A few weeks ago, I was working with a fellow developer and trying to figure out how we could enhance the functionality of a WordPress website that required managing visitor logins. The site, which was for poets and writers, would allow visitors to set up accounts, submit content, interact with others on the website and share content to outside circles on Facebook and Twitter. After scratching our heads for a number of days, we came to the conclusion that BuddyPress would provide the needed solution. A couple of weeks later, we can see our decision was not misguided.

In our case, BuddyPress worked because it accomplished what it was created to do: enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. The BuddyPress package however is more than a social networking tool. Companies can use it as an internal communication tool and some universities and colleges have used it to deploy a wide social network on their website. While most institutions are powerless to control and monitor Facebook interactions, BuddyPress provides a safe and secure environment with similar functionality but with the ability to monitor student activity.

BuddyPress is open source and makes available its core code online. In addition, users are free to use its themes, plug-in extensions and contribute their time and knowledge to the project.

The BuddyPress Core

Since BuddyPress is essentially an enhanced WordPress plug-in, it is written with the same primary technologies that power its parent base i.e. PHP and MySQL. Most users will therefore find it real easy if they have previously been working on WordPress. The package extends the integral functions of the WordPress engine to include themes, plugins and widgets effectively inheriting what has been there all along.

BuddyPress Features

In order to allow the creation of social networking applications, BuddyPress comes installed with some basic functionality that includes Activity Streams, User Profiles, Group Creation, Friend System, Bespoke themes and Blogs per user. Even with its own login functionality, BuddyPress integrates with the underlying WordPress platform in such a way that only a single sign-on is required to the system for users thereby providing seamless experiences across the board.

With most users already on social networks, BuddyPress offers a solid strategy of helping you attract new members by allowing you to link user profiles to their other social networks like Facebook and Twitter. Using a code snippet or a plug-in, users can easily share their activity on social networks as well as allow others to check out their other profiles on these outside platforms. Members can even share their profiles on social networks if they want others to join them in their new ‘social network’.

Group Forums

Groups and group forums are popular on the Web and within communities, and BuddyPress offers communities an easy way to post and reply to forum posts. Members have the freedom to search all public forum topics from the Forums Directory and even post a reply or start a forum topic in a public group even when they are not group members. Any time a member adds a post or replies to a forum post, he or she auto joins that group. Group forums in BuddyPress are made up of Forum Topics and Discussion Threads. Forum topics are proposed discussion subjects while discussion threads are the conversations and replies that result from a particular topic.

Users can easily search and filter forum topics and groups using various parameters as well as create new Forum Directory topics in the same way.

BuddyPress also offers other enhancements that include site-wide forums, avatar uploads, a friend messaging system and a bunch of interesting plugins and themes.

BuddyPress can be installed directly through the WordPress dashboard plugins page or downloaded manually from the plugins repository and uploaded to your website. The latest BuddyPress build can also be downloaded from the SVN repository for developers who want to get their hands dirty.

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At this point we’re just about done with the homepage of our responsive website. We’ve got our navigation in place, our background images resize nicely, and our other elements are able to resize and adjust to various screen resolutions.

Today we’re going to focus on tying the page off with a footer. I’ve always admired sites that put some thought in to the bottom of their page design. There are certainly times when a footer requires nothing more than some basic contact info and maybe a copyright claim.

But I think it’s a good idea with any site requiring a fair amount of vertical scrolling to go ahead and add a smaller version of your main navigation in to your footer. This allows the viewer to reach the end of your page and quickly jump to another page on the site. We’ll put the icing on our footer by feeding in our latest tweet with a little jQuery script and then sprinkle in some contact info. Before we dive in to it, let’s take a quick peek at what we’re working towards.

Much like a website’s header, I like to use a separate file for my footer and dynamically pull it in to each page with a php include.

This makes for quick and easy updating if a link is added or contact info changes. Go ahead and open your idex.php file and include your footer, mine is sitting just above the close of my body tag and looks like this.

<footer> <?php include('footer.php') ?> </footer>

That’s it for our index.php page, go ahead and save it then close out of that file.  Next up we’re going to want to create our footer file and enter all of our content, so open a new document and save it as “footer.php”. The first tag we’re going to want to drop in our footer.php file is our container id.

This will keep our footer content centered on the page and aligned nicely with the rest of our main content above. You’ll notice in the image of our footer above that it’s broken down in to three sections, so we’re going to want to include a “footerLeft” class right after we open the container.

We then populate our “footerLeft” class with a miniature version of our main navigation, and then icons linking to our social media pages.  At this point my code looks like this.

<div id="container"> <div class="footerLeft"> <ul> <li><a href="#">Home</a></li> <li><a href="#">Portfolio</a></li> <li><a href="#">Services</a></li> <li><a href="#">About</a></li> <li><a href="#">Blog</a></li> <li class="last"><a href="#">Contact</a></li> </ul> <img src="images/blogger.png" /> <img src="images/linkedin.png" /> <img src="images/facebook_icon.png" /> <img src="images/twitter.png" /> </div><!--end div "footerLeft"--> </div><!--end div “container”-->...

WordPress is undoubtedly one of the most popular tools on the Internet because it makes it so easy to get a functional web site up and running in such a short time.

And then there are the plugins. If you want your WordPress site to do something then odds are there is a plugin that you can install to make your site do what you want it to do.

But plugins pose a bit of a problem at times. Since they are created by third-party developers you never know what quality control practices are used and what security testing is done to make sure that the plugin doesn’t leave your site vulnerable.

So instead of blindly installing a plugin, you can easily apply these hacks to your WordPress code to enhance the functionality of your site without giving up control to a plugin developer who you don’t know.

Remove the trackbacks from your comment count

Like any exercise, let’s get warmed up first.

Trackbacks are one of the communication tools that make blogging much more community driven than a static web site. However because they are listed under the comments, people don’t always approve them. This quick little hack will remove the trackbacks your blog receives from the total number of comments.

This can be done by adding the following code to the functions.php file:

add_filter('get_comments_number', 'comment_count', 0); function comment_count( $count ) { if ( ! is_admin() ) { global $id; $comments_by_type = &separate_comments(get_comments('status=approve&post_id=' . $id)); return count($comments_by_type['comment']); } else { return $count; } }

Keep readers on your site with related posts

Most blog owners know that best way to keep visitors is to provide them with more useful content. There are many plugins out there that can be used to provide readers with related posts, but it is also something that can be done with a little bit of custom code that needs to be placed within the loop:

<?php $tags = wp_get_post_tags($post->ID); if ($tags) { echo 'Related Posts'; $first_tag = $tags[0]->term_id; $args=array( 'tag__in' => array($first_tag), 'post__not_in' => array($post->ID), 'showposts'=>5, 'caller_get_posts'=>1 ); $my_query = new WP_Query($args); if( $my_query->have_posts() ) { while ($my_query->have_posts()) : $my_query->the_post(); ?> <p><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark" title=" Permanent Link...