BuddyPress

August 20, 2009  by

Sustainable Alachua County: A Web Work in Progress

Update: I worked on the SAC website as part of an internship in 2009. I have since moved on from the project and the site is no longer live.

It’s been a while since I last wrote about my internship with Sustainable Alachua County (SAC). Back in March of 2009, I started to build a social network for SAC using BuddyPress, a powerful suite of plugins for the WordPress MU platform.

But I put the BuddyPress project on hold when my colleague John Casey and I got ambitious and aspired to build a mega-site for SAC using Drupal, another open source content management system. After some time of tedious tweaking, we decided to revert back to the WordPress-based system.

I’ve now got a rough draft of the new Sustainable Alachua County website that I built using BuddyPress, and I recorded a screencast preview of how it works for the SAC board members. I’m still waiting on the SAC board members to get some feedback on the site, but I’m hoping we’ll stick with the general idea that John and I have proposed.

Update: Watch a video tour of the SAC social network below:

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March 5, 2009  by

SAC: A Social Network for Sustainability

Update (July 2011): I worked on the SAC website as part of an internship in 2009. I have since moved on from the project and the site is no longer live.

Social network for sustainability

The website for Sustainable Alachua County (SAC) is evolving. Today I set up a community foundation for the site using BuddyPress, an open source social networking platform based around WordPress Mu. The website is starting to become what I want it to be.

Although the current design is nothing impressive — and a logo for SAC is still in the works — the functionality is in place, and the site has the potential to be something of a “Facebook for sustainability” in the Gainesville area.

Members can sign up, publish blog entries and make groups for their organizations, where people can discuss topics in forums and post items just like a Facebook group — the system even allows private messaging among members, and people can network and “become friends.” There’s also a central blog in place for SAC matters.

In the coming weeks I’ll be improving the design and tailoring the network more to fit the purposes of SAC.

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