I remember when “portal” websites were the thing online. Everyone wanted to be the next Yahoo!, and every other website was powered by PHP-Nuke.

Of course, it was the community aspect of these so-called portals that made them so popular- and that hasn’t changed, except that now we call them social-networking sites.

BuddyPress is an add-on to Wordpress MU that gives you the ability to grow your own social-networking site. It’s actually a suite of plugins, and a niftily-tweaked Wordpress theme, offering up member profile pages, private instant messaging, groups, forums and blogs at the click of a button (or, in this case, the activation of one plugin). Because it uses Wordpress MU, you already know it’s on a great system- plus your members blogs can use any Wordpress theme they want (depending upon whether you, the admin, install it, of course).

Is BuddyPress for you? Check these out:

BuddyPress.org
The official BuddyPress site, and where you want to go to check out the demo, read the FAQ, and look through the forums.

Buddy-Press.net
All you need to know about BuddyPress, including a really simple installation guide, and ten reasons to use BuddyPress (that I wrote).

BuddyPress DEV
This is where to go if you want to learn how to extend BuddyPress, or see how others are doing it. Lots of good stuff here, especially on their plugins page.

Have you tried BuddyPress? Like it, hate it? What do you think?