SidekickBlog

My regular readers – all 5 of them :) are probably wondering where I have disappeared over the past week so this is a quick update.  The fact is that I have been neglecting this blog and spending all my free time playing around with a new project involving the new community module released for Wordpress called Buddypress.  Buddypress is a basically an integrated set of components (plugins) that rides on top of a regular WPMU (Wordpress for multiple blogs) install to add all kinds of social networking features (mini Facebook). 

I was already looking at starting a community using Ning or a similar social network creation tool.  Just as I registered the community at Ning, news about Buddypress exploded onto the scene (ok well, it was not that big news but I frequent a very niche area of the web).  After reading up on the features and checking out some existing installs, I decided to go ahead with Buddypress instead for the following reasons:

1) It takes 5 minutes to set up a working network on Ning – Where is the fun in that?  Buddypress gives me the opportunity to take the skills that I am learning to run regular Wordpress websites to a whole new level and if I finally end up making a good website after all the intense research and work of the past several days, it will be an amazing sense of accomplishment.

2) I didn’t like the fact that you have to start paying a monthly fee to Ning just to get their ads of your network and point your domain name to it.  Considering, that I am still figuring out what kind of community I want to build, I don’t want the bills to start coming in already.  Also, Ning pretty much owns the user profiles as they are part of their larger community.  Buddypress, like Wordpress is open source and completely free and lets me use my existing resources to launch a community website that I control completely.

All in all, working with Buddypress has been full of frustrations as it is very new code and still has a bunch of bugs and a lot of illogical default attributes.  But the potential!  I am really enjoying finding innovative workarounds to existing limitations and the support community is extremely helpful and responsive. 

I hope to generate fresh content for this blog from what I am learning while experimenting with Buddypress (I smell a new series of tutorials) but only if I end up creating something substantial with my endeavors.  I hope to also be more regular over here in the near future once I get through the launch issues of the new website.

You can test out my existing work at theindianstartup.com and please send me your suggestions, bug reports at kunal.jain (at) theindianstartup.com (Currently there seems to be some issues with user registrations from non gmail/hotmail email address but I am hoping to work that out soon.)

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