Community Building – Buddypress

SPEAKER_00 (00:01 – 00:16): Another really important aspect of running a community is an ability to communicate between your team or your volunteers.
SPEAKER_00 (00:18 – 00:50): One way that we’ve been experimenting with that is using something called BuddyPress. So if you activate BuddyPress, plug in, then you will see It’s a bit like, imagine like your own personal Facebook site, but it’s all hosted in your own website. So you can set up friend connections, you can have private messaging, you can create user groups. So we’ll turn those on.
SPEAKER_00 (00:52 – 01:32): It’s probably a good idea to lock down community visibility-only members only. You can, yeah, so you’ve got to configure some settings here. Probably don’t want group creation by all users, and whether or not you want that is up to you. Okay, so we’ll save that. Now, under here, URLs, you’ll see the various URLs to get to it. So here we’ve got,
SPEAKER_00 (01:35 – 01:52): this is probably the one you want, the list of groups. So we’re going to create a group called My Community. You can configure it, probably want it to be a private group and generally group admins only.
SPEAKER_00 (01:54 – 02:24): Next step is upload a nice photo and a cover photo. and you can invite other people. And now you have a group, and you can say, you can chat in it, just like, you know, Facebook-y sort of stuff, invite new people, edit it, and so if, and of course, because of our setting, if we were to go to that,
SPEAKER_00 (02:26 – 02:44): what did I call it again? I’ve already forgotten. the group section you wouldn’t be able to access it because you’re not logged in. So that’s a nice way of having sort of a group chat and a way of setting up and fostering your community.