BuddyPress Releases Update, Now WordPress Friendly Again

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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?

Gawker Media Opens Publishing Rights to… Anyone

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Gawker MediaIn 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.

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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…]

The James Farmer Interview: Part 1 of 2

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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…]

BuddyPress Updated to 1.0.2

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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.

b5media Goes Community

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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.