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Meet the WordPress Family

Saturday, 12th September 2009
Online Marketing

wordcampla

Beau Lebens presented the meet the WordPress family at the WordCampLa Seminar. He is a lead developer at Automattic and has been there for over 4 years. This seminar took place at the beautiful Loyola Marymount university in Los Angeles.

The WordPress family consists of five projects:

  • WordPress
  • WordPress MU
  • bbPress
  • BuddyPress
  • backPress

I’ve spoken before about my love for WordPress, I’m just going to speak about the other 4 WordPress projects.

WordPress MU

WordPress MU isn’t WordPress! It uses more server resources (memory, processing power) and it’s more complicated to run. The site admin is also responsible for updating plugins. Blog admins can’t install their own themes or plugins.

WordPress MU is going to merge with WordPress during version 3.0. If all goes well, you can set a configuration options and you can load directly all of the multi-user functionality. You can simply decide if you want to run MU or WordPress. Most companies just need to run the WordPress.

Example sites that run WordPress MU are wordpress.com. There are a thousand servers that run WordPress.com. They have a Hybrid system that allows it to work smoothly across all servers. WordPress MU has a ton of tables in the database. If you are looking to downgrade WordPress MU to regular Wordpress, good luck. We briefly attemped this for the Ad 2 site and quickly changed our minds.

bbPress

bbPress is a totally separate platform from WordPress; however it does share user tables (profiles, options). bbPress also shares login cookies. It is a very lightweight forum. I’m using it on the SDGCSA.com site, but it hasn’t been used very much. You can’t use a normal theme for bbPress, but it’s very easy to use the CSS from your normal theme. You really just have to stylize the header, background and footer.

bbPress runs the WordPress.org forums. I use this forum on a daily basis, and it’s as clean as it gets.

Buddy Press

BuddyPress started out as a project that started out as a social network called “chic speak”. It is a social network in a box. It’s WordPress MU + set of plugins + bbPress. Beau said that BuddyPress is a “make your own Facebook and bring your own terms of service”.

BuddyPress has a real clean interface and lets you set up a lot of the same functionalities as WordPress. Automattic uses BuddyPress as their intranet. Buddypress will be powering the new profiles on WordPress.org

backPress

The only project that I haven’t heard of before is backPress BackPress is Automattic’s latest project. backPress shares code library between WordPress and bbPress. It provides common web app functionality. This is more of the coding library, so it won’t appeal to the masses. It handles more of the scripting, handling and advanced functionality. The cool thing is that you can take WordPress code and then use it on your own project that is external to WordPress.

This project sounds awesome! There is a ton of great code in WordPress and BackPress lets you use it. Kudos to Automattic for creating this project.

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