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The image above shows how we left our BuddyPress installation, which you can see live at http://www.nometech.com/wpmu/. As you can see, it’s pretty bare. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy to change that! Just click the link that says ‘Add Widgets’. Lets start off with adding a nice message that says ‘Welcome’. Add the ‘Welcome’ widget, add a title and some text. Then click done and save changes and refresh your homepage.  You should see the message you just added. Neat, no?

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Now that you’ve done that once, it’s very easy to do it again and you can very quickly assemble a neat looking homepage just using widgets. There’s a drop down box on the right hand side of the widgets page that let you choose between sections. Choose another section and pop some widgets in. Very quickly you can have something that looks like this (obviously it’ll look better with some content and more users!):

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And that’s kind of it. We’ve only very briefly customised the homepage in this t utorial, but the brilliance of BuddyPress is that it’ll do the rest for you! Click on your username under ‘Members’ and you’ll see that BuddyPress automatically makes a nice list of the stuff you’ve done. You’ll also an option ‘Messages’. Here you can  send and receive messages. Very cool, no?

And there we are. The best way for you to learn more about BuddyPress here on in is to have a poke around you own installation. If you’ve got something brilliant you’ve learnt, why not share it by leaving a comment below?

Step 1: Log in

This really is simple. Log in and select the ‘Plugins’ tab from the list down the side. Simple step done. Could get a bit more complicated from here on in.

Step 2: The installation

You’ll then be greeted by a page looking like the one below (unless you’ve fiddled about). Select the option in the picture and you’ll be at the (familiar) standard WordPress plugins page. In the search box, type in ‘BuddyPress’ and hit search. On the next page, find BuddyPress and select ‘install’. Then activate BuddyPress and you’re done! Or sort of. Not…

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Step 3: Moving stuff about

Here’s where it gets vaguely difficult. Fire up your FTP client and locate /wp-content/plugins/buddypress/. Next thing to do is download the bp-themes file. It doesn’t matter where to; you can delete it in a sec. Once the file is downloaded, we’re going to upload it again. Just to keep things simple (you might be able to do this without downloading in some FTP clients, but the majority don’t support this). Navigate to /wp-content/ and re-upload the file. Final thing to do is open up the bp-themes file you just downloaded and upload the bphome file within it to /wp-content/themes/. You can then delete the bp-themes file.

Step 4: Activate!

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Now that you’ve installed BuddyPress and moved some folders about, visit your installation’s homepage and you’ll see it’s…. the same. Next, we’re going to activate the BuddyPress theme. The the backend, select the options ‘Themes’ under the ‘Site Admin’ menu. You’ll see one theme option ‘BuddyPress Default Home Theme’ that hasn’t been activated. Select the ‘Yes’ radio box and then click ‘Update Themes’.

Step 5: Default theming

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Theming is something that we’ll cover more in part three (if you’re not already, make sure you grab the RSS feed so you don’t miss the post!). In the meantime, select the ‘Appearance’ tab, then click the BuddyPress default theme and click activate in the top right hand corner. Check the homepage again and you should see something like this:

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Step 6: Have a play around

Now that you’ve installed BuddyPress, have a play around. There’s so much stuff to do, it’d be hard to highlight it all now, so you’ll have to find it out yourself . Next time we’ll be installing some more themes and some other stuff – if you want to suggest something, leave a comment. Make sure you’ve got the RSS feed so you don’t miss the next post!

Installing WPMU and BuddyPress is something that everyone wants to be able to do, but can’t work out to do. Why? I couldn’t tell you – it’s super easy to do!

Step 1: Get hosted

Hosting hundreds of blogs is quite server intensive; don’t expect to be able to have a massive networks of blogs on budget shared hosting as you’ll very quickly use up too much bandwith and processing power. That said, with guys at WPWebHost have a hosting plan that you can get for $10 that will support upto 100 WPMU blogs, so if you’re serious about starting a small network it might be something to check out.

Step 2: Download, unzip and upload WPMU

First up, head over to mu.wordpress.com/download and download WPMU. Unzip it and upload it to your server. For this demonstration I’ll be installing WPMU on nometech.com/wpmu, so I created a directory /wpmu/ and uploaded all the files to /wpmu/.

Step 3: The database

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Once everything is uploaded, head over to the directory you’ve uploaded to and you’ll be greeted with the familiar WordPress install screen. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see some fields and options. The first option is ‘Blog Addresses’. The gives you the option to set where blogs are installed – at blog.yoursite.com or yoursite.com/blog. I chose subdirectories just to keep things simple. Next thing to do is enter your database details, which of course you need to set up. Assuming you’re running cPanel, log in and select the ‘MySQL database wizard’. Follow the wizard, selecting ‘all priverlages’ towards the end.

Step 4: The installation

The fields you've got to fill out. Click to enlarge.

Now the database is set up, return to the installation page we were at a second ago and fill in the database fields with the database we just created. Fill in your email address at the bottom and click install. You’ll then be greated by a ’sucess’ page and a login link. Login with the password provided and you’ve just installed WPMU!

Step 5: Give yourself a pat on the back

That really was easy, but don’t overdo it; subscribe to the RSS feed to make sure you get part two (and possibly part three) of the series and learn how to get started with BuddyPress. In the meantime, why not have a play around with WPMU? If you use WordPress on your site, it should be a similar experience – in half an hour you can be a WPMU master!