Boone Gorges

I’ve been developing for the CUNY Academic Commons, a social network and collaboration site for the faculty, staff and graduate students of the City University of New York, for about six months now – a period not coincidentally coterminous with my history as a WordPress developer! During that time we’ve envisioned the Commons as a site built around individual scholars and students. BuddyPress has been a natural fit for this kind of project.

Our concept is for BuddyPress profiles and groups to act as hubs for the collaboration that happens on the Commons. Individuals flesh out their profiles with their research and teaching interests. Based on this information, groups form around common interests and projects. With only a small amount of development time – see, for instance, this hack that allows users to identify their interests in a more fine-grained way – BuddyPress excels at this kind of community building.

It’s at the next stage where the real development work begins. Groups that form in BuddyPress need spaces to work. And since the CUNY Academic Commons caters to such a wide audience – tenured professors to first-year graduate students, chemists to laywers to philosophers to creative writers – our goal has been to provide different kinds of collaborative spaces for different academic purposes.

Blogs are a no-brainer. It goes without saying that the integration between BuddyPress and WordPress is as tight as can be.

Forums are another space where groups work together, and their integration into BuddyPress is getting more seamless all the time. Before the recent release of BuddyPress 1.1, it took quite a bit of development time to make bbPress play nicely with BuddyPress – consistent theming, shared logins, access to the other platform’s core functions. The forum integration in BP 1.1 solves these problems, but raises new development challenges, especially regarding the functionality that bbPress handles in plugins: email notification of forum posts, file attachments, etc.

MediaWiki is the third spoke in the BuddyPress collaboration hub. Our team has made single sign-on between WordPress and MediaWiki happen. We’ve got a method for making the BP admin bar appear throughout MediaWiki. We’ve also developed a tool that brings wiki edits into the BuddyPress activity streams.

I’m excited to be part of the BuddyPress community, as I think it’s got a great future as this kind of collaboration hub: a set of tools for people to connect, and open connections with software where specialized types of collaboration and content creation can happen.

Lisa Sabin-Wilson

This weekend we’ll all be at CUNY in NYC for a weekend of learning, sharing, networking, eating, drinking and soaking in all the amazing WP goodness that comes out of every WordCamp across the world.  I’m excited, aren’t you??  The tireless organizers of WCNYC have worked hard to put together a really fantastic line up of sessions….simply something for everyone.  I know how challenging it is to organize and event such as this – hats off to them for what is sure to be a pretty phenomenal weekend in NYC!

Speaking of sharing and socializing – - my session at WordCamp NYC is aimed towards introducing bloggers to the BuddyPress - a  suite of plugins available for the WordPress MU platform that is rich with features that allow you to take your WordPress MU site to the next level by engaging a community on your own web site  through dynamic features such as:

• Extended Profiles
• Friends
• Private Messaging
• Activity Wires
• Blog Tracking
• Status Updates
• …and more!

My session introduces you to the features available, aimed toward helping you make the decision if BuddyPress is right for your site, and has features that you would like to add to enhance and grow a social community on your own domain.  Many people, wrongly, state that BuddyPress is “Facebook in a box…” – - I think even I have wrongly made that statement in the past.  It’s not Facebook, at all.  Running a Buddypress community on your own site makes it a good deal more targeted to your specific niche community, allowing you to build a full and interactive social network around the specific niche topic and interests that you have full control over on your own site.  Where Facebook covers everything from Farmville to Mafia Wars – - your (BuddyPress powered) community can hone in, and concentrate, on specific topics and interests that you determine and guide.

My session explores the types of communities that are using BuddyPress, and how they are taking advantage of the available features to build, grow and sustain their own social community on their sites.  I will gives you some suggestions on useful plugins that will help you extend the available features on your BuddyPress powered site for your community members to take advantage of as they socialize, network, engage and interact within your community.  Finally, I will provide an explanation on the BuddyPress theme framework and a few tips I’ve come across in my work with BuddyPress that will help you dig in and customize your BuddyPress templates to give your own community a unique look that is specific to you and your community.

