Chapter 5. Building a Community with BuddyPress

Unlike our previous chapters, building a community will revolve around a single killer plugin—BuddyPress. The crew at Automattic, the company that owns Wordpress.com, released BuddyPress in April of 2009 in order to add basic social networking features to WordPress. Since then, BuddyPress has continued to be updated and tweaked and is now, hands down, the best community-building plugin available for WordPress.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• The basics of starting an online community

• What BuddyPress does

• How to install BuddyPress

• Setting up BuddyPress

• Leveraging other social networks to drive traffic

• BuddyPress plugins to customize your community

Before setting up BuddyPress

The most important step to building a community is defining your "Community Purpose". While this seems like an obvious statement, more often than not, people who start an online community fail to pick their niche or fail to stick to it.

You shouldn't just start an online community...