Learn How to Add a Custom Background Image to BuddyPress Avatars with Sarah over at wpmu.org. Don’t forget our own tutorial a while back about this for ways to do it using pure CSS in Fancy up your avatars with some CSS.

Move over robots.txt enter humans.txt. It’s an interesting initiative and something for all who run a website to consider.

reset.css has a new version. We use Eric Meyer’s reset CSS like most do now and the new version has some important updates. We will look to include this in new themes and review about fitting onto old ones.

9 useful google chrome extensions looks at what goodies await the web designer looking to use Chrome.

A key one for those validating their code CSS Validator to report vendor-specific extensions as warnings, not errors.

Every week last year we brought you links from around the web on a Friday and we’re going to carry that on.

Jeff Sayre has some interesting thoughts in ‘The HyperWeb: It’s All About Connections’

Boone Gorges looks into how he built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. ‘Group Announcements tab in BuddyPress is a great read and insight.

Sarah over at wpmu.org looks at ‘How to Write a WordPress Plugin: 12 Essential Guides and Resources’

Siobhan has really sparked off conversation around her informative post ‘Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else’

Last up for today we have some eye candy links for you from Bp Inspire:

esse community

Operation HQ

Design moo

Buttons rock

CatsWhoCode have a nice round up of CSS3 button tutorials right here. There are some great ones there from CSS3 gradients and rounding through to some really unexpected effects just with CSS3. We just love the pure CSS3 icons – amazing.

CSS3 drawing time

CSS3 simply can do things before we could only dream of in CSS and over at Queness there are some great examples in 10 Incredible CSS3 Drawing You Must See. From buttons, the olympic logo through to color wheel and adverts – it truly is a good eye opener to what you can do. We’re rather partial to the CSS Dragon – post is in French but the examples is all CSS.

CSS3 Border time

Borders can be boring but CSS3 brings us cool features like border images. Louis Lazaris over at SitePoint has a great general post CSS3 Border Images for Beautiful, Flexible Boxes. Whilst this could become an overused feature there is some great potential as with any effect assuming it’s used well and without over milking the concept.

In Wpmu.org this week

As usual Sarah has been doing some great BuddyPress posts:

Daily Tip: How to Remove @mentions from BuddyPress

Diaspora vs BuddyPress: Open Source Social Networking Matchup

And a great release in the form of MarketPress the e-commerce plugin from WPMU DEV:

Announcing MarketPress: A Robust E-Commerce Plugin Built for WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress

Free EBooks

Lets round up this Friday Find with a great link from Web Design Ledger which links 10 Free EBooks for Web Designers. There are some great books there for a range of levels so we’re sure you’ll find something of use there.

Daily Tips

Wpmu.org does a great feature called ‘Daily Tips’ where each week a number of great short tips and links are featured.  This week has been no exception to the great links rule, here are just a few:

Daily Tip: Manually Activate BuddyPress Users Who Have Not Activated Their Accounts

Daily Tip: Fix for BuddyPress Group Forums Error When Creating a New Topic

Daily Tip: Create an Unlimited Hierarchy of BuddyPress Groups

Permlinks consideration and scaling

Something close to every site owner’s heart is SEO and scaling – Sarah has a great article directly dealing with this.

The Best WordPress Permalink Structure For Scaling, Performance and SEO

Everybody loves eye candy

We all love looking at great BuddyPress examples and this week saw 17 of them being featured over at wpmu.org

BuddyPress Showcase: 17 New Niche Social Networks

Video interactive

Want to add a new level of interactivity to your site?  Look no further than this great article.

Make Your Identity Interactive With Video Avatars for Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress

Well that’s this week’s friday find here’s to another great week in the world of BuddyPress.

Attention plugin developers – Sort your sniffer out.

Jeff Sayre wrote a post entitled ‘Important Developers’ Notice: Please deactivate WordPress Hook Sniffer for the time being’ which is worth paying attention to if you use the sniffer.

Add to your PHP tool box

Cats who code has a great article on ’10 life saving PHP snippets’.

Tired of DIY

Are you lost in the installation process, desperate for guidance?  Look no further than WP.MU.  James wrote a post this week over at wpmu.org titled ‘Want WordPress Multisite and BuddyPress installed?’.  Newly updated to include WordPress 3.0 and the latest BuddyPress version, wp.mu really could be the answer to all your installation worries.

This week in wpmu.org

Sarah had a great BuddyPress tutorial this week on ‘How to Send a Site-wide Notice or a Site-wide Private Message in BuddyPress’.  She also gave us a great Daily Tip ‘Daily Tip: How to Show Total BuddyPress Site Member Count’

It’s raining themes

Never ones to sit back and do nothing we’ve been sewing away to create you some great new themes.  This week is our crazy theme a day for 4 days and so far you’ve been introduced to 3 of our new ones – Business Blog, Business Feature and Business Portfolio.

Here’s a sneak download link and preview for the 4th we’ll be releasing tomorrow Business Services.

We’re so pleased to release these themes this week and look forward to seeing what people create with them.  If you do use them please link in the forum to show us what you create.

Daily tips this week

Over at wpmu.org there were some great tips for BuddyPress:

Add a Google Buzz Button to BuddyPress Activities in Under a Minute

Daily Tip: Silence the “BuddyPress is Ready” Message in the WordPress Dashboard

How to Disable the BuddyPress Admin Buddy Bar

BuddyDress themes are all 100% GPL

Before we go we’d like to remind you all that our themes are all 100% GPL compliant.  We know it’s been a topic lately with other theme companies and would like to just remind all our current users and potential users we support GPL just like WordPress and BuddyPress and all our themes are licensed with GPL.

