If you’ve considered starting up your own social networking site but didn’t know where to turn to, you can stop looking. Most social networking engines cost around $200-$2,000 depending on the features and support you need. Instead you can turn to the opensource Wordpress MU to get started.
Wordpress MU provides multi-user capabilities just like Wordpress.com. MU can scale to allow for an unlimited amount of blogs, anyway you want to brand it. Buddypress is where your social network features come into play. Buddypress provides features like individual profiles, friends, groups, and more.
Holdfire servers are designed to equip scripts like Wordpress MU and Buddypress. To get started on your own social network, download the latest MU release from mu.wordpress.org/download.
Setting up Wordpress MU
- Now that you’ve got Wordpress MU downloaded, you’ll need to figure out what directory you’d like the installation to be in. You can have it in domain.com, sub.domain.com or domain.com/blog. Once you decide what directory, go ahead and upload all of the Wordpress MU files into that directory.
-
Go ahead and open up domain.com (or the directory you chose) in your browser, this prompt up the WPMU install page. It may or may not ask you to change permissions on file(s) and directory(ies). If you are required to chmod permissions, you can either do so by jailed SSH (available upon request for resellers) or use your FTP client. -
Now you are going to be required to enter in your blog’s details. This will require you to create a MySQL database and MySQL username for your installation. Once you’ve created each and added the user to the database, go ahead and fill in the MySQL details, but don’t finish the form just yet. - The other option you should have left after filling out the rest is choosing between using subdomains (user.domain.com) or directories (domain.com/user). We recommend using the basic directory format, as this is the quickest way to setup your account. However, should you choose to use subdomains, you will need to contact support to finish the setup for WPMU.
- If you chose to use directories, you’re all set with WPMU, and now ready to get Buddypress setup.
Setting up Buddypress
To get started on setting up Buddypress, we highly recommend that you follow through with their installation guide which is a very quick and easy process. Once you’ve got that, you can hop right into your WPMU administration and play around with the Buddypress and WPMU settings.
WPMU and Buddypress Support
While we do support the use of Wordpress MU and Buddypress, you should direct any support queries to WPMU forums and Buddypress forums.
Check back here soon to see Holdfire’s own social network!
