Want to celebrate in style? WPMU.org had a colourful infographic to go with the release of 3.1.

Fancy discovering more about the music behind WordPress? 3.1 is code named Reinhardt after Django Reinhardt and WPMU.org provides the music with Daily Tip: Jam Out with WordPress 3.1′s Namesake, Django Reinhardt.

Today’s 12 Days of WordPress and BuddyPress is brought to us by Stas Sușcov and let’s meet him in his words:

I’m the WordPress Romanian Localization Team driver, Ubuntu Website Team WordPress hacker/maintainer and WordCamp Bucharest speaker. I was also a Google Summer of Code 2010 student for BuddyPress, which resulted in BuddyPress Courseware component. My blog.

I remember last summer, when I just start playing with BuddyPress, and how much fun it was. Challenges were overwhelming, even so, now I would hardly do it other way. So this is a post about how to get started writing code for BuddyPress (be that core patches or plugins). and how to not get stuck at early stages.

From my experience, the community is everything, but that’s not enough when you decide to contribute to a project. There are interesting aspects that can scare a newcomer, like:

• Conceptual aspects and application design
• Quality of documentation
• Codebase quality and used technologies
• Availability of examples (existing contribution)

Let’s take it one by one.

BuddyPress is still WordPress.

I met a couple of WordPress contributors, that got scared about BuddyPress, thinking of it as something totally new and different. Ok, this is wrong, at least at first view.

BuddyPress was never a pilot project for WordPress, it started as a bunch of hacks (plugins), and evolved into what it is now thanks to it’s community and contributions. The guys that contributed and do it now, were WordPress developers initially!

The main differences between WordPress are the hook names, and some API extensions (here to mention the URL mapping, groups and profiles addons like xprofile). All of it, along with WordPress functionalities(post types and options API) should be enough for you to write applications of any complexity level. So If you think you need to alter the database for you plugin, rethink the adopted design/concept for it, because it’s wrong (I’m almost 110% sure).

From my experience (and I was one of the early adopters of this workflow when writing BuddyPress apps), I found post types along with it’s metas data structure, as almost perfect for the most common tasks you will need for a plugin! To convince you, here are some of the reasons you should consider, that come bulk with such a strategy: caching, database optimization from the very beginning, no need to alter database if your plugin grows. So be smart, and plan your plugin carefully.

In the end, writing a BuddyPress plugin, will just make you a more hacker than you already are :)

Whatever you decide to write for WordPress/BuddyPress, document it!

Be that PHPDoc inline documentation or old school readme.txt, write it down. Writing plugins for BuddyPress is pretty the same as writing them for WordPress. Having a documentation around will help you maintain your codebase along the whole plugin life-cycle which can last years!

Newcomers should know that BuddyPress is still a wild beast, and though guys put efforts into creating both: a solid community and a WordPress level codebase, some parts of code may just miss documentation! Once such a problem strikes you, ask for help, and the help will come, just head on to forums or codex.

Code is poetry, at any age or experience.

Don’t forget this! Both WordPress and BuddyPress are using imperative and sometimes object-oriented programming. This made a couple of my friends to criticize it badly, but that should not be a reason for you to do the same!

BuddyPress is a complex system! For it’s main components like groups and messages, the code is written as classes, which is great, mainly because if you want to modify some component workflow, all you need to do is extend the base class and overwrite the method you don’t like. But heading on with the OOP way everywhere is wrong. Usually users don’t do such complex things, and forcing them to adopt such a workflow, will just drive the contributions away. Not to mention the template tags, which are bare functions that hook into something and allows you making a paragraph out of a list a snap!

So blaming BuddyPress for coding styles it’s wrong, mainly because being flexible for developers (of any level), sometimes it’s more important than being flexible to end-users! With some help, BuddyPress contributions can come from young programmers to experienced developers, and patches are always welcome!

So how do I start.

Good examples are always a good start for any coding you plan. BuddyPress developers took this seriously, and put efforts into helping newcomers understand the plugins workflow and adapt easily.

On codex, there’s a dedicated page for how to write a component. It’s a bunch of code that gave me a real boost when I wrote my first plugin (basically a small modification of the skeleton component), and you should also check it if you want to write something quickly!

More experienced developers, can write their code independently of that. The approach is the same, and it’s up to you. Remember, we’re very-very flexible in terms of code, and the hooks are your best friend!

