WordPress MU (WPMU) is basically the multi-user version of WordPress, the popular blog/cms tool. The aim of WPMU is to allow for one installation to spawn multiple WordPress blog instances. Basically, you can install WPMU on your server and run as many individual WordPress instances as your box can handle.
WordPress MU has the basics of a social network right out of the box – individual member blogs, member profiles and the ability to scale well.
Don’t Hack – Just Plug
WordPress also has an excellent plugin API, as well as a whole host of quality pre-built plugins ready to download and activate. The key here is that I didn’t have to hack the core – I could just achieve the additional functionality needed by building dedicated plugins.
Plugins were built and used for private messaging, advanced profile management, online polls, photo management, multi-blog search and user credential management.
Not Blogs, But Member Home Pages
The crucial part to the whole project was morphing WordPress MU to stop it from generating new blog instances and instead generating new member home pages.
A member home page includes a users own personal profile front and center, their own personal “journal” as a feature of their home page, as well as private messaging functionality.
To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new WordPress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site – making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.
Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.
Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.
A nice feature of WordPress MU is it places member pages on a subdomain, so any members home page can be found at http://membername.chickspeak.com. A nice touch, as it’s then easy to remember the to link to your profile.
Adding Some BBPress Magic
The project also called for a fully featured discussion forum. The forum needed to work seamlessly with the site, using the same login credentials and the same look and feel. Another project called BBPress fit the bill perfectly. BBPress is a no-frills forum/bulletin board application built by the same guys (Automattic) as WordPress. It has the same style, plugin architecture and most importantly can share the credentials data and cookie information. Perfect.
Limiting Credentials
The final step was to limit the administration functionality that a member has on their own blog. This stops them from signing up new users, deleting content they shouldn’t be, or changing the theme of their member page. I created a simple plugin that disabled the menus for these settings in the WordPress admin interface. The pages could only be accessed by site-wide administrators if needed.
I’ve only really glazed on what I did with WordPress MU to turn it into a fully fledged social network engine – but you get the overall idea. I’d be happy to answer anyones specific questions if you have them.
ChickSpeak is up and running over at ChickSpeak.com. Feel free to take a look when you get a chance, I’d welcome any feedback. You can also click the image thumbnails in the article to get full screenshots.
Toxa, 
Johnson and 2 others are discussing. 
It is a beautiful site.
Ken Boone 5:38 pm on July 7, 2007 Permalink |
When you list an item to sell, I think there is an area near the end of the listing page under Additional Information called Buyer Requirements. You can check the box that will block buyers who are registered in countries to which you don’t ship.
Andy Peatling 10:42 pm on July 7, 2007 Permalink |
No use Ken – I did that, but it made no difference, they just sign up with a US address and they’re in. Thanks for the help in any case.
Dixyt 2:20 am on July 9, 2007 Permalink |
Same experiences, Andy. And I’m also an ebay buyer, and this is the third time, I’m buying an item that doesn’t exist! And the sellers continue to spam me and trying to sell me other items out of ebay!
Selling or buying has become a stress full thing on ebay. Too bad that’s their business!
Nice day
Dixyt
PS :
one advice to new comers on ebay, create a specific email address just for ebay! It’ll save you some spam troubles!
Johnson 4:01 am on July 13, 2007 Permalink |
I’m from Nigeria, and I find it offensive what you say about Nigerians. Nigeria has more than 100.000 people online, you want them all blocked because some 20 spammers are causing you problems? And you know most of them are from other countries?
You silly you. You think that your country has some preordained right to use the internet, and ours not?
Andy Peatling 11:52 am on July 13, 2007 Permalink |
Not at all Johnson, all I’m saying is that there is no Ebay Nigeria – so why would it make a difference if you can’t access Ebay at all?
I’ve no doubt that it is only an extremely small fraction of Nigerians causing an issue, but that small fraction causes many issues with a large fraction of people who do have Ebay in their country.
Toxa 8:41 pm on September 15, 2009 Permalink |
eBay is pulling away from their business model of being an online-auction house. The reason for this is obvious: like many other dot-com-bubble startups they overestimated the inherit value of the market they were in business with. This naturally inflated the perceived value of eBay at the time they went public. We all have seen the share of eBay fall greatly over last few years, as it became clear to investors the used-goods-auction market is not that huge as it appear to be. eBay must show growth in profits or face a big sell out and eventual death. So, what do they do? They switch their business to a much larger but over-saturated market of new-goods retail. eBay figures they can capitalize on their brand-name and become a direct competitor to Amazon. It is as good of a plan as any in their position. It won’t be easy, it will take years, and there will be blood. First you have to get rid of all the little guys, which show up every spring to auction off the stuff they found in their attics. You see they are just muddying up the waters for the big boys. Then you have to entice all the big retailers to come to eBay and list their shiny new goodies. At the same time eBay needs to keep its main asset – the buyers. All of this is not easy, the site was conceived as an auction house not a web-store. This becomes very apparent when you want to purchase multiple items. There is not even a shopping cart! It all is very confusing for the shoppers. In addition, I don’t think people will consider eBay for their needs when shopping for a brand new gadget. I believe eBay is doomed. It’s demised has started a few years back and will continue for another few. But they will become another, albeit latent, casualty of dot-com bubble. If only they could be less greedy and embrace the position of being the leader in online-auction segment of e-commerce.