BuddyPress

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.

With 200,000 Active installations, BuddyPress is the best social network plugin.

Installation

REQUIREMENTS

To run BuddyPress, we recommend your host supports:

  • PHP version 7.2 or greater.
  • MySQL version 5.6 or greater, or, MariaDB version 10.0 or greater.
  • HTTPS support.

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:

  1. Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Components’ and adjust the active components to match your community. (You can always toggle these later.)
  2. 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.
  3. 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.