How developers and designers can contribute

Are you a BuddyPress developer/designer or just blogging about BuddyPress? There are several cool things you can do on BP-Tricks to spread your content or services. This post will outline some of the current things you can do to help the community and at the same time widen your reach.

Add your RSS Feed to the Stream

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.

It’s absolutely fine to write about your commercial projects, as long as you keep your content useful and related to BuddyPress. Our users can vote down feed entries by clicking “This is not helpful” and this might resolve to your post being hidden. This is just a way for us to keep the Stream filled with useful content for our users. Writing posts about your (commercial) services without adding any value to your posts, is not a good idea, and might get your stream removed.

Submitting a Trick

Just like any other member of BP-Tricks you can submit a Trick to us. This can be a design or coding tutorial, or an inspirational post about using BuddyPress (in-depth look at your Plugin, community building tips etc).

The Tricks you send in will be published under your name and listed on your profile page under the tab “Tricks”. At the bottom of the post something will be displayed about who you are, what services you offer and how to get in touch with you (Twitter or Private Message).

The content displayed in this box can be controlled by filling in your profile. The box uses the “About Me” and “Twitter name” fields.

Some advantages of sending in a Trick

- Big chance of the Trick being featured on the homepage
- All our Feed subscribers and Twitter followers will get notified of the Tricks and thus spreading it’s reach
- People who use our Themes will see it appear on their WP Dashboard
- The Trick gets archived, tagged and categorized and added to your profile so it can easily be found back.
- You earn awesome Awards to earn a spot in the Widget of Fame

Adding External Tricks

If you have written some awesome BuddyPress posts in the past, you can easily re-submit them through our Links section. By adding a new link your older blogposts can be easily found back by our members. They can also vote up your link and comment on it. It’s a great way to get some attention for some of your older work, and especially help people new to BuddyPress get started. I’ve read some great tutorials on the web about BuddyPress who hardly got noticed, this is a way to bring them back from the dead *insert creepy Zombie tune here*

Adopt an Idea

Brilliant plugin ideas can be thought up by anyone, but sadly not everyone has the skills to actually pull it off. That’s why we’ve added an Ideas section to BP-Tricks. Anyone can submit their ideas and vote on ideas from others. This will give us (developers) a good idea of what the community wants, and if you really like one of the user submitted ideas, you can adopt them! This means you tell the community you’ll be developing the idea. We’ll then help you promote the plugin, raise some donations for it, and if create a support group for it on BP-Tricks. Awesome right?

Have fun!