Setting up BuddyPress
27 July 2009 11:26 Filed in: Social Network Programming
As mention before one of my choices was to base my site on the Insoshi project, an open-source social networking platform based on RubyOnRails, since I had played around with its predecessor, RailsSpace. However, as good as the Insoshi looked, and its code base being very clear because of the Rails’ MVC architecture, I decided against it. My main reason being that I did not wanted t spend most of my spare time in customizing the code because of the lack of available plug-ins and themes. Therefore I put aside the old code I developed and decided to check out the now available open-source social networking software that was not back in 2007.
By using exiting code I can concentrate on the layout and operation of the side instead of code development and debugging. That is not to say I don't have to work with code, over the last 3 weeks I was very busy getting my first choice up and running, more about that in a moment.
Since the general idea is to create a 'social network', I looked around and found BuddyPress which is a new sister project of the existing blog software WordPress. Since WP is the most use and stable blog software today I decided to start my evaluation with BP.
BP sits on top of WP to extent it into a social network by adding group, member and forum section. The forum software is actually another WP project called bbPress. Both BP and bbP are new project that just now were released as stable versions.
I started my evaluation with installing WordPress MU version 2.7.1, which is a multi-user version of WP. The reason WP-MU is required, instead of the plain WP, is to allow for each user to have their own blog in addition to the master blog. Since WP is a blog based system, by having individual blogs as bases it will allow BP to add other multi-user features which sit on top.
The installation of WP-MU was without any problems. The next step was to add BP as a plug-n to WP-MU, again using Version 1.0 Release Candidate 3 was easy without any problems.
The problems stated with installing bbPress (Forum Software) which is a separate application that needs to be integrated with BP. Right from the start the auto-install failed complaining about the admin user was already in use. After checking with the bbPress community forum I found that this version (RC3) had known integration problems and that users should use the Alpha 6 version instead. Following the advise I got the install working. However, testing the integration of the Forum with BP revealed that there was no integration, no forums were created within BP, nor any forums created in bbPress showed up in BP.
After a week of following various articles on this topic I finally got it to work by using a manual setup for the two systems configuration files. This process got named “deep” integration. By the time I was done, BP Version 1.0.1 was released, which I upgraded to without any further problems. I was finally able to test the features of the system, but more about that in my next posting.
By using exiting code I can concentrate on the layout and operation of the side instead of code development and debugging. That is not to say I don't have to work with code, over the last 3 weeks I was very busy getting my first choice up and running, more about that in a moment.
Since the general idea is to create a 'social network', I looked around and found BuddyPress which is a new sister project of the existing blog software WordPress. Since WP is the most use and stable blog software today I decided to start my evaluation with BP.
BP sits on top of WP to extent it into a social network by adding group, member and forum section. The forum software is actually another WP project called bbPress. Both BP and bbP are new project that just now were released as stable versions.
I started my evaluation with installing WordPress MU version 2.7.1, which is a multi-user version of WP. The reason WP-MU is required, instead of the plain WP, is to allow for each user to have their own blog in addition to the master blog. Since WP is a blog based system, by having individual blogs as bases it will allow BP to add other multi-user features which sit on top.
The installation of WP-MU was without any problems. The next step was to add BP as a plug-n to WP-MU, again using Version 1.0 Release Candidate 3 was easy without any problems.
The problems stated with installing bbPress (Forum Software) which is a separate application that needs to be integrated with BP. Right from the start the auto-install failed complaining about the admin user was already in use. After checking with the bbPress community forum I found that this version (RC3) had known integration problems and that users should use the Alpha 6 version instead. Following the advise I got the install working. However, testing the integration of the Forum with BP revealed that there was no integration, no forums were created within BP, nor any forums created in bbPress showed up in BP.
After a week of following various articles on this topic I finally got it to work by using a manual setup for the two systems configuration files. This process got named “deep” integration. By the time I was done, BP Version 1.0.1 was released, which I upgraded to without any further problems. I was finally able to test the features of the system, but more about that in my next posting.
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