At WordCamp NZ a couple months ago we were lucky enough to have a Town Hall style Q&A with Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress. During the Q&A I got to ask a couple of questions one of which was about WordPress, and by extension Automattic’s, asperations in the social networking space and whether they saw themselves ultimately competing in some fashion with FaceBook and MySpace via their “Social Network in a Box” BuddyPress project. Having watched some of the other Q&A’s Matt’s been doing at subsiquent WordCamps and have noticed that the social line of questioning keeps coming up.

Matt’s jokes aside I very much believe that the direction WordPress is heading in will naturally make it’s .com arm a competitor of sorts, if not directly, to the MySpaces and Facebooks of the world as the single user and multi-user codebases merge and BuddyPress matures.

There are already a growing number of alternative WordPress driven offerings to AutoMattic’s WordPress.com springing up such as incsub’s blogs.mu and wp.mu which allows users to set up there own branded multi-user WordPress offerings without having to deal with installation and configuration of WordPress mu on their own server. I think we are also going to see an explosion of smaller independant, and potentially connected, niche social networks built on the WordPress/BuddyPress platform due to the unprecidented level of flexability, accessability and control and with far greater customisation potential via Plugins and Themes than any of the current solutions out there such as Ning and Virb.

Gravatar, already used extensivly across the various WordPress properties, and other AutoMattic offerings such as Intense Debate and PollDaddy will also likely be key elements in the social evolution of WordPress.

With over 5 million WordPress.com blogs and 5.5 million wordpress 2.8 downloads (and counting) simply connecting all those blogs together makes for a pretty sizable social network right off the bat… it’s no Facebook for sure but it’s going to interesting to watch over the coming months.

I’ll be watching with great interest to see what WordPress 2.9, 3.0 and beyond do in the social space… I see a bright, fun filled and SOCIAL future for WordPress!

BuddyPress 1.1 has just been released. Having been watching TRAC with great interest I can safely say that A LOT of bugs have been fixed, code refactored and enhancements added over the past couple months, including a completely re-written parent theme architecture and one-click bbPress forum integration.

I’ve been so busy on other projects for the past couple of months that I haven’t been able to be as involved with the BuddyPress community as I would have liked but with this milestone I’m itching to get back in there and try out all the new stuff and finally get BabbleLounge up an running! The only thing I would like to have seen in this release would be the inclusion of the Photo Albums feature that has been slated for late 2009 (and there isn’t much “late” left).

To find out all the cool new features of BuddyPress 1.1 go read the release announcement, try the demo site or download it for yourself.

Well done Andy and all the contributors for this awesome platform!

In one of my other lives… that’s outside of my paying job at Xero I love working on WordPress, WordPress MU (WPMU) and BuddyPress projects.

A site, that in an ideal world I would be able to take advantage of, called WPMU DEV Premium is just about to hit the milestone of having 100 plugins, themes and videos for use with Wordpress MU and the BuddyPress.  As with so many it seems, I can’t afford the outlay for a membership as none of my projects are profit bearing. If I could justify the cost however there is one plugin in particular that I see real value in:

Supporter

The Supporter plugin provides a seemless way to integrate a paid upgrades feature similar to the wordpress.com upgrades system, in fact WPMU DEV Premium also offer a plugin called Upgrades that does EXACTLY what the wordpress.com system does using a system of credits as opposed to supporters paypal $ based system. This is a feature which with the exception of Supporter has been sorely missing in the WPMU world so this definately fills a significant gap in the market. The only thing that would make this plugin a complete no-brainer for me would be support for BuddyPress and I’m sure that’s not far away!

Now if I could just find the money for a subscription perhaps I could start monetising some of these projects!

Congratulations James and Andrew on reaching the Ton!

I was working on a WordPress theme recently, for a site with a not insignificant volume of posts, and found myself needing a fancy, more user friendly way of presenting the archives.

After a search of the WordPress extend repository I came across Smart Archives Reloaded by Scribu, an evolution of the original Smart Archives by Justin Blanton and while it didn’t quite achieve what I was aiming for I could see the potential to get where I was going… so I rolled up my sleeves, put my php hat and started coding.

The new fancy archive is built using a multi-level implementation of the jQuery.Tools tab control and also adds post categories and dates to the list of output tags available. After a couple of days of tweaking and testing I got in touch with Scribu to present “Super” Smart Archives Reloaded. Needless to say he loved it and offered to roll it into the core plugin.

So from version 1.7 of Smart Archives Reloaded you too can now take advantage of the “fancy” archives option and enjoy the smartest archives on the web!

You can see the archive in action here or go download it and try it for yourself… it’s as simple as upload, activate and view, and it even comes with a simple default style!

This is only my second WordPress plugin and my first to see the light of day and it feels great to give something back to the WordPress community. Thanks to Scribu for including my work in the plugin.

I’m heading to WordCamp New Zealand this coming weekend, the 8th and 9th of August, at the Mt. Victoria Bowling Club right here in Sunny Windy Wellington.

Xero, the company I work for, is a Premium sponsor and while it sux to be giving up my weekend with the family I am looking forward to hearing all the latest news in the WordPress world and attending some of the unconference activities on offer. It’s going to be a great opportunity to hear from Ma.tt, who is doing a “Town Hall” style Q&A after lunch on Saturday (although I was a little disappointed to hear he wouldn’t be doing his stock State of the Word speech) and others on subjects such as bbPress forum integration, building community and e-commerce. I was hoping for some BuddyPress related presentations but I guess we’ll have to wait until next year when I think that will really have become HUGE!

If you’re not already coming, take a look at the schedule and get your tickets here.