Final thoughts

I really hope this article will help newcomers cover some of the unusual questions they could ever stumble upon and didn’t know where to get answers. If you didn’t observe, every thought I wanted to explain, more or less brought me to the community. Also, I just wanted to remind everyone that my experience with BuddyPress as part of the community was really special. I was taught and helped a lot, and the people I met here that did all the above are just awesome!

So I hope to see you soon, contributing to BuddyPress.

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress comes from Jerome Degl’innocenti.  So who is Jerome?

My name is Jerome Degl’innocenti and I am a web designer employed by Fresh Egg (a web design and SEO company) living in Eastbourne, England.  Part of my role as a web designer puts me in charge of all WordPress and BuddyPress developments.   I regularly write any WordPress tips on PimpMyWordPress.com but my addiction for WordPress and BuddyPress goes beyond my day job hence BPinspire.com!

Since day one I have been a massive fan of BuddyPresss and I am always on the lookout for any outstanding new sites.  It is for this reason that a year ago I decided to create BPinspire.com, so that people could share any exciting BuddyPress developments.

As the New Year fast approaches, I would like to pause for a moment and look back at 2010.  This year has certainly turned out to be a fantastic BuddyPress vintage; in fact BPinspire is rapidly moving towards the 100 mark in regards to BuddyPress sites added to the showcase gallery.

It has been hard to shortlist only 20 high-quality BuddyPress sites.  The sites featured below are not in any specific order but all have something special.  They have each created a strong community, demonstrate excellent custom development and are rich in design creativity.

With the increase in popularity of BuddyPress, I am certain that next year will be full of remarkable new websites.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the BuddyPress development team for all their hard work and the generosity of the BuddyPress community for sharing all their great tips.

Have a fantastic Christmas everybody and a happy New Year.

Club Belote http://clubbelote.com/

Plazza http://plazaa.de/

Kev Jumba http://www.kevjumba.com/

Virgin Media Pioneers http://www.virginmediapioneers.com/

h Mag http://www.h-mag.com/

OOizit http://www.ooizit.com/

Irrational Games http://irrationalgames.com/

Cuny Academic Commons http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Tufts Roundtable Commons http://www.trcommons.org/

Ride Oregon http://rideoregonride.com/

Tasty Kitchen http://thepioneerwoman.com/tasty-kitchen/

Better Codes http://bettercodes.org/

BP Tricks http://bp-tricks.com/

Operation HQ http://www.operationhq.co.nz/

Bitsy http://bitsythis.com/

Wijmo http://wijmo.com/

Gameful http://gameful.org/

Inksie http://inksie.com/

Solo Practice University http://solopracticeuniversity.com/

SpyTunes http://spytunes.com/

It’s over to Paul Gibbs for today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress.  Lets meet Paul first in his own words from his profile at BuddyPress.org:

” I’m a Core Developer on BuddyPress. I enjoy speaking at WordCamps, crafting code, and helping people.

I provide consultancy on projects and design custom plugins for your site;

contact me at paul@byotos.com, in #buddypress-dev on freenode, or on twitter as @pgibbs.”

A powerful tool in a WordPress developer’s arsenal is the ease and flexibility of creating a widget. Introduced in WordPress 2.8, the WP_Widget widget class abstracted most of the complexity involved in writing a widget, giving developers a framework to build on and prevent time being needlessly spent on, for example, building custom option panels. Widgets remain a great way for a PHP developer to become familiar with the WordPress platform and API features such as actions and filters.
BuddyPress’ Groups component has a similar extension architecture to widgets and we’re going to look at how existing WordPress developers, who haven’t written for BuddyPress before, can get started.

Introduction to BuddyPress components

BuddyPress is a single plugin, but internally it is subdivided into distinct parts, almost into separate plugins, which BuddyPress calls components. The core components are Activity Streams, Blog Tracking (for multisite), Forums, Friends, Groups, Private Messaging and eXtended Profile (xprofile). A plugin developer working on BuddyPress would either extend one of the core components or create a new component. An example of extending the Private Messaging component would be to add support for file attachments to messages, and a new component would be best for brand new functionality, such as a photo album.

At the moment, the Groups component has the best API for developers, so we’re going to be looking at John James Jacoby‘s BP Edit Group Slug plugin as an example. Download it and look at its source code whilst reading this article. The BP Edit Group Slug plugin allows you to change the group’s slug, which is part of the group’s permalink. You might want to use this if you decide to rename the group after creating it and want to update the permalink too.

