What is the crowd's opinion of BuddyPress?

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...it's wordpress...

No...really...it's wordpress with the buddypress and paid-memberships-pro plugin...

• Total cost to setup the software for this site: $0
• Current price of a .club domain from namecheap: $12.01/year
• They appear to be hosted on mediatemples basic wordpress service: $29/month
• They also appear to own netropolitan.cc: $29/year

If even one sucker buys into this they made a massive margin.

I'd look into Wordpress with the BuddyPress plugin. Free, easy to set up, tons of themes for it, and tons of developers familiar with it in case you need a hand or want to give it to someone else to manage later.

This isn't a project you're going to pull off as a total novice to webdesign.

Do you have any knowledge of the subject at all? Do you know what a CMS is? Hell, do you know how to work with HTML? If the answer to the last answer is no, you've got a long way ahead of you.

There's always multiple solutions. You're trying to start a social network for tennisplayers in your area. One of the solution would be using (installing and customising) a CMS, short for Content Management System. So you want to use a CMS to make a social network. 2 personal suggestions: Buddypress Social networking CMS or you could use drupal with a couple of plugins.

However, if my feeling is right here, you have no experience whatsoever. 2 other options for you, my good man: * Learn everything. It's going to take you awhile, but you'll get there. Get some knowledge regarding (x)HTML, CSS, and for this project, some basic PHP and MySQL knowledge wouldn't hurt. * Get a professional webdesigner and have it done for you. It'll cost you, but you'll have a great looking site, that people might actually use, and you might actually get some ad revenue that way!

In any case, best of luck to you. I like the idea!

Huckberry.com isn't built on a WordPress platform, so it'll be tough to duplicate its functionality exactly.

You're looking for two separate functions: a custom registration page which you can create with the free Pie Register plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/pie-register/

You can create a custom login form and custom registration form with Pie Register that allows you to fully customize the page according to your theme, then just drop in the short code you need: https://wordpress.org/support/topic/pie-register-plugin-shortcode?replies=4

And a membership solution with no access to the dashboard, which you can get with BuddyPress http://buddypress.org. You can then restrict your content to logged in users only, and in the BuddyPress settings, you can disable registered users' access to the admin bar so that they can only log in and edit their accounts via the front end. BuddyPress has a few other advantages, too, like letting you segment your members into groups for different content.

I'm sure there are other ways to do it, but this is how I've done it for a few clients and it's pretty straightforward. Hope that helps :)

I would recommend consulting with a developer as all the functionality you want can be done from WordPress (especially with BuddyPress but it would take a lot of other plugins to make it all work. There's nothing out of the box that will do what you want.

Start by looking at http://codex.wordpress.org/Roles_and_Capabilities

You might also want to look at buddypress. There are two plugins that handle groups well but are made for membership / walled garden sites:

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/s2member/home/

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/membership/home/

Depending on your requirements there might be other solutions that are better suited than Wordpress.

E.g. I can very highly recommend Atlassian Confluence. This is an enterprise wiki working very well with AD/LDAP groups and fine grained user/group rights. Single users and groups can have blogs there as well. In general it is very powerful.

BuddyPress

Just to note: no serious web developer is going to help you with this project for free (to build a social networking site from scratch would most likely run you well over $100k). So just use BuddyPress, it's open source, built off of WordPress and is ready to go for basic social networking.

Don't look at Joomla if you're not comfortable learning Drupal. As I mentioned above, maybe you should take a look at Buddypress. It's built on Wordpress, which is easy to find a host for, noob friendly and the Buddypress plugins probably provide most of the functionality you need to get at least a prototype up and running.

Buddypress is a wordpress plugin(?) with this functionality.

I work for an organization that uses the Wordpress frontend and admin and Java for data handling and some other things, mostly because it's a duct tape with an existing system. Sending data back and forth can be frustrating and requires well executed APIs on both ends.

The ARGO network by NPR uses Wordpress for the admin and Django for all sorts of other functionality, but I've heard that's changed and they're just using Wordpress now.

Yes - Multisite/MU if there's going to be a limited number of sub-sections and users. If you want a more social aspect to it, though - so that people can create their own little sub-sections, like Reddit - then Buddypress might be better.

Don't use impact for headers. Hell, just don't use it.

Also, why are we giving feedback on a google site? If you want to create a hub for something as awesome as a space initiative, build it yourself! Right now it's boring and a mess in the backend.

Other notes:

• Remove sitemap. No one uses it. If your users need to find something via a sitemap, your site is structured poorly.
• Why is the content container 1127px wide? That's huge. 960 is the lowest/recommended, 1120 should be the highest.
• Get rid of that huge button under discussion.
• Is there going to be a forum on here? If so, google sites won't cut it. Either get Wordpress with BuddyPress installed, or use a dedicated forum application (like phpbb).

BuddyPress has a lot of extra stuff that isn't in most WordPress themes, and is (in my opinion), way too hard to theme to begin with. So in a word.... no. I mean, you could theme it yourself, but it's not on my list of favorite things to do. :P

BuddyPress compatible themes will usually be tagged as such. Here's a list: http://buddypress.org/extend/themes/

Wordpress is good, though it's not completely optimized for this, it can be done.

Look at this http://www.elegantthemes.com/gallery/elist/

then this for the community aspect

if you are crafty enough, I'm willing to bet you can get a half baked version of what you have in mind done in a few weeks/months depending on your wordpress skill. It might not have very feature in mind at the beginning, but could get you to a good point to release/test it. then see what you like/dislike and what you really need to move forward and get a developer to do that for you

Try http://buddypress.org/ it's open source and built on a great CMS ( Wordpress ). You don't have to be a developer to set it up and if you want anything custom I think you will find it a lot easier to ask developers after you have the basic site up.

Personally when I see "I have x idea for the next facebook" I cringe, but If I saw you actually had the basics done I would at least have a look at what you've got.

Depending on your exact requirements you may want to give buddypress a go. Its a WordPress suite that greatly extends your site into more of a community, there are lots of buddypreaa themes available too.

Like I say,it depends on your exact requirements, but it sounds like it may be your best bet - http://buddypress.org

a picture of me from 9 years ago that my ex wife took of me the day she purchased her first SLR camera

I was a successful musician at the time, reason enough to find me interesting for about 6 months I guess.

Ahh, see, this is why I love reddit. I would have never thought about installing a LMS otherwise.

There are all great ideas. I'm looking up more information about moodle as we speak (apparently it allows for an online chatroom?). Cool stuff!

EDIT:

Also, what's your opinion about BuddyPress? Do you think that this would be Social Management System (SMS) that would convey benefits to a classroom? http://buddypress.org/

WordPress in Multiuser mode:

http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

OR

BuddyPress, which is the WordPress social networking implementation and may suit you nicely.

http://buddypress.org/

i was using this for a while with no issues, then went to BuddyPress Default 1.5.1. Now I switched it to the default 2011 theme, BP-Nicey and default theme from buddy press to test and its still not loading. Thanks for your help

edit: do you think if i make a new database and copy the tables over that could help? I've always had issues with this WP install for some reason

I'd suggest looking at buddypress if you haven't already. Since this is more of a community type of site you might be better off going that route and just stripping off the functionality that you don't need.