2.1 Install BuddyPress and Add Components

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on installing BuddyPress on your WordPress site, and using it to add social media to your site. In this part of the course, we're going to install BuddyPress and then we'll select some components to add to our site. And I'll explain what all the components are, and what they do, so you know which ones should work for you. So here's a site that I've set up, which is a clean WordPress installation with no content in it just yet. And what we're gonna do is add the BuddyPress plugin. So you do that just as you install any plugin, so we'll go to the Plugins screen on our site, and then we'll click Add New. Now you don't need to search for BuddyPress because you'll see here that it's right at the top of the list of the suggested plugins that are offered to you. So simply click on the Install Now button. When that's installed, the Install Now button will turn into an Activate button, which again you click. And that will activate BuddyPress for you. Now BuddyPress will then give you a welcome screen. So here's the screen with some information about BuddyPress, and it's latest release. And you'll see that the release I'm using is 2.8.2. So what we need to do now is configure BuddyPress. And we do that via the settings menu. And we go to settings and BuddyPress. So the first thing that BuddyPress will prompt you to set up is the components. And the components are the different parts of BuddyPress, the different options that you switch on or switch off, depending on what your site needs. Now before we do this, let's take a look at these components and what they do. And you'll see that BuddyPress has automatically select a few for me by default. And I can switch some of those off, some of them I can't. And I can switch other ones on too. Let's work through each of them in turn. Firstly here we have extended profiles. That lets your users add more information to their profile then what they get in a standard WordPress profile. So it lets them share more information about themselves to help them connect to other users. The second one is account settings, and that lets your users modify their own account. So they can set up the notifications that they get from BuddyPress and their privacy settings and so on. It's a good idea to leave that switched on because it gives your users more control. The next one is friend connections, this lets your users become friends with each other so they can make direct connections with other users on your site, and speak to each other directly. And I'm gonna switch that on. The fourth option is private messaging, and this let's people who've connected send each other private messages that aren't visible on own activity stream. Or on the activity stream for a group or anything like that. And again, I'm gonna switch that on. Because I want to give my users as many options as possible. Nextly and switched on by default are Activity Streams. Now BuddyPress really doesn't work that well without activity streams. I guess you could use it just for private messaging and friend connections, but the activity stream is where people will see updates from other people on your site and other people in their network. They can be used for individuals and also for groups. So I'd leave those turned on. And then next we have Notifications. Now, because I've activated Account Settings here, that gives my user some control over the notifications. So it's good to leave notifications switched on. If you're not giving your users account settings and you don't want to bother them with lots of notifications, you might want to switch this off. The next one is User Groups. This lets people create groups of their friends or acquaintances that they can communicate with in private. But between a group of them and not just to individuals, and it's another really useful feature so I'm gonna turn it on. The next one we have here is site tracking, that lets you track what's going on on your BuddyPress site. Now if you want to manage activity on your site and make sure that nobody is posting anything spammy or anything inappropriate, it's a good idea to turn this on so that you can see what's going on. And then finally the last two components which you can't switch off, are BuddyPress Core, which is what makes time travel, maybe not time travel but BuddyPress possible. It makes the whole thing work. And then Community Members. And again, a BuddyPress Community is nothing without members. So that has to be left switched on. And you can't turn it off, if I try to, it won't let me do anything. So take some time to consider which of these components is relevant for your BuddyPress network. You can always add these at a later date if you want to, or you can remove them. Although removing them is harder, because if people have started using them, they might be a bit disgruntled if they're not available anymore. So sit down, do some thinking about your BuddyPress network, who's gonna be using it, and what you envision to them using it for. And then select which BuddyPress components work for you. I've selected all of them, so that we can take a look at all of them, and when you've done that click Save Settings. So you can see now that BuddyPress has saved my settings. So that's how you install and activate BuddyPress and select the relevant components for your site. In the next part of the course, we'll go on to configure the pages in our BuddyPress site. See you next time, and thanks for watching.