Hooking into BuddyPress safely

Like with widgets, a group extension requires you to extends BuddyPress’ BP_Group_Extension class. To tell BuddyPress to load your group extension, use bp_register_group_extension(). However, be aware that John’s plugin is slightly out of date about how third-party plugins should hook into BuddyPress; the correct way is documented on the BuddyPress codex. We advise creating a loader.php file and putting in the following:

// Only load code that needs BuddyPress to run once BP is loaded and initialised.

function my_plugin_init() {

require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/my-plugin.php' );
}
add_action( 'bp_include', 'my_plugin_init' );

All of your code which is dependant on BuddyPress can then be put into the my-plugin.php file. This will make sure your plugin won’t break someone’s website if they were to deactivate BuddyPress before deactivating your plugin.

About BP_Group_Extension

In your class, there are six functions which you can choose to implement.

• BP_Group_Extension::create_screen() — implement the HTML for the create screen, as seen when users create a new group.
• BP_Group_Extension::create_screen_save() — handle saving of options from the create screen.
• BP_Group_Extension::edit_screen() — implement the HTML for the edit screen, as seen when the group admin(s) edit their group.
• BP_Group_Extension::edit_screen_save() — handle updating of options from the edit screen.
• BP_Group_Extension::display() — implement the HTML to display output from your group extension in the group.
• BP_Group_Extension::widget_display() — invoked when the user is on the front page of a group (by default, the activity stream page).

You are not required to implement all of these functions in your class. For example, as John’s plugin is only used for the group admin(s) to change the permalink, there is no need to display anything to regular visitors. In addition to these methods, there are a few helpful class properties:

• $enable_create_step, $enable_nav_item, $enable_edit_item — booleans. Set these if you want to display your extension on the create/edit screens, or add a nav item. Optional (all default to true).
• $create_step_position, $nav_item_position — integers. Use to change the order of where your extension displays on the create scree and the navigation bar. Optional (defaults to 81).
• $name, $slug — strings. The title of your grope extension, and the slug for its permalink. Both required.
• $nav_item_name — string. Set to use this instead of $name in the navigation bar. Optional.
• $visibility — string. Controls whether this extension will be visible to non-members of a group? Options: “public” or “private” (defaults to “public”).
• $display_hook — string. ADVANCED. Defaults to ‘groups_custom_group_boxes’.
• $template_file — string. ADVANCED. Defaults to ‘groups/single/plugins’.

$display_hook and $template_file are two advanced options which will give you more control over which template is used when you display() your group. You don’t need to worry about these as the defaults will be appropriate most of the time.

Where to get help

Using John’s plugin as an example, I suggest that you spend an afternoon over this Christmas period learning to implement your own group extension and seeing what you can come up with. If you need any help, please leave a message on the BuddyPress Community site where I’ll be happy to help you learn how to develop with BuddyPress. Merry Christmas!

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress is brought to you by Bowe Frankema.  So who is Bowe?

BuddyPress fanatic and Freelance Theme Designer.

Loves to use awesome in every sentence. Also been described by people as a Treehugging hippie.

Proud founder of BP-Tricks.com.

A few weeks back I held a presentation at WordCampNL about BuddyPress, and I can’t believe how hard it was to explain what BuddyPress was all about in just 30 minutes. Overall I had a lot of fun doing the presentation, but I came to the realisation that BuddyPress has far outgrown the status of “just” a WordPress plugin, and that it had become a powerful social networking tool, which can be used for almost anything! And while this is a great thing, and you can quickly set up a community which uses all BuddyPress core features and awesome plugins to the fullest, it does not mean that your community will be successful if you just provide numerous ways for your members to interact with each other.

Just like Spidermans uncle said; “With great power comes great responsibility”. In our case that means that as BuddyPress community builders we need to take a close look at the functionality BuddyPress provides and which plugins we want to use to extend upon it, and NOT simply use every possible communication method available in BuddyPress. Because while that might seem tempting to do at first, it can lead to a community that never takes off, simply because of an overkill of ways to communicate. The problem of allowing people too much choices, is well-known in the restaurant and supermarket business;

expertly weeding out assortments leads to good results since it improves customers’ shopping experiences. Unilever’s director of marketing for household products, Rob Persiko, says, “Consumers have a hard time finding what they’re looking for because there’s so much on the shelf.” Isn’t that the best reason to reassess retail assortments? >>source

This exact same concept applies to your BuddyPress community. You have to take a close look at what your members want, and how experienced they are in the world of social networking. Here are three things I always do when I work on new BuddyPress projects for myself or clients;

1: Think back to the time you’ve just discovered BuddyPress and remember what confused you: also take into consideration that as a community builder you’ve probably already became familiar with a lot of standard social networking features well before you started using BuddyPress. Try to look at your community with a complete blank and “unexperienced” point of view.

