge you for it, i think. But here the point is that this Is an example of a sass or software as a service using Body press. And actually, if i took Conference one day to like a paid model, like pay a couple Of bucks a month and you'll get notified when these Conferences have opened up their speaker calls which is Originally why i built it in the first place. I missed a speaker call, i missed the tickets for this Conference. Well, log in, activate, Join a body press group and you'll get these automated Emails for a buck a month or something. That's a software as a service, right? So really body press can be used for those things as Well. Community. So body press is Accessible and it has a low barrier to entry, at least For its basic functions. So it's been a choice for many Community projects, local projects, that sort of thing. So people use body press to build social networks for Neighborhoods. They use it for churches, Religious reasons, youth groups. And even realtors use Body press to set up profiles for their realtors within Their companies sometimes. So one of the examples of a Community-based site is something called study church. And i actually spoke with this gentleman before. I kind of investigated it and it's just basically a Community site based on bible study groups and the Memberships are actually hooked into restrict content pro, Which is a plug-in that allows people to pay you money and You give them access to content in various areas on your Website. So this particular website has a free Membership and it also has a, i guess at the time i was Talking to him but by now he probably has this in place. A premium membership. So this is how he's getting a Little bit of income to help with the site. So the website is basically a one big study collaboration Aspect. So when you answer a question in These bible study groups the answer is saved as a comment. It's also a body press activity item so that the group can Engage back and forth based upon the answer. So it's kind of like, you know, it is truly what a social Network is. It's truly communication between other Members in an open forum. So that's, i thought that was Actually a pretty good example of a community-based site. This one's my favorite. I think every time, yeah, we know David. So, yeah, all right. Sorry, my brain's getting past all the jokes. Okay, now we're good. So i think every time i show Examples of body press i try to clean out the old stuff And bring in the new stuff because that's, i mean, America. But the kitchen, tasty Kitchen always stays in my slide deck. This site, i don't know how old this site is. It's one of the oldest ones, but it's also one of the Maintained sites a body press there is. I mean, this site is not like, it's not like an auto Pilot or anything like that. This site still has active Members on the site, i think on a weekly, not on a Weekly, but a daily basis. I think it's totally public. I actually suggest you create an account. And, you know, and experience how they have modified it. It uses body press for the users, of course, but the users Have the ability to create recipes and share those recipes And catalog them. And actually there's a Post ratings plug-in that they incorporate so people can Actually rate other people's recipes. So this is why i don't add anything to the site. But it's actually, the content on it is so rich that that's What makes it so interesting and probably so popular is that They just took body press and just added a community aspect Around just sharing recipes with each other. It's very well done. If i look at this anymore, i'm going to be hungry, but i suggest you check it out. So moving on from community sites, higher education. So body press has been growing in the higher education space for quite a while. And that's the same thing with word press as well. Word press is popular in the higher education space as well. I think there's a conference coming up about that, too, but i can't remember what it is. Oh, is she in the room? All right. Moving on. But anyway, word press has become more popular in the higher Education space, and so therefore body press is also kind of taken to it as well. And in fact, it's body press has probably become so popular. We could probably just have just a 30-minute talk just on how colleges and Universities actually use body press. By the way, that was my speaker application for the conference. That was it right there. So let's take a look at some few examples. This one's probably the oldest slide on my deck, too. If you ever talk about higher education and body press, one of the Biggest and oldest sites is an academic social network for the city University of new york. I don't know. C-u-n-y abbreviated system. Cheese. This boon started this, like, how long ago? It's forever. Boon, if you can hear me, Give me a sign through live stream. By the way, how the live stream is coming along. Still cracking? All right. Crack-a-lackin. Okay. So, basically, developers, this site is, this is so old. I almost forget how it started. I would love to have boon explain it In detail. But the developers not only created This site for the education with body press, but they've created It. It became so popular. They basically, like, invented plugins and functionality that Have been either incorporated into body press or has always Been kind of developed along a parallel in body press for a Long time. This site actually supports a Number of huge, large networks. And there's, like i said, i think The plugin that came out of that is something called commons in a Box. So if you're more interested in That, google that, commons in a box, i think, oh, and i also Have the url up there that is just dedicated to that type of Body press application. This is like the premiere example When you're talking about educational body press sites. Another example, though, let's