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Major BuddyPress Update

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The tech behind the Idea Hive community that Heather Durnin and I manage for our students is a wordpress multi user set up with BuddyPress installed on top of it.

If you’re not familiar with it, BuddyPress is definitely worth your time to investigate. I moved over to it when Ning changed to a “for pay” model of use. Basically a social network in a box, Buddypress is a wordpress plugin that allows you to set up forums and groups fairly easily. As well, with other plugins, it isn’t difficult to add functionality like  built in wikis and space for group document uploads.

The students that Heather and I have in our grade 8 classes (we both teach combined classes with grades 7 and 8 students in the same room) began their school blogging life last year at wordpress.com. To ensure that these students would have all of their content from last year, we decided to leave these students at this site. Our grade 7’s however, we decided to host directly out of the ideahive.org site. This way these students only need a single login and they can post in the forums and groups as well as easily move over to their personal blogging space to work in.

After a lengthy wait, BuddyPress has had a major upgrade to it’s entire system moving from version 1.0 to 1.5 in a single leap. From kernel code to its theme, hundreds of bugs have been looked after and the system is now ready for live use. I performed the upgrade on the Idea Hive site, and with one small exception, everything moved cleanly and easily over to the new version.

A few thoughts for people who have this same thing to do:

1.) Make sure when you upgrade, you shut off all of the plugins that have any contact with BuddyPress before you upgrade Buddypress itself. In my system for example, I have plugins to do with group formation, wikis for each group and group document uploads. I made sure to shut these plugins off before I updated Buddypress itself.

2.) Not all plugins are updated yet to meet the requirement of 1.5. Make sure to check the compatibility list before you do your upgrades. Activating a plugin that has not been updated might throw a wrench into your system.

3.) There is an entirely new BuddyPress administration section that you need to go through in order to make certain that settings on things like private messaging, forum creation and account deletion are placed where you want them to be for your community.

4.) The new Buddypress theme is one that people might actually want to work. Fully customizable with new spaces for widgets and menu, a background image and a custom header, be prepared to spend some time making it your own.

The entire network seems a little quicker and smoother since the upgrade. I have found in the past that Buddypress could be slow sometimes, but at first glance 1.5 seems a more nimble and I’m interested to see it under full steam.


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