Wordpress Mu and Buddypress
With Ning becoming a paid service I wanted to create my own social networking site. I checked out a few options, and I am still looking into more. Drupal looked promising but it is not very intuitive. Being in a hurry I decided to try out Wordpress Mu and Buddypress. Although they were not exactly what I wanted they turned out to be pretty good. Wordpress Mu stands for multi-user. With mu you can create a whole bunch of blogs from one installation - Very cool stuff! You can also create group blogs, with different permissions set for different types of users. I really liked Buddypress. Buddypress is a basic social networking content management system based on wordpress. Like wordpress it was super easy to install. Setting it up was a breeze. With Buddypress you can have a social networking site with public and private groups set up in an hour or even less. There are even plugins you can add to create a paid membership site. My respect for wordpress just went up a notch. I used to like wordpress but now I love it! On related side note I found a classified ads plugin for wordpress. At first I had some problems with it, but I got it going and yes it does work, and it works well. I had some fun with that too and set up my own classified ads site. You can have free ads or charge. I set mine up to charge by the week, 2 weeks, the month, and 90 days. You can do any kind of set-up you want. Once again, very cool. I liked it so much I am going to buy another domain and create another classified ads site. I’ll spend more time on the design of this one so it looks really sharp. In the past I never did much to modify the look of the wordpress themes, but now that I have more knowledge on the subject I am going to attempt to create my own themes and I might even make some generic ones to add to the wordpress theme site. Well I have lots to do so I better get back to work.