talk about there is something At the michigan tech school called parent net. This isn't for the students. As the name implies, it's for the Parents. So the parents went ahead and Created a network and we're talking hundreds of parents here. They created their own network for their children at Michigan tech. So the parents can swap Information. They can discuss concerns. I put that in quotes. Not sure when i wrote that. But whatever concerns are, they can discuss them. And they can get some questions answered. So basically it's a parent support group for their college kids. Which i thought was actually pretty neat. Me, on the other hand, i wouldn't notice them gone. All right, so moving on. Temple university school of Business. Now, some of you make, this is Actually a college out of philadelphia. It's a multi-site network that allows over a thousand Members not only teach and take courses. So basically this means they write blogs. And these students can also learn and engage with each other With buddy press as well. So they've got the blog Functionality mixed in with the buddy press. And they also do this, they also send out specific news. I'm not going to use the phrase incorrectly. News alerts or knowledge alerts through rss feeds. So people can subscribe to these rss feeds and get the Knowledge that way. Very tech-worthy school for Still using rss feeds and knowing what rss feeds are. Dawson college, it's a community of teachers using buddy press. But what's cool is that they use a plug-in called buddy press Groups documents. Anybody ever heard of buddy press Groups documents? Good. So you know i'm not making this up. So people can upload and share documents with other people Inside the buddy press groups that they're members of. So it's only available within those groups. And that's really nice because when you have groups sharing Documents, it doesn't clutter up the rest of the website, right? So you have one particular department sharing documents And they don't have to go to a separate documents page. And you just go right to the buddy press group. And so if you're sharing documents with buddy press, I suggest you look at that plug-in because that could be A nice way for your website projects. And then finally we have a website, john carrell university. Uses wordpress and buddy press to connect students with Alumni. And the alumni enter their Information into a gravity form. Anybody ever heard of gravity forms? Okay, i'll just assume that was the s. That populates a mentor. And basically there are custom Post-types called mentors. And then that populates that. And then there's a few custom taxonomies mixed in there. But anyway, buddy press allows students to log in and Browse these mentors and then be able to connect with Them, share stories with them and so forth. Most of these education sites you can't access publicly. One or two may require permission or special access. So i suggest you check them out. Now, we've already, the conferences and events, we Kind of already talked about this. This is just some random Screenshots that you'll see when you look at the slides. We've already kind of looked at this. But again, i can at least share with you some of the Plugins that i did use for the conference site. Gravity forms. Buddy press followers. Buddy press followers is a plug-in. When you, the standard buddy press like friendship model is Closer to, oh, god, i'm going to say the upward. Closer to facebook, where you have to, hey, i want to be your friend. And that friendship has to be accepted. And then your friendship, you're both friends, right? That's the way it goes. You just can't be a friend without the other person accepting the invite. Buddy press followers is a plug-in where it's kind of more like twitter. It's like that angry x stalking you from the back. It's basically, they follow you and you don't have to reciprocate. So i use that system. And it's actually a pretty good plug-in, Because a lot of the buddy press sites that i use, you don't Have to have the other person respond to you. Now, that comes in handy. You can use both plug-ins at the same time. You can follow somebody, have someone follow you, just like on twitter. But you can also use the default buddy press friendship model When you want to, let's say you want to establish a deeper connection, Like you want to direct message somebody, but you don't want People to start direct messaging you if you're not following them back, right? It's kind of like, you know, weird. So anyway, and then finally, the front end registration and login forms. That's a breather. But this is a plug-in that used to be Pippin's plug-in, and now he's taking over it. Anyway, this is actually a plug-in that takes your front end Registration and login forms and puts them on the front of your site. So you can create basically custom login pages, custom registration pages. The gravity forms that i use, and here's a trick for you. A lot of people, not a lot of people, but there is a persistent problem. It's not an epidemic, but it has happened often enough That people do ask once in a while about buddy press registration spam. It's always a constant battle, and there's actually probably good plug-ins for it, And there's probably good techniques that i'm not aware of, And other people in the audience probably know, but my personal technique Is that for a lot of my buddy press projects, i use gravity forms. Again, this is not always applicable to all projects. You do sometimes need that buddy press registration form. But i basically, and user gravity forms has a user registration plug-in. So you can create a form that people can enter, and when they hit enter, Their information gets sent to wordpress to create a user, And also gets sent to the buddy press metadata fields. What does this mean? It means you can replace the wordpress, Or the buddy press