I’ve been playing a bit with a BuddyPress installation, the new social networking application for Wordpress. It requires Wordpress MU as the platform. I really like it — it’s like they say, the basic features of Facebook in a box, plus you get to add blogs and other functionality that some sites don’t have.

BuddyPress is an uber-set of Wordpress Plugins that add a lot of structure and functionality to WordPress, but even with that, the installation isn’t as tough as you would think.

The pluses

• Social networking: You can add friends, create groups, create blogs — all the actions you would expect in any social network, including emails that will be sent out during particular actions. It’s all open source too, so you have complete access to the code base to customize it, and believe me, you can customize WordPress a lot.
  
• Customizable profiles: While there’s some wonkyness to adding fields to profiles (you can’t order them), adding them is a snap. I have no idea how you would actually search the fields in an advanced search sort of way — looking at the database, it didn’t appear to be very easy — but the amount of customization you can do and the easy of use to do it is ridculous.
• WordPress Plug Ins: You get full access to the thousands of plug ins that have been developed for WordPress, including the BBPress discussion forum, which plugs right in the to the groups.
• Your server, you own it: While Ning is a great solution (I’ve seen some awesome implementations) at the end of the day if you’re a business, it’s best to have it on your box so you are less suspectible to the platform. BuddyPress is that.

The minuses

• Installation: It’s on WordPress MU, so moving it over from your standard WordPress installation isn’t as easy as you would hope (well, it’s not for the normal WordPress user). There was some database installation funkiness that a few extra minutes in PHP would have solved in handling errors better. Outside of having to delete the WordPress configuation file a few times, the installation was fairly run of the mill.
• Designing The UI: With the extra funcitonality comes the extra overhead of designing a look and feel for the application. While the first theme is great — I used some of the examples to solve design issues with a marketing directory I’m working on — there is a significant amount of work that has to be done that’s well outside of the “well, it’s Wordpress, I can pay only $500 to design in” comments by clients. It is Facebook in a box, and should be treated as such for complexity, and I can imagine spending a month at least designing a decent social netowkr.
• WordPress Plug Ins: Not all of them will work well with WordPress MU, so the predictability of what works and what doesn’t is trial and error. You’re going to have to live with the caution of “well, this may work, but it will be an adventure” on some of the plug ins.
• Performance: It seemed a bit sluggish, and if you are running a social network of any size, I recommend having it on a dedicated server. Some of the plug ins haven’t been tuned yet, so there is a lag. Remember, it’s version 1.0.

Your IT person says Joomla. Your PHP person says Drupal. Your marketing person says SharePoint.

Let’s be frank: they are all buzzwords, and the person speaking to using that system usually has an ulterior motive outside of what’s best for the users. It’s like that Linux guy that likes Linux because it’s easy for him and no one else. Does that really serve the office?

If you have a Microsoft Gold Partner sitting in your office, he’s going to say SharePoint fits the needs for anything short of curing cancer even if MOSS is completely the wrong system. And frankly, all developers have their favorites, and sales people sell, regardless of what the product is. Mac vs. PC. Windows vs. Unix. Drupal vs. Joomla. They’re all religious wars, wars I’m especially tired of.

Every product has it’s merits, and should be judged on them alone, not on a salesperson’s preference. End of sentence.

What do you do? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in the process of setting up a few content management systems for clients, and it’s been an eye-opening experience, not because the systems are crude, but because they actually work pretty well. SilverStripe and Wordpress are two that I’m looking at using on a consistent basis, but there’s a few resources out there to help you select one:

• Six Revisions has a list of the 10 promising systems it has selected
• Open Source CMS is the mack daddy of CMS lists, and a lot of them have online demos
• CMS Watch is a bit more techie, and is a news portal covering the major systems
• Sometimes a blog engine is just what you need, and Smashing Magazine has reviewed 10 of them

In the coming weeks, I’ll go through some of the implementations I’ve been doing to make Wordpress and SilverStripe sing. Stay tuned!