Well that was this week’s Friday Find – don’t forget if you’ve got any BuddyPress related news you want to share or sites you’d like us to include in our showcases just let us know.

First up… facebook

We’ve now got a page over here.  We’d love you to like our page and start joining in the discussion there.

BuddyPress Colours gets on the theme directory

This week BuddyPress Colours was accepted into the WordPress theme directory and we’re over the moon about it.  You can now get it right here.  In just a few days we’ve been amazed by the 650 downloads.  If you don’t know what BuddyPress Colours is… it is a theme pack that consists of child themes where the colours are split from the layout elements making it really easy to create your own colour scheme.

We’d like to thank anyone whose downloaded it and look forward to welcoming new members both to the blog and as BuddyDress members through the theme.

Catch up on the tutorial videos

Missed out on a video from BuddyDress?  You can catch up with all the videos right here.

BuddyDress twitters

Don’t forget as we close up this Friday Find that you can find us all week over at twitter right here.

Buddypress blogtastic

Over at wpmu.org Sarah posted a list this week entitled 15 Excellent BuddyPress Blogs You Should be Reading – thank you for the mention Sarah. We’d suggest it’s well worth checking out as there are some great gems over there. For this week’s Friday Find I thought it was worth taking a look at a few of the blogs listed and doing a roundup of their latest topics.

Jeff Sayre has an interesting post entitled ‘The Growing Panoply of Speciality BuddyPress Developer and Administration tools’

Boone Gorges has a great article on ‘Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X’

Francesco Laffi delivers an nice tutorial entitled ‘Add confirm email field in BuddyPress signup page’

These are just some links but any of those blogs listed are well worth following some update more than others but worthy of a place in any BuddyPressers list of reading.

In wpmu.org this week

Wpmu.org as always was busy this week so here’s a nice selection of links from over there relating to BuddyPress:

‘Maximize WordPress and BuddyPress Performance With W3 Total Cache’

‘Daily Tip: Limit Groups Per User With New BuddyPress Plugin’

‘Keep them Clicking: How TO Increase Your Site’s User Interaction With Cubepoints For Buddypress’

Releases a gogo

This week’s also been fairly busy with WPMU DEV chucking out a fair few plugins:

Random Theme on Signup
Rebranded Meta Widget
There was also a major update to BuddyPress Group Calendar

We’ve also been busy here at BuddyDress with the release of our free Bp Colours: Colour Pack for the BuddyPress Default theme.

As always if you’ve got anything you think we may like to include in a Friday Find just drop us a line.

Incoming BuddyPress 1.2.4 update

It seems BuddyPress 1.2.4 is close enough to smell now with this declaration:

“John said that 1.2.4 will be out the door by the end of the week, along with the Followers plugin. WordPress 3.0 coming out before BuddyPress 1.3. BuddyPress 1.2.4 will come with better WordPress 3.0 support, so that BP doesn’t break when you upgrade core WP. There are 3 defect tickets for the 1.2.4 release at the moment, and Paul Gibbs asked the core developers to consider some of the enhancement tickets that have patches attached.” – Paul Gibbs

The future of themeing in BuddyPress

It seems there are some changing incoming with the theme whilst nothing has been set this was announced in the developer update:

“John announced that whilst the default BuddyPress theme won’t change for 1.3, another Automattic designer, Kevin Conboy (who did the Poll Daddy redesign) has been drafted in to develop future BP themes. John wants to see special themes to help draw out specific functionality in each of the components.” – Paul Gibbs

Further insight into this comes from this comment by Andy:

“AFAIK Kevin is just working on some design stuff in his spare time, the fact he works for Automattic is moot.” – Andy P

WordPress 3.0 Beta 2 has landed

It’s been a while since the first beta but beta 2 has now dropped for WordPress 3.0.

This week’s tips and links from wpmu.org

As is custom with the Friday Find’s here’s a round up of the great tips and links over at wpmu.org this week:

‘New BuddyPress Plugin Adds Ajax Profile Previews to Avatars’
‘How to Widgetize Your WordPress / BuddyPress 404 Page in 2 Simple Steps’
‘Daily tip: How to Remove the BuddyPress is Read Message in the WordPress Dashboard’
‘Monitor Your Site in Stealth Mode Like a BuddyPress Ninja’

So there you have it another Friday Find. If you’ve got a link you want to share or something you want featured in a Friday Find just add a comment or use our contact form.

BuddyPress.org gets a facelift

BuddyPress.org got a facelift which sees it using a modified version of the default theme on the insides. There is more connectivity potential between members and more of the expected ‘buddypress’ functions along with most areas being overhauled.

Tweet me buddypress

A slightly different slant to a part of this week’s Friday Find we’re going to have a look at a couple of this weeks tweets about BuddyPress:

pgibbs @baccioly I’m aiming to get a release out for WordPress3/BuddyPress 1.3 – not sure of ETA for BP 1.3 but am guessing within a month. 30th April 2010

jaydblackman Really thinking I’m not going to miss Ning when it’s gone. More info on Ning->BuddyPress migration + plugin: http://bit.ly/aX7TFy 29th April 2010

wptavern according to woopra, there sure are a lot of people search the terms ‘facebook buddypress’ and ‘buddypress themes facbook look alike’ 28th April 2010

This week in wpmu.org

There was a great Daily tip over at wpmu.org entitled ‘Make Sure to Put Your bp-custom.php File in the Correct Directory’. Sarah also put up a great post ‘Basic Guide to Creating a BuddyPress Language File for Sitewide Label and Message Editing’.

There we have it another week here at BuddyDress and another Friday Find. Welcome to all our new members and keep an eye out next week for an incoming beta of our latest theme Product.