so buddypress 1.7 OMG that stands for "Oh My God"

here is information about where you can contact me if you want to.

I'll show that again at the end becvause it won't be until the end of the presentation when you'll really realize how cool I am and you're gonnal wanna take down all of my information

so, hello, about me, I'm a freelance web developer and consultant, um, I live in queens, formerly of Brooklyn, home of the greatest rappers

but now I'm in Brooklyn, or Queens, see, Freudian slip

I am a lead developer on the BuddyPress project.

I do a bunch of other WordPress related projects.

CUNY Academic Commons, Anthologize, Commons In A Box.

I do a bunch of stuff, um, a bunch of stuff

so, and I am unrelated to He-Man.

I put that up there because a lot of people they look at me and they're like "wait are you?"... and I'm like...

Ok, [clears throat], um, what is BuddyPress?

Steve asked before how many people have used BuddyPress, I wasn't really looking, so how many of you have used it?

Ok, so close to half.

So let me just briefly tell you a little bit about what BuddyPress is.

So we have WordPress right? and WordPress gives you the ability to blog; to create content.

What BuddyPress does is it adds a social layer on top of your WordPress isntallation.

The way I like to... and I didn't put a slide in here about this... but the way that I really like to say this. The way that I like to put it best is that WordPress is abou content first.

It's about whatever you are producing: blog posts or journaling or whatever itis that you put in your wordpress blog.

BuddyPress kind of turns that around and it makes user s first.

You produce all sorts of content. LIke you have profile content. You have a customizable user groups.

You have the ability to create forums. You have threaded activity streams that keep track of things going on around the site.

So we have all sorts of content but it is all organized around users as opposed to being organized around posts.

so, um, I like to... About BuddyPress [laughs] so here's where I screwed up.

I may as well just pull back the curtain right, the great and powerful Oz.

Um, I copied a couple of these slide from another prsentation deck and I forgot to copy over the images.

So I'm just gonna kind of tell you about what the images look like.

So lets imagine here that you saw a picture of the BuddyPress logo and then over here you saw a picture of a piece of a lego.

I have a friend in the BuddyPress community named Tammy and she loves to descibe BuddyPress as social lego.

Which is my favorite way of thinking about it.

It's this collection of tools that are there to provide different social functionality on your site.

And you as a site developer or a site administrator can decide which ones of these you can turn on. to kind of build a customized social experieence for your sites users.

So, you could also think about this as a sort of existential statement if you want.