BuddyPress hosting

BuddyPress is an absolutely free and open source social networking software package. BuddyPress is owned by Automattic, Inc. (since 2008) which is a web development corporation which was founded in August 2005.

BuddyPress hosting idea was conceived in the year 2008 while there was ongoing work to add social networking features to the WordPress MU powered web sites. BuddyPress is basically a plugin that can be installed on WordPress to convert it into a social networking platform. Just like WordPress, BuddyPress is also an open source software. Everything that you see here is built by the huge BuddyPress community. These include everything right from the core code, the documentation, and the different themes as also the plugin extensions. Since it is an open source project, anyone is welcome to help by contribution of their time and knowledge. Thus it also goes through a continuous process of improvement thanks to the constant inputs from the people.

BuddyPress hosting lets the user have a complete control of his site and thus build a completely personalised and at the same time giving the user an absolutely unique experience. BuddyPress hosting comes with a huge range of features that are useful in building a social network application. It is mainly designed for companies, schools, sports teams or any particular niche community to have their personal social network or a tool for communication. BuddyPress hosting is basically an extended version of the WordPress engine which includes the widgets, plugins and themes.

BuddyPress hosting softwares have been created to bring people together. It mainly works to allow the people who have similar interests to connect and communicate easily. Some of the uses of BuddyPress hosting are:

• A social network for the campus of school, college or university.
• An internally connected communication tool for a company.
• A niche social network for a certain topic of interest.
• A social network for a new product.

BuddyPress hosting comes with an array of features that work out of the box. But certain users might want to use only a couple of features initially. A BuddyPress user can simply turn off the features that he does not want with just a click of a button. When the user disables these features the theme of the site will adjust automatically, and will display only the menu items, pages and buttons for all the features that have been enabled by the user.

The minimum system requirements for hosting BuddyPress 1.2.9 are as follows:

• It requires a PHP of 5.2.4 or greater
• The preferred database is MySQL 5.0 or higher database for storing the BuddyPress information.
• The server needs to be Apache Module mod_rewrite which needs to be enabled for “pretty permalinks” which will let the user have clean URLs.

There are a few plugins available for BuddyPress:

• BpGroups is a plugin which brings in a few improvements to the group system.
• Invite Friends is a kind of plugin which allows the user to add friends from other social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Orkut and GMail.
• Twitter To Wire is a plugin that adds tweets to the wire automatically (it is somewhat similar to the facebook wall).