I have been working with BuddyPress since its early, infant days in the summer of 2008 when I discovered how truly amazing and powerful it is for building communities.  The development of BuddyPress has grown in leaps and bounds over the last year and continues to keep getting better every single day, thanks in no small part to Andy Peatling and the group of devs over at BuddyPress.Org.  I have been so eyebrows deep in BuddyPress over the past several months that I sometimes forget that there is a great big community out there that doesn’t yet know its power and potential! I hope to bring some of that BuddyPress joy to WordCamp NYC this weekend and share with you the wonders that I’ve discovered.

I’m really looking forward to meeting everyone!  I love the opportunity to meet WordPress (and BuddyPress!) users whenever I get the chance – - ping me on Twitter @LisaSabinWilson so I can add you and we can stay in touch in NYC and beyond!

Ted Mann

The term “hyperlocal” is popping up more and more on the interwebs lately. When you hear it, what do you think of?

- Town-based blogs?
- A reinvention of journalism as we know it?
- Big media’s latest desperate ploy to save their eroding business?
- CitySearch for the ‘burbs?

All true. All fair ways to describe what has become one of the hottest trends in the media industry in the past year.

Everybody from AOL (Patch.com) to MSNBC (Everyblock) to the New York Times (The Local) is attempting to get a piece of the hyperlocal pie. And whether or not you think one of these sites holds the promise of becoming Facebook for small towns — or the misfortune to become Microsoft Sidewalk 2.0 — it’s clear that they’re helping cover city council meetings in a way they haven’t been in years., and at the same time, bringing the power of the blog format to citizen journalism.

There is one problem most of these sites face, though: How do you empower the community and get them to join your blog, while preventing the whole thing from devolving into a forum-like free-all-all? (Apologies to all bbPress and forum enthusiasts out there.)

There are options, sure — moderating posts, making membership invitation-only, and so on. But the most elegant solution may just be the most simple of all: BuddyPress.

At least, that’s what I found when we launched InJersey.com, a network of hyperlocal blogs in New Jersey, last summer. For us, BuddyPress was initially a way of future-proofing our town sites in Cherry Hill, Collingswood, Flemington, Freehold, Madison, Somerset Hills, and Vineland. But what we found out is that BuddyPress is one of the most unintentionally ingenious ways of mobilizing and educating a team of citizen journalists possible.

Since launching, the InJersey site editors — all of whom are full-time reporters for Gannett New Jersey’s six daily newspapers — have employed all of the features of BuddyPress (messaging, wire, profiles) to communicate with and send assignments to the people who’ve signed up to become contributors on the site. And more importantly, it’s helped elevate the level of discourse — in part by just having users use their real names.

In my session — “Hyperlocal Journalism with BuddyPress,” Saturday, 5 p.m. — we’ll look at how we built out InJersey, and specifically what sorts of tools and plugins helped make it a reality. We’ll focus especially on ways to help manage a site featuring open registration, and what you can do to manage a burgeoning user base, while still keeping everything as open as possible.

Casey Bisson

Most every university uses LDAP or some other authentication technology to reduce the number of systems that users have to maintain their passwords in. When Plymouth State University first deployed WordPress MU (when it was still in pre-release beta), we integrated with LDAP. Eventually we migrated to single sign-on via CAS (Central Authentication Service) and I took over maintenance of the wpCAS plugin.

Running WordPress as a client to other authentication systems is easy, but WordPress offers a number of user-facing features that get lost when doing that.

So when we went looking for ways to improve the security of our password assignment and reset process, we decided to make WordPress the center of the system. Using WordPress saved us the trouble of building our own and the many eyes of the WordPress development community help ensure the overall security of the system.

WordPress now powers the authentication, password recovery, and profile management for the university, replacing the authentication features of our commercial portal system. Now we’re taking advantage of WP’s plugin architecture to easily add new features (like sending password reset codes by SMS), but this approach also offers a neat way to sneak more social features into the tools our users depend on daily.

I’ll be discussing the evolution of WordPress authentication at Plymouth State, including the custom plugins and hacks we developed to make it work, in my session on User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems at WordCamp New York.