Description

Are you looking for modern, robust, and sophisticated social network software? BuddyPress is a suite of components that are common to a typical social network, and allows for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system.

Aimed at site builders & developers, BuddyPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, and extensibility. It is deliberately powerful yet unbelievably simple social network software, built by contributors to WordPress.

Members can register on your site to create user profiles, have private conversations, make social connections, create and interact in groups, and much more. Truly a social network in a box, BuddyPress helps you build a home for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community.

Built with developers in mind

BuddyPress helps site builders & developers add community features to their websites. It comes with a robust theme compatibility API that does its best to make every BuddyPress content page look and feel right with just about any WordPress theme. You will likely need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine.

BuddyPress themes are just WordPress themes with additional templates, and with a little work, you could easily create your own, too! A handful of BuddyPress-specific themes are readily available for download from WordPress.org, and lots more are available from third-party theme authors.

BuddyPress also comes with built-in support for Akismet and bbPress, two very popular and very powerful WordPress plugins. If you’re using either, visit their settings pages and ensure everything is configured to your liking.

The BuddyPress Add-ons

WordPress.org is home to some amazing Add-ons for BuddyPress, including:

NB: BP Classic is a backwards compatibility Add-on for BuddyPress 12.0 and up bringing back the BP Legacy URL parser, the BP Default theme and BP Legacy widgets.

Go to BuddyPress profile on WordPress.org to find them all!

Join our community

If you’re interested in contributing to BuddyPress, we’d love to have you. Head over to the BuddyPress Documentation site to find out how you can pitch in.

BuddyPress is available in many languages thanks to the volunteer efforts of individuals all around the world. Check out our translations page on the BuddyPress Documentation site for more details. If you are a polyglot, please consider helping translate BuddyPress into your language.

Growing the BuddyPress community means better software for everyone!

Screenshots

Activity Streams - Global, personal, and group activity streams with threaded commenting, direct posting, favoriting and @mentions. All with full RSS feeds and email notification support.
Extended Profiles - Fully editable profile fields allow you to define the fields users can fill in to describe themselves. Tailor profile fields to suit your audience.
User Settings - Give your users complete control over profile and notification settings. Settings are fully integrated into your theme, and can be disabled by the administrator.
Extensible Groups - Powerful public, private or hidden groups allow your users to break the discussion down into specific topics. Extend groups with your own custom features using the group extension API.
Friend Connections - Let your users make connections so they can track the activity of others, or filter to show only those users they care about the most.
Private Messaging - Private messaging will allow your users to talk to each other directly and in private. Not just limited to one-on-one discussions, your users can send messages to multiple recipients.
Site Tracking - Track posts and comments in the activity stream, and allow your users to add their own blogs using WordPress' Multisite feature.
Notifications - Keep your members up-to-date with relevant activity via toolbar and email notifications.

Blocks

This plugin provides 15 blocks.

Login Form Show a Log In form to logged-out visitors, and a Log Out link to those who are logged in.
Primary navigation Displays BuddyPress primary nav in the sidebar of your site. Make sure to use it as the first widget of the sidebar and only once.
Dynamic Groups List A dynamic list of recently active, popular, newest, or alphabetical groups.
Groups BuddyPress Groups.
Group BuddyPress Group.
Dynamic Members List A dynamic list of recently active, popular, and newest members.
Members BuddyPress Members.
Recently Active Members Profile photos of recently active members.
Online Members Profile photos of online users.
Member BuddyPress Member.
Sitewide Notices Display Sitewide Notices posted by the site administrator.
Recent Networkwide Posts A list of recently published posts from across your network.
Embed an activity Add a block that displays the activity content pulled from this or other community sites.
Latest Activities Display the latest updates of the post author (when used into a page or post), of the displayed user (when viewing their profile) or of your community.
Friends List A dynamic list of recently active, popular, and newest friends of the post author (when used into a page or post) or of the displayed member (when used in a widgetized area). If author/member data is not available the block is not displayed.

Installation

Requirements

To run BuddyPress, we recommend your host supports:

PHP version 7.4 or greater.
MySQL version 5.7 or greater OR MariaDB version 10.4 or greater.
HTTPS support

Note: If you are in a legacy environment where you only have older PHP or MySQL versions, WordPress also works with PHP 5.6.20+ and MySQL 5.0+, but these versions have reached official End Of Life and as such may expose your site to security vulnerabilities.

Automatic installation

Automatic installation is the easiest option as WordPress handles everything itself. To do an automatic install of BuddyPress, log in to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to the Plugins menu and click Add New.

In the search field type “BuddyPress” and click Search Plugins. Once you’ve found it, you can view details about the latest release, such as community reviews, ratings, and description. Install BuddyPress by simply pressing “Install Now”.

Once activated:

Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Components’ and adjust the active components to match your community (you can always toggle these later).
Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Pages’ and setup your directories and special pages. We create a few automatically, but suggest you customize these to fit the flow and verbiage of your site.
Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Settings’ and take a moment to match BuddyPress’s settings to your expectations. We pick the most common configuration by default, but every community is different.

FAQ

Can I use my existing WordPress theme?

Yes! BuddyPress works out-of-the-box with nearly every WordPress theme.

Will this work on WordPress multisite?

