BuddyPress for Building Community Websites

This video was initially intended as a brief demonstration and update for a few people to help bring them up to speed on the R&D I’m currently engaged in, however it ended up comprehensive enough that I thought I’d share it here as well.

This clip is best viewed full screen with the HD setting selected. Press play to start the video, and then from the up arrow just beside the full screen button select 720p HD.

One of my many hats above and beyond that of educational technologist for UNSW is as pseudo-webmaster for the local homeschooling community that my family is a part of here in the Blue Mountains. As with most networks – educational or otherwise – we’ve had a need for a web presence to help organise our activities.

WordPress has been used to establish the first incarnation of the community website, and has been a very valuable tool to help facilitate things, however increasingly the logistics, planning and scope of the group activities and families involved has become more involved, thus necessitating a site redevelopment.

With this in mind I’ve begun to experiment with BuddyPress in earnest recently. BuddyPress adds a social layer to any WordPress installation, and opens the door to far more participatory elements than the base installation alone. This can include creation of groups, forums, file storage, messaging, and a wide variety of other activities.

When combined with the newly discovered and AWESOME Events Calendar plugin, this has helped establish (at least in principle) a formidable web presence that has been extremely easy to set up.

Given the potential use of this model to other online communities and/or educators, I thought it would be worth sharing what components have gone into this particular installation (as demonstrated in the above walkthrough).

So far this site incorporates the following plugins, all of them downloaded and installed from the WordPress Dashboard via the Add New Plugin option.

At this stage it’s unclear how much of this will comprise the final version of the site, however I’m impressed enough with BuddyPress’ power to want to share this information more widely.