BuddyPress
Are you looking for modern, robust, and sophisticated social network software? BuddyPress is a suite of components that are common to a typical social network, and allows for great add-on features through WordPress’s extensive plugin system. Aimed at site builders & developers, BuddyPress is focused on ease of integration, ease of use, and extensibility. It is deliberately powerful yet unbelievably simple social network software, built by contributors to WordPress. Members can register on your site to create user profiles, have private conversations, make social connections, create and interact in groups, and much more. Truly a social network in a box, BuddyPress helps you build a home for your company, school, sports team, or other niche community. Built with developers in mind BuddyPress helps site builders & developers add community features to their websites. It comes with a robust theme compatibility API that does its best to make every BuddyPress content page look and feel right with just about any WordPress theme. You will likely need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine. BuddyPress themes are just WordPress themes with additional templates, and with a little work, you could easily create your own, too! A handful of BuddyPress-specific themes are readily available for download from WordPress.org, and lots more are available from third-party theme authors. BuddyPress also comes with built-in support for Akismet and bbPress, two very popular and very powerful WordPress plugins. If you’re using either, visit their settings pages and ensure everything is configured to your liking. The BuddyPress Add-ons WordPress.org is home to some amazing Add-ons for BuddyPress, including: BP Attachments BP Classic NB: BP Classic is a backwards compatibility Add-on for BuddyPress 12.0 and up bringing back the BP Legacy URL parser, the BP Default theme and BP Legacy widgets. Go to BuddyPress profile on WordPress.org to find them all! Join our community If you’re interested in contributing to BuddyPress, we’d love to have you. Head over to the BuddyPress Documentation site to find out how you can pitch in. BuddyPress is available in many languages thanks to the volunteer efforts of individuals all around the world. Check out our translations page on the BuddyPress Documentation site for more details. If you are a polyglot, please consider helping translate BuddyPress into your language. Growing the BuddyPress community means better software for everyone!
Gutenberg
“Gutenberg” is a codename for a whole new paradigm for creating with WordPress, that aims to revolutionize the entire publishing experience as much as Johannes Gutenberg did the printed word. The project is following a four-phase process that will touch major pieces of WordPress — Editing, Customization, Collaboration, and Multilingual. Following the introduction of post block editing in December 2018, Gutenberg later introduced full site editing (FSE) in 2021, which shipped with WordPress 5.9 in early 2022. What Does Gutenberg Do? Gutenberg is WordPress’s “block editor”, and introduces a modular approach to modifying your entire site. Edit individual content blocks on posts or pages. Add and adjust widgets. Even design your site headers, footers, and navigation with full site editing support. Each piece of content in the editor, from a paragraph to an image gallery to a headline, is its own block. And just like physical blocks, WordPress blocks can be added, arranged, and rearranged, allowing users to create media-rich content and site layouts in a visually intuitive way — and without workarounds like shortcodes or custom HTML and PHP. We’re always hard at work refining the experience, creating more and better blocks, and laying the groundwork for future phases of work. Each WordPress release includes stable features from the Gutenberg plugin, so you don’t need to install the plugin to benefit from the work being done here. Early Access Are you a tech-savvy early adopter who likes testing bleeding-edge and experimental features, and isn’t afraid to tinker with features that are still in active development? If so, this beta plugin gives you access to the latest Gutenberg features for block and full site editing, as well as a peek into what’s to come. Contributors Wanted For the adventurous and tech-savvy, the Gutenberg plugin gives you the latest and greatest feature set, so you can join us in testing and developing bleeding-edge features, playing around with blocks, and maybe get inspired to contribute or build your own blocks. Discover More User Documentation: Review the WordPress Editor documentation for detailed instructions on using the editor as an author to create posts, pages, and more. Developer Documentation: Explore the Developer Documentation for extensive tutorials, documentation, and API references on how to extend the editor. Contributors: Gutenberg is an open-source project and welcomes all contributors from code to design, from documentation to triage. See the Contributor’s Handbook for all the details on how you can help. The development hub for the Gutenberg project can be found at https://github.com/wordpress/gutenberg. Discussions for the project are on the Make Core Blog and in the #core-editor channel in Slack, including weekly meetings. If you don’t have a Slack account, you can sign up here.
