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A powerful blogging tool + over a thousand ever-evolving plug-ins with social media capability = a plugin for WordPress that allows you to turn your blog into your own Social Networking site

For years now WordPress has been one of the largest and most used self-hosted blogging systems on the web. WordPress is an Open Source application that allow fellow coders from all around the world to contribute on its development with the creation of their own plugins. Nowadays the demand for a simple and powerful Content Management System is high and everyone wants to add and change their own pages – especially in the Flat 3.0 World we live in where publishing your own content is more important than just inhaling information.

Wordpress was introduced to the world as a blogging platform, but it’s infinite extensibility has catapulted it to one of the most popular choices of Content Management Systems on the web. As administrator functionalities are becoming more and more necessary on many non-blog based websites the user-friendly edit-it-yourself ability that Wordpress offers makes it a clear choice for content management system’s and since it can be used for more than just a blog utilizing its ever growing library of plug-ins is becoming more and more practical.

BuddyPress: Your Brand on Your Terms

BuddyPress is an extension of WordPress MU – a multi-user application that allows you run “hundred of thousands of blogs” with a single installation of WordPress. BuddyPress incorporates social networking tools into your website (users profiles, group creation, friend lists, private messaging) and why not let users register on your site to create their own blog (http://userblog.yoursite.com) with a simple form registration?

Having social networking tools on your own website further increases your visibility and accessibility to the world wide web and bridges the gap between website owner and website viewer by creating a two way interaction process so that you’re not just feeding information to your viewer but your engaging with conversations with them too. Social media accessibility also attracts more passionate and engaged visitors and empowers those visitors to communicate with each other while simultaneously contributing to the content and credibility of your website.

Instead of redirecting users to an external Social Networking site (such as a Facebook Fan page) BuddyPress provides websites with comparable social networking capabilities. It is an extremely effective Social Content and Social Media tool. Just like you can adjust and use WordPress as a Content Management System for virtually anything, BuddyPress expands that thinking by letting you create a complete social network from the ground up.

BuddyPress is an ideal tool for organizations, schools, and basically any group that shares a common goal to bring its people working together, sharing ideas, and more importantly, engaging themselves in the right place, with the right content, under their own terms of conditions and brand.

Working on BuddyPress is not entirely different from creating a site in WordPress, and although there are a few templates available online that can get you started on the spot they might not unify well with the rest of your website. To be brand effective you will need to build these new tools inside your current site so your users won’t feel like they are using a 3rd party application. Remember, the goal is to create your own social networking arena on your site. The website should sell your brand, not WordPress or BuddyPress’es, and don’t get me wrong… I love WordPress from its products to its “Code is Poetry” slogan, but a WordPress powered website that doesn’t look like “Just Another WordPress weblog” is the best publicity the Blogging System can get. Overall, the key to incorporating these tools effectively is to empower your website and make it stand out and apart from from the rest, and utilizing the BuddyPress plug-in properly will allow you to do just that.