Guide on Turning WordPress Site to Social Network With BuddyPress

Almost every business entity now a days is spending a lot of efforts and time to expand their reach in today's highly competitive and wobbly online marketplace. But, having your presence on social media networks can help you reach out to millions of users quickly than a traditional website. Social media platform can help your business gain spotlight you may have dreamed of.

So, if you've made up your mind on creating a social networking site and have selected WordPress as your choice of web development platform, then choosing a plugin from the WordPress Plugin Directory is perhaps the first thing that you should consider.

There are a number of plugins out there good at building social network sites with large community, but at times, managing a large community can be distracting. Perhaps, you may need to create a small social network that doesn't demand a wide user base but comes with powerful functionality. In that case, “BudyPresss” is exactly what you need. It is a free plugin and fully compatible with WordPress.

In this post, we will talk about the steps involved in creating a social network website using BuddyPress. But before that, let's first discuss about a few benefits of BuddyPress.

Some Major Benefits of BuddyPress

Large Pool of Plugins Available. BuddyPress is one of the favorite and widely used plugin of webmasters. There are over 330 BuddyPress plugins to choose from, which enable you to extend functionality of the BuddyPress.

Offers Widgets. As we all know, widgets are fancy and powerful tools that helps us integrate extra functionality into WordPress website widget-ready areas. BuddyPress offers eight great widgets that help you perform some important tasks in a highly convenient manner.

The widgets are listed below:

• Members

• Who's Online

• Groups

• Recent Network wide Posts

• Friends

• Sitewide Notices
• Log In

Exchange Information in a Secure Manner

. Security of WordPress sites has always been a major concern among site owners. Thanks to BuddyPress, you can share critical business information using a password-protected approach, so that the information is available only to team members having access to it.

Turning Your Site Into a Social Network Site With BuddyPress

Step 1: BuddyPress Installation

BuddyPress installation process is quite simple. You just need to search for this plugin in the WordPress Plugin Directory. Once the plugin is located, click on install as shown below:

After the plugin has been installed, the BuddyPress welcome screen will pop up. 

Before getting started, it would be better to take a few seconds and think about the functionality of your social networking site you're creating with Buddypress. For instance, think about the core features you would like to add in your site including profiles creation, organization into groups, links, etc.

Step 2 - Configuring Features of Your Social Networking Website

Once you are clear about the features that you would like to add into your site, it's time to begin configuring BuddyPress functionality to fit your needs. For doing so, from your WordPress dashboard go to Settings>>BuddyPress and click on the Components tab.

When the settings page opens up, you will first have to configure he Components section. This section comes with a few default components. Luckily, you can remove the pre-installed components or may even use further components as per your requirements. However, it is recommended that you should avoid removing some default BuddyPress components, such as:

Extended Profiles

: It helps to expand the user profiles, by providing editable profile fields.

Member Account Settings:

This option allows registered users to make tweaks to their settings via their profiles.

Friend Connections:

This component option is similar to the “Facebook friending” or “Google+ Circling” functionality. It enables users to customize who they would like to keep within their feeds.

Activity Streams

: This component helps in generating customized streams such as the Twitter feeds or Facebook Newsfeed.

User Groups

: This option enables your users to organize different activity groups (public, private or hidden) who can talk about anything they wish to discuss.

Site Tracking

: You may want to organize your social network website usage statistics, you can do so using Site Tracking.

Step 3:

Configuration of Pages and Settings

Next, you'll need to configure the Page tab on the BuddyPress settings page. This section comprises of two parts: Directories and Registration. The directory part associates each WordPress page with BuddyPress pages – such as Activity Streams, User Groups, and Members.

The Registration part, on the other hand, help you create a sign-up and activation page.

Settings is the last tab on the settings page, and as the name implies, it helps in picking up the settings for profile, account deletion, toolbar, group creation, and lots more. You can configure the settings according to your needs.

Let's Wrap Up!

BuddyPress since the time of its inception has played a significant role in helping WordPress sites and blogs evolve to engaging and fully-functional social network. Hopefully reading the details covered in this post, including the benefits and the process of creating a social network site with BuddyPress will prove useful to you.

Author Biography:

Samuel Dawson has contributed this content and he has explained each & every step of how you can use social network in WordPress with the help of buddypress. Samuel has top quality methods and strategies to develop WordPress related things. He is the strong part of Designs2HTML Ltd which is responsible to Convert HTML to WordPress in few hours of time-frame. Samuel also shares various things on the web regarding web design and development.