The member theme, that is not complete, is a custom version of the Shouty Theme that you can found here in BuddyDress. I’ve built my own loops to extract posts for category AND tag when needed, and some other tricks. A problem i’ve had was the use of jcarousel scripts because they give some problems with the BuddyPress jcarousel livequery, and so i’m studying a solution to this.

Do you like it?

Let me spend some words: TMD hosting is a sponsor of BuddyDress.com, and i wanna be transparent with my readers,  but trust me: there are not so many hosting companies around that make a buddypress policy (for only 4.99$/month).

Let me introduce Jonathan Taylor: he is the marketing man at TMDhosting, and he will reply to some questions about the service they give to Buddy Press users.

Hi Jonathan, it is uncommon to see special Buddy Press hosting packages: why did you decided to jump in this niche world?

Hi Marco, I would like to start by saying a big “Thank you” for your interest in our company and that it is a great pleasure to work with BuddyDress.com. Honestly, the real reason for creating a dedicated hosting package for BuddyPress is that all of us love WordPress. Most of us working at TMDHosting have personal blogs and we believe that WordPress is one of the greatest open source projects nowadays. When we first came across the BuddyPress project we were fascinated by the idea to extend a blog network website functionality to a fully featured social network website.

More and more people are starting social networks and community websites today, thus, creating such package was more than a reasonable step for us.

I’ve read in your package description that you offer free MU and BP installations to your customers. I can really ask you to set up everything for me? And how much time i should wait for the installation?

Yes, this is correct. We provide free WordPress MU/BuddyPress installation services and our technical support usually complete such requests in up to 15 minutes which is our usual response time. We believe that the WordPress MU and BuddyPress installation should be provided free of charge due to the fact that the process does not require any development work or exclusive services, furthermore it is not a very time-consuming process.

Still, any additional integration services such as bbPress integration for groups forum support may require some additional time, however, they will be completed in a timely matter. For more information you can always refer to our BuddyPress hosting package:
http://www.tmdhosting.com/buddypress-hosting.html

Your package says that you can transfer my BP from my old hosting to your server: database, files, scripts..with no data loss. I think this could be a winning point, this will cost me something more?

We provide a free website transfer from your previous host as a part of our changing-host promotion. This service is free of charge and it is included in all of our hosting packages. Additionally, TMDHosting compensates you with up to 6 month of unused months with your old hosting provider. Combined with the hassle free website transfer, this  saves you a lot of money and valued time. You can check our free website transfer and changing host offer here:
http://www.tmdhosting.com/free-website-transfer.html

Maybe in the future will you provide some free plugins installation too?

WordPress MU and BuddyPress plugins are quite easy to install. We provide free plugin and modules installation services. You can simply  post a support ticket request and we will proceed with the installation process. For all included services of in our BuddyPress hosting package you may review our BuddyPress page.
http://www.tmdhosting.com/buddypress-hosting.html

Ok, i’ve installed my Buddy Press on your server, but Houston…we have a problem. What kind of support i can receive from TMDhosting?

We do our best to resolve as wide as possible range of issues. Still, if the issue is a strictly development/coding related we might not be able to assist you in this matter. However, we will always make our best in order to suggest you a suitable solution for your case. I am glad to say that since we have launched our BuddyPress hosting all issues that have
been submitted via our ticketing system by our customers have been successfully resolved.

As you know, Buddy Press and MU are in a continue evolution: i could be sure that you are always able to install the latest versions for me?

Both BuddyPress and WordPress MU have a very good documentation or detailed installation instructions. Our technical support team is  constantly keeping up to date so you should not be worried – we will install any requested version for you. Furthermore, we have detailed tutorials for both BuddyPress and WordPress MU – we are doing our best to keep them up to date as well.

Do you wanna tell something more to our readers?

We highly recommend WordPress MU and BuddyPress as a community and blog/social network platform. Additionally, we are confident that this project will continue to evolve and the great development team of BuddyPress will extent even more its functionality. What will make BuddyPress even more popular from now on is the theme variety. This will help more and more people to build their own social network websites without the need to develop their own theme. Thus, we really support BuddyDress for the initiative to create and collect a large number of themes for BuddyPress and provide the community with valuable resources.

Thanx Jonathan and have a nice work!

 I think that the words “suite different users” is the key, and so we’re going to analyze the Buddy Press actual trends, to better undestand who and why is using our beloved plugins set. A lot of new possibilities are open, and surely we’ll focus about niche Buddy Press installations too: educational, social networking, dating site, reviews, and so on. Killerstartups ask when we’ll release a new theme: surely soon and we’re on work on some ideas, and the nex theme will be more particular that the previous, trying to better exploit the platform possibilities.

You can easily figure how important could be this for the growth of your website, because your users can be automatically logged in (if they have a Facebook account) and start interacting. Some bugs still have to be fixed, and the plugin works only with the most recent versions of MU and BP, but we are on the right way to have a brilliant feature for our communities. You can dowload the .zip here!