A while ago I wrote a post about the new WordPress 2.3 and my dislikes with the new category system. It turns out I was wrong with my findings that my category-based forum wouldn't work with WP2.3, because it does. Jay! After I'd upgraded my testbox to WordPress 2.3, I did some more interesting things to the testbox.

The idea kind of stuck to me, so I started fiddeling around with my testbox install.

Recently I was discussing social network software with Jeroen, since he wants to create his own hyves. He was looking into the upcoming BuddyPress, wich is based on WordPress MU. I commented that it should be possible to build some community software around a regular WordPress install, but it would take some new plugins to be written. The idea kind of stuck to me, so I started fiddeling around with my testbox install, building an author template wich could feature a personal blog and a possibilty to leave scraps. This was again done by abusing the WP category system.

How does it work?
I've written a little plugin wich enters a post in the database each time a user registers to the blog. This post has the author id set for the new user, so this user has posted to the blog just by registering. This post is being used for the scraps or guestbook thingy at the bottom af the author page. It also brings the advantage of making the author page visible, because there's a bug in WordPress wich gives back a 404 if you're trying to reach the authorpage of a user who hasn't posted to the blog yet. It is a bug, because it only occurs when you're using pretty permalinks.

The tesbox also uses some other plugins for the thing to work, wich are:

• - Cimy User Extra Fields for the creation of some extra user fields,
• - TDO Mini Forms, I hacked the code of version 0.4 of this plugin so I could use it to create forum and blog posts,

Plus some other plugins wich aren't really related to this post such as antispam plugins etc. I also tried using the Advanced Permalinks plugin, but I couldn't get it to rewrite the pretty permalinks in the way I intended, so I deactivated it. Last but not least it uses a custom profile page, I found a way around the problem of getting it to work in WP2.2 (and 2.3).

Is it a valid option if you're looking for a social networking platform?
This is a question I'm trying to answer for myself also. I think it's probably not a real option for a fully open social networking site. The posting database would very fast fill up with a lot of data, since every single blog post is placed in the same database table. In a closed environment it probably could work though. Still it was a lot of fun playing with it (I'm a geek, I know), and though it doesn't have all of the core functionality a social networking platform should have, I'm convinced it is quite possible to build these options within some extra WordPress plugins.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 5th, 2007 at 8:48 pm and is tagged 2.3, forum, mu, profile page, tdomf plugin, theme. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.