This article is going to take you through setting up BuddyPress for the first time. It is geared towards people trying to set up Social Networking sites with features similar to those available with Ning or other hosted Social Network providers, as such it assumes that you will want all of the features of BuddyPress, plus a few more (well, a whole bunch more!).
One of the issues with BuddyPress is that notifications are not “Live”, in other words, in order to see if you have any notifications, you need to refresh your web page, this detracts from the dynamism of the site. Eonet Live Notifications fixes this by introducing a live notification in the form of a pop-up that shows up in the bottom right corner of the page, informing you that you have a new notification and providing a click link to view that item.
BuddyPress Sticker is a simple plugin that adds the ability for site members to add stickers – emoticons to there activity updates.
One of the issues with BuddyPress notifications is that they do not update unless you refresh the page you are viewing, this means that unless you are actively browsing the site then you will not get an on-screen notification. BuddyPress Live Notification fixes that and allows a new notification to appear on the screen without that page refresh.
By default, BuddyPress does not inform the poster when someone Favorites their content, this plugin adds that notification, so members know when people like their content.
The BuddyPress @Mentions is it’s system for sending site members a public message, similar to writing on a users wall in Facebook since the mention will turn up in that users activity stream. @Mentions is normally a one to one thing, if you want to have more than one person in your mention then you must include @member1, @member2 etc. In your activity update.
Now that you have installed BuddyPress and have configured a number of eats features and those of add-ons it’s important that you get to know BuddyPress from a users perspective. This article will take you through some of the basic features of your BuddyPress Installation from a users perspective. The exact range of features available on any site will depend upon which features have been enabled by the site Admin.
Buddy Member Stats is a plugin that displays a range of statistics about BuddyPress site members in a tab on their profile.
BuddyPress Follow allows members of a BuddyPress social network to follow each other, it places follow buttons on each members profile and in the members page and adds extra tab’s in each members profile page, one showing who is following you and the other showing who you are following.
So far we have installed our basic BuddyPress install for our Ning style social network, we have done a lot. But still the site we have created lacks features, for example there is no Chat or sharing of photo’s and video’s, it would be nice to have events, the groups are pretty basic as are the member profiles. This article attempts to show you how you can move further towards your dream social site by introducing quite a large number of plugins and giving you basic information about how to install and use them.
