Mark Evans

Automattic Goes Social

A few days ago, I wondered aloud how Automattic (the parent of Wordpress.com) was going to make money after Matt Mullenweg dismissed the idea of running ads.

The answer is still somewhat of a mystery but what Automattic will be doing with some of its venture capital loot is moving into the social networking game after it bought a one-man show called BuddyPress. There are suggestions Automattic is going after Ning and/or Facebook but one thing is sure: Automattic looks intent on leveraging the Wordpress platform to get into another markets other than blogs.

The person behind BuddyPress is Andy Peatling, who worked at Blaze New Media in Vancouver. If you want some insight into what Peatling developed take a look at his blog post on the creation of ChickSpeak.com, a social network for women built on Wordpress MU.

The crucial part to the whole project was morphing Wordpress MU to stop it from generating new blog instances and instead generating new member home pages.

A member home page includes a users own personal profile front and center, their own personal “journal” as a feature of their home page, as well as private messaging functionality.

To achieve the desired change it was down to making a new Wordpress theme. The theme would have exactly the same look and feel as the core site - making it look like the new member home page was still part of the core site itself.

Within the theme, I removed the code that usually makes the blog posts front and center, and changed it to the code that outputs the users profile. The blog code was moved to the sidebar so it could still be accessed as the members “journal” feature.

Finally, the code to output the users new private messages was added to the sidebar, as well as some code to output polls, photos and other smaller bits and bobs.

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