Description

Are you looking for modern, robust, and sophisticated social network software? BuddyPress is a suite of components that are common to a typical social network, and allows for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system.

Aimed at site builders & developers, BuddyPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, and extensibility. It is deliberately powerful yet unbelievably simple social network software, built by contributors to WordPress.

Members can register on your site to create user profiles, have private conversations, make social connections, create and interact in groups, and much more. Truly a social network in a box, BuddyPress helps you build a home for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community.

Built with developers in mind

BuddyPress helps site builders & developers add community features to their websites. It comes with a robust theme compatibility API that does its best to make every BuddyPress content page look and feel right with just about any WordPress theme. You will likely need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine.

BuddyPress themes are just WordPress themes with additional templates, and with a little work, you could easily create your own, too! A handful of BuddyPress-specific themes are readily available for download from WordPress.org, and lots more are available from third-party theme authors.

BuddyPress also comes with built-in support for Akismet and bbPress, two very popular and very powerful WordPress plugins. If you’re using either, visit their settings pages and ensure everything is configured to your liking.

The BuddyPress ecosystem

WordPress.org is home to some amazing extensions for BuddyPress, including:

Search WordPress.org for “BuddyPress” to find them all!

Join our community

If you’re interested in contributing to BuddyPress, we’d love to have you. Head over to the BuddyPress Documentation site to find out how you can pitch in.

BuddyPress is available in many languages thanks to the volunteer efforts of individuals all around the world. Check out our translations page on the BuddyPress Documentation site for more details. If you are a polyglot, please consider helping translate BuddyPress into your language.

Growing the BuddyPress community means better software for everyone!

Screenshots

Activity Streams - Global, personal, and group activity streams with threaded commenting, direct posting, favoriting and @mentions. All with full RSS feeds and email notification support.
Extended Profiles - Fully editable profile fields allow you to define the fields users can fill in to describe themselves. Tailor profile fields to suit your audience.
User Settings - Give your users complete control over profile and notification settings. Settings are fully integrated into your theme, and can be disabled by the administrator.
Extensible Groups - Powerful public, private or hidden groups allow your users to break the discussion down into specific topics. Extend groups with your own custom features using the group extension API.
Friend Connections - Let your users make connections so they can track the activity of others, or filter to show only those users they care about the most.
Private Messaging - Private messaging will allow your users to talk to each other directly and in private. Not just limited to one-on-one discussions, your users can send messages to multiple recipients.
Site Tracking - Track posts and comments in the activity stream, and allow your users to add their own blogs using WordPress' Multisite feature.
Notifications - Keep your members up-to-date with relevant activity via toolbar and email notifications.

Blocks

This plugin provides 15 blocks.

BuddyPress
Login Form
Group
Dynamic Groups List
Groups
Recently Active Members
Members
Online Members
Member
Dynamic Members List
Sitewide Notices
Recent Networkwide Posts
Latest Activities
Embed an activity
Friends List

Installation

Requirements

To run BuddyPress, we recommend your host supports:

PHP version 7.2 or greater.
MySQL version 5.6 or greater, or, MariaDB version 10.0 or greater.
HTTPS support.

Automatic installation

Automatic installation is the easiest option as WordPress handles everything itself. To do an automatic install of BuddyPress, log in to your WordPress dashboard, navigate to the Plugins menu and click Add New.

In the search field type “BuddyPress” and click Search Plugins. Once you’ve found it, you can view details about the latest release, such as community reviews, ratings, and description. Install BuddyPress by simply pressing “Install Now”.

Once activated:

Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Components’ and adjust the active components to match your community. (You can always toggle these later.)
Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Pages’ and setup your directories and special pages. We create a few automatically, but suggest you customize these to fit the flow and verbiage of your site.
Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Settings’ and take a moment to match BuddyPress’s settings to your expectations. We pick the most common configuration by default, but every community is different.

FAQ

Can I use my existing WordPress theme?

Yes! BuddyPress works out-of-the-box with nearly every WordPress theme.

Will this work on WordPress multisite?

Yes! If your WordPress installation has multisite enabled, BuddyPress will support the global tracking of blogs, posts, comments, and even custom post types with a little bit of custom code.

Furthermore, BuddyPress can be activated and operate in just about any scope you need for it to:

Activate at the site level to only load BuddyPress on that site.
Activate at the network level for full integration with all sites in your network. (This is the most common multisite installation type.)
Enable multiblog mode to allow your BuddyPress content to be displayed on any site in your WordPress Multisite network, using the same central data.
Extend BuddyPress with a third-party multi-network plugin to allow each site or network to have an isolated and dedicated community, all from the same WordPress installation.

