As somewhat of a Wordpress fanatic, the news of Wordpress’ new social network BuddyPress has got me pretty excited.

The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network.

BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). BuddyPress also has a core plugin that all other plugins require, it contains shared functions and performs the basic modifications to the WordPress MU interface.

When using the default theme, BuddyPress will move the main focus of WordPress MU away from blogs, and onto the actual member profile. However, members can still blog and use all the blogging features they would normally expect from WordPress. When someone uses BuddyPress, they will be going there to build or enhance their profile first, and write something on their blog second. The blog is turned into another component of BuddyPress. It should be noted that removing the blog as the main focus is all done in the theme files. Other themes could keep the blog as the focus and still make full use of other components.

A BuddyPress installation will consist of a main community home page, which could either be an actual blog, or a syndication of all the activity of the community members.

The standard features of BuddyPress are:

• Extended Profiles
• Personal Blog
• Private Messaging
• Friends
• Groups
• The Wire
• Status Updates
• Albums

As each one is a separate plugin, there is no reason why site admins can’t pick and choose which components they want and don’t want. There is also no reason why additional components couldn’t be written, or other existing WordPress plugins be used alongside.

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