The BuddyPress project will transform a standard installation of WordPress MU into a social network platform. BuddyPress is made up of a suite of 8 plugins that you can plug into your existing installation to suit you First up you have Extended Profiles As an admin you can create whichever fields work for you for users to fill in and flesh out their profile Create any kind of field depending on your needs, and your users can then come along and fill them in. Of course they can also upload a picture to personalize things further The Private Messaging component works like internal site email. Users have an inbox, a sent messages box, and a compose screen to quickly ping their contacts from within your community Messages can be sent to one, or multiple members at a time The Friends component allows people to quickly connect to one another, adding friends, making it easy to follow the latest updates on what friends have been doing on the site There are a few ways to order lists of friends which makes it easy to navigate longer lists For instance: alphabetically, or those that were most recently active on the site The Groups component of BuddyPress lets users create a group a gathering of members, blog posts, photos, and any other user-generated content Groups can be public - that appear in all search results and are open for anyone to join Private groups that can also be searched, but require requests and permission to join or finally hidden groups that don't appear to anyone on the site can be put together by inviting other users to join The Wire component is a place where friends and members can post messages to a particular piece of content For instance, you could use The Wire on a profile page, so that people can leave messages on a person's profile You can also use it in the Groups component for leaving messages on a group page, but that's not the limit You can use The Wire on any of the BuddyPress components on photos, for instance The Activities component logs any activity from a user across the entire network Things like new friend connections, blog posts, Wire posts, or any other specific activity will be recorded here in an ongoing stream In addition to every user having an activity stream, the component also adds a site-wide activity stream, recording the activity of every single user across the whole site to create a global activity stream. Users can also see their friends' activity all in one list. The Blogs component tracks blogs across the entire network, so if a user creates a blog it will add it to their blogs list. If they write a new post it will add it to their recent posts list no matter what blog they post on, it will record it in the list It's also handy for tracking any comments a user makes to the site and these appear in a Recent Comments list BuddyPress comes with 2 default themes The Home theme, which provides spaces to drop widgets into BuddyPress introduces a whole bunch of new widgets with a social networking focus, so you can have a widget that displays your latest members, latest groups, who's currently online, site-wide activity, and more. You can also use an existing WordPress theme with BuddyPress, so long as you're able to add widgets to that theme, you can drop in the BuddyPress widgets, and add that social aspect to your existing WordPress theme The second default theme is the member theme which controls the display of profiles, user blogs, messages, friends lists, and groups lists. It basically controls the display of anything that's not blog related You can also customize this using a regular WordPress theme by just dropping in some new template files which will turn it into a BuddyPress member theme So that's BuddyPress An elegant solution to turning your WordPress MU installation into a fully-fledged social network platform