Read custom BuddyPress activations for more information.

Where can I get support?

Our community provides free support at https://buddypress.org/support/.

Where can I find documentation?

Our documentation site can be found at https://codex.buddypress.org/.

Where can I report a bug?

Report bugs, suggest ideas, and participate in development at https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org.

Where can I get the bleeding edge version of BuddyPress?

Check out the development trunk of BuddyPress from Subversion at https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/, or clone from Git at git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/.

Who builds BuddyPress?

BuddyPress is free software, built by an international community of volunteers. Some contributors to BuddyPress are employed by companies that use BuddyPress, while others are consultants who offer BuddyPress-related services for hire. No one is paid by the BuddyPress project for his or her contributions.

If you would like to provide monetary support to BuddyPress, please consider a donation to the WordPress Foundation, or ask your favorite contributor how they prefer to have their efforts rewarded.

Discussion Forums

Try bbPress. It integrates with BuddyPress Groups, Profiles, and Notifications. Each group on your site can choose to have its own forum, and each user’s topics, replies, favorites, and subscriptions appear in their profiles.

Reviews

digitalformationxyz October 16, 2021

BuddyPress is a great plugin! We were able to create several independent social networks on the multisite. The basic functionality of the plugin works very well. We include additional features with other plugins from the BuddyPress community. And it's all free! Thanks to the developers. I give 5 stars!

October 6, 2021

To start with BuddyPress on its own is an absolute mess if you are trying to create a private social media site. It just doesn't get the job done. Yes, there are third-party plugins that can seemingly do everything that you need but many are not up to date or only work with some themes and the entire thing just becomes an incohesive mess of plugins that were not meant to work together. I did get a site working nearly the way I wanted it, but this was mostly due to Wbcom who seems to be a developer that rounds out all of the hard edges of BuddyPress through themes and plugins. I guess if you think of BuddyPress as a platform for experienced developers like Wbcom to make a useful social media site then I should change the rating to five stars. BuddyPress as it is requires a tremendous amount of help from various plugins and themes before a social media site can be created. There are few resources to guide you through the process other than those that describe the particular plugin or theme which is hardly unbias as the majority have paid options to upsell. The BuddyPress site itself has a tremendous amount of information but none of it very useful. There are a lot of unanswered questions that I found in my search with similar questions that I had. Many of the forum questions are a decade old and it is hard to know if they are relevant still. Aside form that the documentation is extensive but it is the kind of documentation that mostly reiterates the same description of options that are in the plugin pages next to each option. What might be really useful is a wiki that guides a user through some common configuration options for a handful of different use cases. Even if using third party plugins to reach the goal since the guide wouldn't be created by the plugin dev a user could trust that it was selected for the task and not in the hopes of upselling. I'm not against people making money, and I'm happy to pay for code that is truly useful and helps me reach my website goals. In fact, after this experience the options that came up in my search that do not use BuddyPress but have annual license fees for turnkey solutions for a social media Website look more appealing than when I started. I just hoped to do it with BuddyPress. If a social media site to help people create social media sites with BuddyPress would help us get there I'd be happy to host it and learn by trying to build it. I just cannot seem to get off the ground with anything useful other than Wbcom which I guess might be the way to go if using BuddyPresss.

Anonymous User 12966443 September 20, 2021

They say at the bottom of the download page "BuddyPress works out-of-the-box with nearly every WordPress theme," this claim is misleading. I have installed BuddyPress on 4 premium themes and many manual configurations were needed. The worst thing about BuddyPress is that it ignores some of the theme and site settings and there is no built-in settings page to disable the sidebar, for example. It's the little basic things that make me rather pay money for a premium community/profile plugin than a free version like BuddyPress.

schuerich August 23, 2021

If it were not commercial addons to BP (Youzify), it would not be possible to use it. Plugin that stopped in the 90s. Email service terrible. Archaic design. No SVG support, even though BP provides an SVG logo on its website:https://codex.buddypress.org/official-fonts-and-logos/. There are not many functionalities that, for example, also have free plugins available in the WP repository such as Ultimate Memeber or Peepso. I do not recommend. It's a waste of time.

ramforth August 17, 2021

A great idea! Fantastic tool - if it worked. But it doesn't work. It has several breaks in the installation, and most commonly for me, is the creation of the register and activate pages. Pretty important features for a community building tool. See, when users can't register - there won't be much of a community. Tried several installs, on several platforms. It just doesn't work. Steer clear of this one.