Yes! If your WordPress installation has multisite enabled, BuddyPress will support the global tracking of blogs, posts, comments, and even custom post types with a little bit of custom code.

Furthermore, BuddyPress can be activated and operate in just about any scope you need for it to:

Activate at the site level to only load BuddyPress on that site.
Activate at the network level for full integration with all sites in your network. (This is the most common multisite installation type.)
Enable multiblog mode to allow your BuddyPress content to be displayed on any site in your WordPress Multisite network, using the same central data.
Extend BuddyPress with a third-party multi-network plugin to allow each site or network to have an isolated and dedicated community, all from the same WordPress installation.

Read custom BuddyPress activations for more information.

Where can I get support?

Our community provides free support at https://buddypress.org/support/.

Where can I find documentation?

Our documentation site can be found at https://codex.buddypress.org/.

Where can I report a bug?

Report bugs, suggest ideas, and participate in development at https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org.

Where can I get the bleeding edge version of BuddyPress?

Check out the development trunk of BuddyPress from Subversion at https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/, or clone from Git at git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/.

Who builds BuddyPress?

BuddyPress is free software, built by an international community of volunteers. Some contributors to BuddyPress are employed by companies that use BuddyPress, while others are consultants who offer BuddyPress-related services for hire. No one is paid by the BuddyPress project for his or her contributions.

If you would like to provide monetary support to BuddyPress, please consider a donation to the WordPress Foundation, or ask your favorite contributor how they prefer to have their efforts rewarded.

Discussion Forums

Try bbPress. It integrates with BuddyPress Groups, Profiles, and Notifications. Each group on your site can choose to have its own forum, and each user’s topics, replies, favorites, and subscriptions appear in their profiles.

Reviews

locker17 January 15, 2024 1 reply

I am new to buddypress and try to understand the functions. I often work with elementor but since version 12 there are no physical wordpress pages I can load to the the editor.Where is the documentation for that? One sentence here, one sentence there. Sorry, but your documentation is absolutely horrible. You hardly find what you want.

vanessalaw January 2, 2024 4 replies

I installed BuddyPress 12.0 on my site, and it bricked the site. A number of WordPress critical errors were shown from multiple plugins. The BP Classic plugin didn't help. Even reinstalling an earlier version of BuddyPress didn't fix the issue. I had to restore from a backup of the site I took earlier. If you're even thinking of touching BuddyPress 12.0 you NEED to upgrade it in a staging environment first otherwise you could be very sorry. So far this update is an incompatible mess for me, and recommend everyone else stay away until they can fix it.

mike2972 December 15, 2023 1 reply

If you want to update your BuddyPress BE CAREFUL. Their latest update to v12.0 completely destroyed my community. No way to recover. I MUST restore with the latest backup taken last night. Luckily I tested this "amazing" update on my cloned test site. Just be very careful when updating BP...

Naovy G May 31, 2023

I find it very good plugin with basic features, but in reality, you need better design and more features / options.If you want to save time to make your site look decent or not so good at coding yourself, I recommend you to go with paid themes.

Marisa March 29, 2023

A month ago I created my first Wordpress site with one third-party plugin and the forum plug-in bbPress. Getting a theme to work well with both plugins took quite a bit of time as I had to write a small bit of custom css and PHP. My knowledge of css and PHP is low. Actually it took a few weeks to get everything to look nice and work well together, although the work was done on a very part-time basis. I now want to install BuddyPress and bbPress together on another Wordpress site as community software for a certain niche. Is there a reasonably low-priced (or free) theme I can purchase for BuddyPress (and that works with bbPress installed on the same site) that looks nice? Please give me some recommendations. I don't want to spend three weeks making css tweaks to get a decent look community website. As regards reviewing BuddyPress (together with bbPress), I installed both a week ago. It is good BuddyPress allows you precisely to turn what functionality what want on and turn everything else off. For my case I just wanted the ability to allow BuddyPress groups to have their own associated bbPress forum. It worked, although the default themes are rather plain - hence my desire for a good theme recommendation. BuddyPress and bbPress work well together. My only issue is one common to all Wordpress users. The more plugins you add to a Wordpress site, the greater the chances of some little issues occurring, although this is not the fault of BuddyPress or bbPress. When I was looking for what forum plug-in to use, I installed three different ones. bbPress was the most plain looking one by default. However bbPress was the only one that played nicely with all the other plug-ins. So I stuck with bbPress. After a little work, I managed to get bbPress looking good.

frvncesko December 4, 2022 2 replies

We are almost in 2023 and this plugin doesn't follow none of the modern trends in terms of design and features. The core functions are below average, the standard design of the plugin is awful, looks like a plugin built in the mid 2000s like the designs we used to see in 2006/2007. The plugin is very primitive, there are no reshare options for status, no likes for post but a weird star that doesn't even gets notified to another user. Then why the hell the plugin doesn't support medias by default? You need toooo many plugin just to add some small simple things that should be inside the plugin by default, like also live notifications. I've been using Buddypress for years and my conclusion is that this plugin has been built only to make you pay for everything and make everything super complex, this plugin is not really customer friendly and it's not a nice choice to create a social network based platform, and if you want a decent social network prepare yourself to install 40+ plugins only for buddypress.

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