What is BuddyPress?

BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin that turns your site into a niche social network. That’s a lot of power and before any of you run right out and convert your blog of awesomeness into a social network of pointlessness, take time to think about your objectives first.There are a ton of excellent needs and reasons to use BuddyPress to take your site and turn it into the community it is begging to become. That’s the killer point: there needs to be a community underlying all of this. Maybe your’e focused on gardeners in Texas or stamp collectors in Des Moines or people around the world dealing with Cystic Fibrosis – if you have a community in mind then BuddyPress is an amazing tool because you can shape the community according to you/its needs. Take that Facebook (or Ning)!

The Presentation

Here’s the presentation, graciously filmed by Dallas’ own Dave Curlee. You can find me hangin’ in the BuddyPress Forums. Drop me a line of you need help on anything BP related.

Enter Buddypress. Yes, there’s Ning and a newcomer – the Grou.ps platform, and I evaluated them all. I found them all too constricting. I’m such a huge fan of WordPress’s ease of use and flexibility that when I heard the folks up in Vancouver were working on a framework for building your own community on top of WordPress, I dove in. Buddypress came out of alpha a few months ago and will leave beta in a matter of days. If you have know anything about WordPress and have a desire to organize a community – you owe it to yourself to kick the Buddypress tires.

I will be writing a series of posts discussing lessons learned from a usability and engagement stand point with our site Bugle Notes

Are we engaging members? – the Bugle Notes layout

Click image to enlarge

In the space of 2 months and about 275 beta testers, we have already tweaked the Home page layout 3 times. Every modification stems from one focus: getting people to interact even more. Going with the premise that we all naturally tend to want to engage, then site layout ought to nudge and facilitate that engagement at every turn.

• The Site Wide Activity section continues to be the one that draws eyes in. We moved that more toward the top and left – where eyes have been shown to fall first on most web sites.
• Blog posts don’t change as often and any new comment will be seen in the SWA – posts are featured in the top middle column.
• Groups are the central focal point for most engagement. They are a big hit as one oft cited issue with most social sites is that conversations and discussions tend to get blended together and threads become hard to follow. While many still love the familiarity of the old fashioned forum thread, they aren’t conducive to entering a discussion and following it along.

I am continually asking myself if the layout does all it can to promote involvement. In my next article, I will address the way Groups can gather interest and engagement around a particular subject.