Start Your Own Social Community Website With WordPress

By Faruque Ahamed Mollick

Today almost everyone heard of Facebook where millions of peoples come online. Facebook is now the number one social network in the world and the popularity is increasing day by day. Even many business invest on Facebook to promote their business appearance.

Not only Facebook alone, but also there are other social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Tumblr and many more. Some of these also has the significance value in online World. Twitter, Instagram are also getting millions of users every day.

Did you ever think about start your own social community online platform like Facebook or Twitter? Now I want to tell you that you can easily start your own social community online platform using the most popular CMS platform which is called WordPress.

Now I am going to list 3 WordPress plugins which can be used for starting an online social media site. You can also start your own social media online platform using one of these WordPress plugin. You don’t need to learn any programming and coding. You can do it easily within minutes.

3 WordPress plugins to start your own social community online platform

here are the 3 plugins which can turn your WordPress site into an online social community platform:

BuddyPress:

BuddyPress is the most popular WordPress plugin that you can use to start your own social community site. This plugin has been referred to as “social networking in a box” and that’s an apt description. There are some core features inside the BuddyPress plugin which can be turn off or on. You have the full control of your site. Have a look:

• Users can create their own profiles
• Users can start making friendships with other users by sending them friend request.
• Users can create group or you can make it turned off.
• Groups can see their own activity streams
• Users can private message each other
• It’s easy to set what notifications and email settings you receive

BuddyPress can do a lots even more than you can think. There are lots of others additional plugins available which work with BuddyPress to increase the functionality and features of this plugin.

WP Symposium

Wp Symposium is another social media plugin for WordPress. This plugin can be a great alternative to be use to build your WordPress social networking site. Some of the features of WP Symposium WordPress plugin are given below:

• Each user has their own profile with avatar picture, header image, activity description, and lots of more
• The community element allows you to join with friends, allows o create groups, and send private messages
• There’s the option to build forums
• You have the ability to add shortcodes to create widgets and change the layout

There are a lots of options available for this plugin that allow you to change the text that your members will see. And if you happen to be using the WPML (WordPress Multilingual) plugin, WP Symposium works very well with that too. Also there are customize options available to make it whatever you want.

Button labels, text, layout, or just about anything you want to be changed like the way you want it to look,  you can do it all easily with the power of WP Symposium WordPress plugin. Also with th Pro version of this plugin, there are lots of shortcodes with different options available.

WP Mingle

WP mingle is also a nice WordPress plugin which can turn your WordPress site into an amazing full featured social community platform and its free.

The coolest thing of this plugin is that when you use WP Mingle as a social media plugin, your users on the site will not be able to see the Admin dashboard part or the WordPress login screen. It will look like a separate and non-WordPress social networking site.

Here are some important great features of WP Mingle WordPress plugin:

• You can comment and create profile posts on friends profiles
• You have the ability to opt in or out of user email notifications
• Users will be able to upload custom avatars. Gravatar also supported by this plugin.
• There are pages available for friend activity
• Pages are also available for user friending
• By using @ followed by the name of the user, users on your WordPress social network site will be able to tag each other just like you see on Twitter.
• From the admin dashboard panel you will be able to configure custom profile fields and also user profile pages
• Your WordPress social network site will have a registration system, a lost password recovery system, a login and logout system and these will all be at the front end
• There’s a facility for users to indulge in private messaging
• There are random and recent users widgets, plus login and navigation widgets
• There are Pretty Profile URLs which will help with Google Indexing as well as with memorability

And lots of more.

If you have used other any other plugin to turn your WordPress site into a social community online platform then you can also mention about this to us.