CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpressextensibilitybuddypress
SoftwareSavant
SoftwareSavant

Reputation: 9757

BuddyPress/WordPress extension for social networking

I am currently constructing a social networking website for a friend of mine. I was going to write this from scratch using PHP, javascript, ect... But it seems as though a lot of the stuff I am doing is reinventing the wheel. Poorly at that. I am currently looking around to see if there is a framework or API that will do all the basic stuff (that has already been through years of best-practice revisions and so forth) but still extensible enough for me to customize it easily to my friends liking. I put my ear to the ground (code for searching google) and somehow or the other BuddyPress-which is an extension to wordpress seems to pop up quite a bit. But it strikes me as more of a blogging sort of thing. Plus, Looking to extend the functionality of this looks to be a herculean task.

One functionality piece that I am trying to add is the ability for the user to have a split account. Let's say that a user joins my site, he will have a profile that only certain users can see, but at the same time, he will have an account that only other people can see. Is that the level of extensibility that I can add to Buddy Press. That functionality is basically on the database back-end. So you would think that that would be simple. Let me know what you think.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 181

Answers (1)

Alex W
Alex W

Reputation: 741

Wordpress and Buddypress are certainly very extensible! If you're comparing writing a social network from scratch with writing a plugin/extension for Buddypress, it's almost no contest -- writing for WP/BP is definitely more straightforward. Plus, since you're building on top of (usually) thoroughly-tested code, I would suggest that you take a crack at it.

As per your specific use case, it's curious, could you add more information about why and how the user will interact with their "split" profile?

If I were going to code something like this, after I set up WP/BP, I would create extra profile fields for users -- e.g. alternate_bio -- and your plugin can load these profile fields IF the user viewing them has the appropriate credentials.

For learning to write the plugin, I'd start here: http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin

Hope this helps!

Upvotes: 1

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