Buddypress is WordPress’ forray into social networking. Because WordPress became so popular and so many websites and developers have been trying to squeeze as many modifications and enhancements as they possibly can out of the limited WordPress core, it was only a matter of time before people found a way to use WordPress as a social network, since these sites are growing like crazy.
When I was focused on WordPress I used to count the days until the BuddyPress release and I couldn’t wait to play around with it in a testing environment. Recently, BuddyPress has gone out of beta and a full public release is now available.
The problem with BuddyPress and why we do not recommend it for sites that ever want to be more of a social network than a network of blogs is that it’s build on top of the WordPressMU core, which again only supports 2 content types: posts and pages. You can create pretty profiles and your users will not need to log in to the dashboard like in regular WordPress, but there are very few features you can add to your community beyond extremely basic stuff. The software is new and there isn’t much you can do with it beyond making a vanilla social profile integrsted into the database that WordPress shares. If social networking is your eventual goal, then you can do a lot more a lot faster with less aspirin, and have must more robust future options by using Drupal, and at similar cost.
BuddyPress is a good choice for an MU community that is already built and live that wants to add some social networking features without the need to completely change-over.
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