2: Find out how your potential members communicate: Does your target audience hang out on forums, twitter of Facebook? If they communicate in a more traditional way (forums, mailing lists etc) you might want to put the focus on Groups and Forums and strip the activity stream from Status Updates and comments on forum topics. If they hang out with the cool kids on Twitter and Facebook you might want to put all your focus on the stream, and get rid of forums and groups entirely!

3: Do a closed beta test before launch: If you think you’ve got everything set up right, it’s time to unleash a wild bunch of diverse people out on your project. You’ll be surprised on the amount of feedback you’ll get, and how the most trivial things can confuse the heck out of your members. But it’s essential to the success of your community, and take time to listen to the feedback you’ll get and tweak where necessary.

If you use other methods to fine tune your community to your target audience, just let me know by leaving a comment, and good luck with setting up your BuddyPress powered community!

Welcome to today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress post brought to you by Jeff Sayre.  First up lets get to meet Jeff Sayre:

Jeff Sayre is a startup entrepreneur and Social Web architect focusing on building niche communities with BuddyPress. In his spare time, he’s a BuddyPress Support Forum moderator and developer.

Visit Jeff’s site to learn more about his work, and while you’re at it, follow Jeff on Twitter.

If you haven’t been living under a rock the past 18 months, by now you all should be aware of BuddyPress—an open source project offering a flexible platform with which to build a social network. BuddyPress is best thought of as a suite of WordPress plugins, each offering a different set of functionality for crafting your version of the next-hottest, social-networking property on the Web.

But wait? You may be thinking that Facebook has already cornered the market on social networking, that there’s no way to compete with Zuck’s monolith. So why even bother creating a niche social network.

This past summer, Ypulse.com released some interesting research indicating that teens and college-aged young adults were getting fed up with Facebook, leaving the uber-popular site due to fatigue and issues with poor privacy management. Many who left went on to join targeted interest-focused niche communities.

This report demonstrates that Facebook’s one-network-to-rule-them-all approach is failing to hold people’s attention, that the all gazing eye of Mordor is losing some of its power. Whereas a giant stadium-full of people is exciting, after awhile, people get tired of a one-size-fits-all gathering and look for something more in tune with their individual likes and interests. Joining another Facebook group is not the same thing as joining a new, unique, and vibrant niche community that caters to a specific interest.

The Rise of Niche Interest Networks

There are already over a hundred niche social networks built with BuddyPress—and more not on that list. With BuddyPress fast approaching its version 1.3 release (soon after the new year), if you’ve been thinking about creating a targeted community, now is the time to learn how BuddyPress can help you achieve that goal.

Privacy is Coming to BuddyPress

As the above research indicates, the lack of effective, easy to use and understand privacy controls is one key reason for dissatisfaction among Facebook’s younger userbase. Unfortunately, BuddyPress does not currently offer any user-controllable privacy filtering. That is about to change.

Over the past 16 months, I have been working on building a robust Privacy Component for BuddyPress. The BuddyPress Privacy Component is a 3rd-party component that provides users with fine, granular control over who has access to which pieces of their personal data.

Now there is no excuse to stop you from building the next-hottest, social-networking property on the Web!

The BuddyPress Project: A Community of Community Builders

As an open source project, BuddyPress thrives on the health and activity of its community. If you are a designer, developer, or site owner, please consider joining the community and helping to evolve BuddyPress into a strong alternative to the traditional social-networking platforms. New ideas, energy, and contributions are always welcome.

