BP-Tricks: Sharing BuddyPress awesomeness made easy!

After months of hard work (read: messing around) BP-Tricks is finally ready for relaunch. It’s been a while since this site provided the BuddyPress community with useful Tips and Tricks. Over the course of the last couple of months the idea behind BP-Tricks has been polished and it has grown to what you’re seeing now; A BuddyPress powered community which allows everyone to easily share BuddyPress knowledge! Before I’ll give a quick overview of the features on BP-Tricks I would like to tell how BP-Tricks was born.

History

About a year ago BP-Tricks started as a regular old WordPress blog where I and some guest authors shared BuddyPress Tricks. The blog did quite well, but over time it got updated less often. Not only because I could not find the time, but also it did not feel right to write about BuddyPress without actually using it. This was before BuddyPress 1.2 was released and at the time BuddyPress was not capable of doing exactly what I needed it to do to.

Flash forward to present day and everyone who has been using BuddyPress can say that
BuddyPress has matured. It has become an awesome community building tool, which is much more then just a social network plugin for WordPress.

There are many plugins available which allows you to use BuddyPress in many creative ways, and hopefully BP-Tricks will be a good example of this.

BP-Tricks is not just a blog writing about BuddyPress. It’s a BuddyPress powered community where everyone can contribute (and be rewarded for it!)

All of the core components in BuddyPress are being used on BP-Tricks, some in a more standard way (Profiles), others are heavily customized to fit our your needs; Finding great BuddyPress tips, tricks and tutorials. To get a good overview of it’s features, be sure to check out the post “BP-Tricks features explained”. Over the course of the next couple of weeks I will share many tips and tricks I’ve learned from building the BP-Tricks site and the BP-Slick Theme, and I’ve done my absolute best to make it easy for everyone to submit there tips and trick. It’s my intention to make write new Tricks on a regular basis in a wide amount of topics.

I hope that it will not only become a place where I feel at home, but that it will grow into a place where the entire community can share their BuddyPress knowledge.

So how can you contribute?

Well it’s pretty easy! Actually there are several ways to contribute to the community and you do not have to be an expert to help others finding what they need! Here’s an overview

Submit a Trick!

Everyone can submit their Tricks content through the front-end or backend in the following categories;

• Design: Tricks that add design elements to a BuddyPress community (javascript sliders, buttons, nifty css tricks) or improve the overall look of a (child) Theme.

• Coding: Tricks that add functionality to BuddyPress and/or WordPress. This is usually php code which can be added to templates, functions.php or bp-custom.php, but it can also be .htaccess rules or any other code language which achieves something awesome!

• Inspiration: This is a pretty broad category where you can submit anything that may inspire other community admins. It can be an article about building a successful community, an interview with a BuddyPress plugin developer or Theme designer or a awesome guide to get the most out of a certain Plugin. Anything that can get the create juices flowing!

External Tricks:

The above makes sure the original writer does not go unnoticed and receives credit for his or her work. When you submit an External Link you fill in the link to the Trick and give a short description of the Trick subject. Place it in a category and the External Trick will be added. Awesome right?

Quick Tips

Everyone loves cool snippets to quickly add cool stuff to BuddyPress! I’ve tried to make it as easy as possible by allowing you to add a trick by clicking on “Add a Quick Tip” from your navigation menu. It’s as easy as filling in a title, category, source and the actual snippet (duh) and you’re done.

All the snippets are neatly organized and indexed, for others to enjoy. I can’t tell you how many times I stumbled upon awesome tricks on BuddyPress.org that go unnoticed and are almost impossible to find back. When you stumble upon a (hidden) gem you can now easily add it to the Snippets section for other to enjoy.

Adding your BuddyPress related RSS feed

If you are already writing about BuddyPress you can easily add your RSS feed to your profile. By doing this your new posts will be added to the Stream automagically and it will be displayed in the Tricks feed and in the Following stream of the people that follow you on BP-Tricks. If you blog about many things including BuddyPress it would be best to create a separate feed for your BuddyPress/WordPress posts, so your posts stay relevant for your followers and our visitors.

There’s still a huge amount of other features I would love to tell everything about, but I do not want to turn this first post into a novel. For now I could like everyone to start submitting your BuddyPress Tricks and earn some great Awards (powered by the extremely awesome Achievements plugin from Paul Gibbs)