registration form. What does that mean? I have not gotten a single spam registration from a gravity form Website that i've built, zero. Of course, maybe i don't design things Popular enough, but i'm pretty guaranteed that gravity forms, filters, There's something with gravity forms, and you can also add on to gravity forms. It's just basically a different, you know, the bots look for Buddy press registration forms, so it's probably the most of it. But anyway, that's, whenever somebody says i have buddy press spam, The quickest thing i can tell them is get a copy of gravity forms Replace a registration page and see what happens. But anyway, again, that's just one of probably many different examples. So the best buddy press, this is something that i've had a whole deal. The best buddy press sites are the ones you can't tell buddy press was used on. Those, but of course those are the ones that take probably the longest time to do. All the examples i've showed you today took a good amount of time and effort from their creators. And it pays off because unless you're a developer, you would know it was powered by buddy press. And buddy press, you know, the more you get away from the default, Buddy press look and feel, the more your client is going to think this is Like a really kick-ass website and it doesn't look like anybody else. Same thing with twitter bootstrap, right? You know, everybody's, you know, there's pros and cons to using it. But the biggest con in my book is that all the twitter bootstrap sites look the same, Or at least a lot of them do. And then when you show someone a great site, This is, oh, how did you do it? And they find out the bootstrap, That's actually a pretty good thing. Same thing with buddy press a little bit. So when people ask me what to consider, things to consider for using buddy press, First, it's important to spec out the features first. That sounds like a no-brainer, but immediately a lot of clients come up To say, i want to use buddy press. Let's start looking for themes and plugins and stuff like that. No, first you spec it out, you see if the themes and plugins work. And then what you do is that in my second point is that do a default wordpress install. So i do a lot of this for complicated sites for clients. I don't dive into this, i don't dive into development immediately for the site. Especially if the user does not, is not familiar with buddy press. I give a default wordpress installation, put it to 20, what's my favorite, 2013, i can't remember, 2013, something like that. Actually, probably older, it's probably 2011. And i put buddy press on it and i just let the client play for a while. After lunch, that's exactly what we're going to do. I'm going to show you a buddy press site that all of you after lunch Will be able to register and log into and we're going to go through Each of the buddy press features together. That's what we're going to do after lunch. Did i say after lunch? I meant after lunch. So anyway, here's finally some things to consider. With basic customization, again, remember buddy press should work With all wordpress themes. Now, as a developer, you're at Some various level of development, right? You're either like you've just gotten development, you feel You're a novice or you feel pretty sure about yourself. I won't lie. Obviously, in my opinion, advanced Customization is going to require good development skills or For the agencies. So some people get frustrated with Buddy press and it's more of their problem, honestly, because They assume they can, oh, it's buddy press. I'll just make it look like this. I'll make it just look like A kickstarter. No problem, right? And then they dive into the pool a little too quickly. So just realize that buddy press is great. It's awesome, but just like a lot of good tools, it does take Time to master and learn. And a lot of people forget about the Design in the ux part of it, too. You can't just whip off a Buddy press site as a developer without some, especially the More complex it gets, the more you're going to need really Good design and ux skills. And a lot of developers don't Have that, really, or at least the majority of them, i think. I think developers are mostly stuck with developing the code. So a lot of the projects i do, i actually bring on a designer. And again, we don't actually, we do the design and the concepts Before we build anything. Maybe the proof of concept first, Maybe. But the design in ux is just as Important as the code that you write. There are certain things about social websites, certain Things that you should or should not do, make it easy For the users to discover other users, to message other Users. All of this is important. It's not relying on the code as much as the design and the user Experience. And then finally, i'm sure this is Probably happening now. Although at the time i wrote this, It was probably future tense. Start adding ssl for your Secure log in pages. In fact, let's just scratch that. Let me reword that. Start adding ssl to your sites. Period. Very, it's going to happen. It is already starting to happen. Google is going to Eventually not count your site. I don't know if it's going to Count it as a security problem or just not going to rank it high Enough in the search listings. But fire fox is starting to Mark log in forms that are just an http is insecure. Not the website, but log in forms. They're log in page. So we're talking about our log in page specifically. If it's not ssl secured, fire fox is already starting to Mark it as insecure. I don't know if that's happened now Or if it's still in the nightly builds. But it doesn't matter. The point is that if you're building a website that has a Log in form, you're going to want to at least secure that Page. But in my opinion, just secure the Whole goddamn website. So anyway, that's it. That's we're done.