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress psots is brought to you by Boone B Gorges and lets meet him first in his words:

“Committing BuddyPress developer. I’m the lead developer for the CUNY Academic Commons, where I have the pleasure of developing lots of custom BuddyPress and WordPress components and plopping them in the repository. I also sometimes do consulting on projects related to WordPress, BuddyPress, and other open source publishing platforms. You can visit my blog, where I release BuddyPress and WordPress related software and write about a number of delightful things, at teleogistic.net. A propos of nothing, I am also a PhD student in philosophy.” – BuddyPress.org profile

BuddyPress’s biggest selling point, in my view, is that it allows you to set up social networks that are independent of those big – and not necessarily always friendly – services (*cough*Facebook*cough*). Keeping control over your community’s data in your hands, rather than the hands of a corporation that might not have your best interests in mind, is unquestionably a good thing. As a bonus, BuddyPress-powered niche networks let you keep those parts of your social life – school, work, etc – separate from the rest (contrast this with the great Facebook melting pot).

Still, the very independence that makes BuddyPress networks so great can also be isolating. What if BuddyPress offered more ways to get data in and out, to communicate with other sites (BP-powered or not), to sync profile info and other content across your entire web presence? What if you could have your (independent, distributed, open source) cake and eat(/federate) it too?

In 2011, BuddyPress will take some steps toward this goal. Several different kinds of technologies are going to make it possible:

• Microformats are open standards that provide a common framework for delivering different kinds of data in a way that is machine readable. Some microformats are a perfect fit for the social networking data native to BuddyPress. Implementing appropriate standards in BP (and, in particular, in the bp-default theme) is the first step toward making BP data comprehensible to other systems. For example, profile microformats like FOAF will help to present BP information like friendships and profile fields in a way that makes sense to software other than BP. Similar formats exist for activity stream data and some of the other kinds of content that people produce in a BP network.
• APIs and web services are gateways for independent sites to communicate and share data with each other. When combined with an authentication protocol like oAuth, API gateways (such as REST and XML-RPC) could provide a way for site admins and even individual users to share their BuddyPress data with another BP installation or even a totally different platform. Imagine updating your profile data in one place and having it sync across multiple social networks; imagine your BuddyPress friend list being synced with your Facebook lists; imagine your tweets being synced in both directions with your BP activity stream. Some of these things can already be done with plugins (see BuddyStream for example). But a robust API layer in BuddyPress core could pave the way for the quick and easy development of many more plugins like this.

At the moment, most of the things I’ve described here are but twinkles in the eyes of the BuddyPress development team. But 2011 promises to be a great year of growth for BP and the BP community, and I think that preparing BP to play a bigger role in the federated social web is going to be a big part of that growth.

Here’s to a happy, and federated, new year, with BuddyPress!

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Tis the season for special posts and have we got a selection for you!

We’re working with wpmu.org to release a series of posts from those in the WordPress and BuddyPress community.  For 12 days from the 12th December you will see on this blog BuddyPress posts and on wpmu.org WordPress posts.  We’ll also link to wpmu.org each day so you don’t miss out on any of the goodness.

The posts will be anything from tutorials to articles or opinions from prominent names in the WordPress and BuddyPress community.  The aim is simply to celebrate the great community and provide some Christmas treats in the form of posts.

So from the 12the December join us in the 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress.

One of the big changes in recent times with regards to themes has been the WordPress Theme Test. Whilst this is a great move and the Theme Review group is doing a kicking job keeping this mammoth task on track, there have been 2 major issues with regards to BuddyPress. These were the fact that it uses child themes and the fact that the Default Theme itself didn’t pass the test. Times are a changing as you can see over at the BP Default Group.

There are still a few things to get done but looks like BuddyPress 1.3 will bring a stop to these problems at least in regards to the Default Theme passing.

New Plugin: BP Group Reviews

Boone Gorges released a new plugin this week called BP Group Reviews. Sarah over at wpmu.org did a review of it here.

BuddyPress comes joint 2nd in Open Source Project Awards

This week saw BuddyPress get joint 2nd place in the Open Source Project Awards organized by Packt Publishing. You can see the results here.

New feature from wpmu.org – ‘WordPress Plugin Directory Releases and Updates’

Wpmu.org has started a new feature brought to you by Siobhan showing Weekly WordPress Plugin Directory Releases and Updates. Interesting if you want a snapshot of what is going on with plugins.

Stuck for weekend reading? Try some BP Tricks

This week has seen some great tips and features over at BP Tricks, we already told you of Bowe’s BP Tricks last week and we’d like to just remind our readers it certainly is one just like us you will find extremely useful. We’d encourage anyone into BuddyPress to keep an eye out on it.

Tutorial roundup from wpmu.org

Sarah over at wpmu.org has a great BuddyPress Tutorial Roundup showing 15 useful hacks and customizations.