3 interesting talks encouraged members of the London WordPress Meetup group to fill the venue to capacity on Thursday evening.
BuddyPress
Core developer Paul Gibbs talked us through the new release of BuddyPress, the social network “out of the box” plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress 1.5 is an almost complete recoding of the plugin, taking advantage of the new features in WordPress 3 and above. It includes a new theme with a fresher look (as many users never attempted to create their own), more complete documentation so that developers and designers can take and extend the core plugin code, and the ability to embed media from sites such as YouTube directly in your site.
WordPress E-Commerce
Jeff Ghazally, one of the developers of the WordPress e-commerce plugin called WP e-commerce spoke about the new version of this plugin, and demo-ed setting up a online music store for digital music downloads in under 5 minutes. Although the core plugin is free, most users need to purchase a plugin add-on to give them the functionality they require. Add-ons range from $10-$195. Community plugins add more specific tasks. WP-ecommerce downloads total over 1.3 million to date, making it one of the all-time most popular plugins.
Better WordPress Search
Developer Shakur Shidane gave us an overview of using Apache SOLR project to add a full featured search to WordPress sites. Search in WordPress is pretty simply – for example it can’t recognise the similarity between “smile” and “smiling”. The SOLR project includes and much more. Although not suitable for most small WordPress users on shared hosting, due to the technology requirements, Shakur’s talk showed us the WordPress can be used for the biggest of sites when required.
Hosting for WordPress
The talks this week at WordPress London showed us just how powerful WordPress can be. From a fully featured social network for your specific group, to extensive e-commerce ability, to high powered search, WordPress is ready for heavy lifting.
If you have a WordPress project coming up that may need specialist support, why not get in touch with us? 2020Media offers specialist hosting support for WordPress for all sizes of website. With ‘no-click’ WordPress install, experienced and friendly technical help and free support, the team at 2020Media are waiting to hear from you.