For those of you not squeamish with the idea of hosting your own social network, you’ll be glad to hear that BuddyPress has released a new update which should make the DIY social network compatible with WordPress 3.1.

This release backports a few important fixes from the currently in-development 1.3 version of BuddyPress to play nicely with the new and very much improved WordPress network administration interface. We’ve also updated the bundled version of bbPress from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3, which addresses a few issues that do not effect BuddyPress directly.

Every effort has been put into supporting both WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 with this release to make updating your sites as painless as possible, so this should be another worry-free update! (Official BuddyPress Blog)

For those of you unfamiliar with BuddyPress, it’s basically a DIY social networking software that empowers you to host and build your own community without having to hire a developer to build one from scratch.

WordPress fans can easily activate BuddyPress by installing the official plugin, and users desiring to customize their social network further have hundreds of BuddPress plugins at their disposal (not to mention the option of creating more).

Do you use BuddyPress? If so, what are your favorite features and (more importantly) what features should the BuddyPress team add to improve it?

In what is probably his boldest move so far, Nick Denton, Gawker Media Guru, has opened the rights to publish on the Gawker media properties to everyone. Just like on any other blog, readers could send Gawker editors tips via a submission form or via email, but now tips send via the new submission form will be published immediately on the tag pages.

A small redesign across the board introduced the new submission form on all 9 Gawker blogs.

User submissions will have to include a tag, using the Hashtag format, popularised on Twitter. Submissions with tags will then be published on the blogs’ appropriate tag pages. The new move is reminiscent of the once so popular community portals with forums and Denton appropriately called the new asset ‘Gawker Open Forums’.
From the internal memo sent to editors: read more

James Farmer is one of the big names in the WordPress MU sphere. He’s one of the guys behind the WordPress MU focused agency Incsub, and also the founder of the poster site of poster sites for the blog hosting platform: Edublogs.org. Sure, I guess wordpress.com is both bigger and probably better technically than Edublogs.org, but this is the mother of all WordPress MU installs, the one that proved that this software can be used for real. If anyone doubted that, that is.

So what are his thoughts on the platform, all the new projects that Incsub has rolled out, and so on? I certainly got them in this mammoth interview, split into two parts. This is Part 1.

First of all, why don’t you tell us a little bit about yourself and your company, Incsub?

Incsub is about my 4th professional incarnation, before that I was an editor at theage.com.au, lecturer at deakin.edu.au and teacher at stacks of different places.

Essentially, while I was in the lecturer mode, I started Edublogs.org to fill a need that I had – providing blogs for people – and it grew (really quick) so people started asking me about making similar sites for them.

Luckily I had also got to know Andrew Billits via the WPMU community by that time, he’s a damn great WPMU coder, and hence Incsub was born.

read more

The community plugin for WordPress MU, BuddyPress, has been updated to 1.0.2. This isn’t a crucial update, but it does fix some bugs, says Andy Peatling, so you should hit that update button from within the admin interface. Personally, I’m happy to learn that BuddyPress 1.1 and onwards will manage language files better, since you need to re-upload those after every update. Very good.

We saw this coming, especially with the feature we did on the new b5media back in February. Mashing lots of blogs together and moving to WordPress MU, it all smelled forum integration with bbPress, and Facebook-ish social networking with BuddyPress from the start. And now they’re rolling it out, first on Splendicity and Blisstree, but the rest of the roster will get the community treatment too.

All of our bloggers will certainly play a key role in this. There are very few leaders in any given community; it is one of those miniscule percentages of total users, in the 1% range. We have a clear advantage because our bloggers are already our community leaders. [...] Most importantly, it allows bloggers to interact with their readers outside of the author/commentor relationship and allow readers to start discussions about their favourite topics as well.

Read the full presentation, and the hopes and dreams of the b5ers, in the blog post.

A while back there was a poll on the BuddyPress website about what should be tackled next. BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress MU that turns your install into something of a social network. It is currently out in 1.0.1.

The results are in and among the things we’ll see in BuddyPress 1.1, apparently due August 17, are filtering of the activity stream, group categories and tags, image posting to wire as well as quick posting to blogs through the theme, and some other things. Not counting bug fixes an other things that might arise along the way of course.

Project leader Andy Peatling urges developers to join in on the fun, and possibly the roadmap will help. After all, it goes beyond 1.1, all the way to 1.4 actually.

WordCamp San Francisco 2009 this past weekend was a resounding success, but there is some major confusion coming from the presentation on the State of the Word by Matt Mullenweg about the “merger” of WordPress and WordPressMU.

In his presentation, Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, told the more than 700 attendees news about WordPress and its relatives under the Automattic umbrella, a form of stockholders report. He also announced that WordPress – the ORG part of WordPress – would be merged into WordPressMU.

Many, including Ozh of Planet Ozh, The Theme Lab, and Aaron Brazell were quick to announce their thoughts about the “merger of WordPress and WordPressMU,” misunderstanding the story they were getting across the live blogs and twit-stream from WordCamp San Francisco. read more

WordPress 2.8 News: The final stages of development, testing, and patching is underway for the release of WordPress 2.8. The latest news on the next version of WordPress includes: read more

Developer Andy Peatling has announced the BuddyPress version 1.0 release. BuddyPress is a set of plugins for WordPress MU, being the multi-user version of WordPress, and won’t work with a standard install. It adds various Facebook-ish functionalities, you can in fact take it for a spin at testbp.org. That’s the default install.

Peatling mentioned upcoming functionality in his announcement post:

The status updates and gallery components are next on the roadmap, you can expect to see versions of those components appearing later this year. We’ll also be going through the hundreds of enhancement tickets we’ve received, and with your help prioritizing them for future versions.

I’ve been using BuddyPress for a project for some time, and it appears to be working well enough, although it might be a bit tricky for some to setup, just like WordPress MU is. Read more on the official WordPress blog, and download 1.0 from here.

The Google Summer of Code^TM 2009 is on and applications for the WordPress aspect of the project is in full swing with student applications now being accepted.

In a comical typical dialog between a son, desperately trying to explain web technology and terminology to a father, thrilled his son might get paid for what he’s long considered was “time wasting computer stuff,” Jane Wells of Automattic spells out some of the basics of this year’s WordPress Summer of Code 2009. read more