Getting Started With WPMU and BuddyPress – Part 3: Getting To Grips With BuddyPress

After installing WPMU and getting started with BuddyPress, this time we’re going to be getting to grips with BuddyPress.

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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?


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Wordpress Blog Services - The BuddyPress Revolution (coming soon…)
June 24, 2009 12:22 am

[…] But I want to try it out now! You do?! That’s lucky, as I’ve just written a series of posts about BuddyPress on my blog, Nometech.com! The series, in three parts takes you through the installation of WordPress MU in part one, then the installation of BuddyPress in part two and finally customizing and ‘getting to grips’ with BuddyPress in part three. […]