Buddypress Best for Social Community Website

Buddypress for social community website is ideally the best software.

Social media websites such as Facebook and twitter has been part of our life for almost a decade already. It is for a fact that social media is one of the most effective marketing tool for various businesses, getting people connected, and touching peoples life via world wide web.

Despite from the fact that Facebook is the original and the true influence of the other well known social media websites like instagram, there are still many creative minds out there who are inspired to create their own social community portals intended for local interaction within their locality.

Yes, it is Facebook who dominates the social media arena because of how it was perfectly engineered from user experience (UI) down to cool features that let user interact easily to their friends activities.

But I learned that there are many social community sites that are niche specific like profile directories and various dating sites. Basically, all of them are having the same vision - and that is to bring people closer.

Now, what I'd like to talk about in this post is how you would do to start your own social community website and know the best option on how to build it. Well, if you have wordpress skills then I highly recommend Buddypress plugin. It is easy to install just like any other wordpress plugins but you may need to familiarize and configure the settings correctly in order to run Buddypress.

Why choose Buddypress?

Aside from its free, you can do advance customization depending on your requirements. Just learn the Buddypress codex and you will find out how to create your own Buddypress theme, child theme, or even custom component or plugins.

For me, Buddypress functionality and features works out of the box. But if you think of your own functionality, check it first if there's a plugin similar to your needs that already exist.

On my experience in building a dating website using Buddypress, I have few custom functionality that I would like to achieve, but I was very glad that those custom functionality that I was looking are already made available as plugins in the WordPress repository such photo album, block users, and likes.

There are many WordPress themes that are Buddypress compatible where you can download for free or you can look for a well crafted Premium Buddypress theme like cinematix.

If you think of building a social media website similar to Facebook, try checking this out - rtmedia

Download Buddypress here

Displaying custom buddypress messages in a custom template

Buddypress plugin is completely free and it works out of the box for a community website that lets users interact easily. But after going through my clients requirements, I learned that most of the functionality he was up to is not provided in Buddypress by default. So I need to Google around to find out if those custom functions are possible.

Good thing to know that Buddypress support has a huge based community of contributors and users, and I spotted some old and recent topics related to my clients custom specific requirements.

In this post, I would like to share with you a simple way how to display a custom Buddypress messages.  In my client’s request, he wants to display 5 recent and unread messages within the custom template I made where I display a members grid view.

The idea is to create a floating messages widget (I might include a screenshot soon) inside the members page.

If you think this is something similar to your needs, keep on reading.

First, you need to familiarize the inside and out for the messages component. Then examine the private messages loop and see the lines of codes to understand how to display the template tags you wanted to show in your custom messages widget.

What I did was very simple. I just copied the standard loop and apply css for my design.

<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) { ?>
                <div style=" background: none repeat scroll 0 0 rgb(255, 255, 255);
                                                height: auto;
                                                margin-bottom: -184px;
                                                margin-left: 760px;
                                                margin-top: 40px;
                                                padding: 5px;
                                                width: 40%;"
                                                id="">
                                              
                                <h4 style="text-align:center">Messages</h4>
                                <?php if ( bp_has_message_threads( 'max=6&amp;amp;per_page=1' ) ) : ?>
                                  <ul id="dns-message-threads">
                                  <?php while ( bp_message_threads() ) : bp_message_thread(); ?>
                               
                                                <li>
                                                  <!-- Example template tags you can use -->
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_id() ?>
                                                  <?php bp_message_thread_has_unread() ?>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_unread_count() ?>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_avatar() ?>
                                                  <span style="color:#da389f!important;font-weight:bold"><?php bp_message_thread_from() ?></span>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_last_post_date() ?>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_view_link() ?>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_subject() ?>
                                                  <?php bp_message_thread_excerpt() ?>
                                                  <?php //bp_message_thread_delete_link() ?>
                                                </li>
                                  <?php endwhile; ?>
                                  </ul>
                               
                               
                                <?php endif;?>
                </div>
              
                <?php } // end messages widget ?>

If you notice, I placed the loop inside the “is_user_logged_in” condition to avoid showing it on non logged in users. And then inside the sample template tags, I just commented out those tags that I don’t want to display.

Also, consider looking thoroughly on the accepted parameters for various way to filter the members you wanted to showed up.