The idea of BuddyPress is to take a standard vanilla installation of WordPress MU and turn it into something that represents more of a community building tool, or niche social network. BuddyPress is essentially a set of WordPress MU specific plugins. Each plugin adds a distinct feature (or component) to BuddyPress and only handles functionality for that specific component (for example, private messaging). The standard features of BuddyPress are:

Extended Profiles

The extended profile component allows site admins to create specific profile fields for their members to fill in. They can create as few or as many profile fields as they like, be as specific or vague as they want. Profile fields can then be grouped.

Personal Blog

This is everything WordPress has to offer for publishing a blog. The only difference is that all administration tabs will be moved underneath a “Blog” tab. A Member’s blog will also appear under “/membername/blog/” or /membername.domain.com/blog” rather than at the root.

Private Messaging

BuddyPress private messaging works like internal site email. Members can message people on their friends list as well as forward and reply to received messages.

Friends

Members of a BuddyPress social network can be connected together by one member adding another as a “friend” and then the other member accepting the friend request.

Groups

Groups in BuddyPress are a gathering of members, blog posts, photos and any other user generated content.

The Wire

This is a place where friends can come along and post to a members profile. This would be a short message and could include a picture and some basic HTML. The TinyMCE editor will be used to allow for basic formatting.

Status Updates

Status updates in BuddyPress will appear on a member’s profile page. A member can update their status as frequently as they want to. All status updates are logged in a member’s activity log.

Albums

Members of a BuddyPress installation will be able to create their own photo albums. These albums can be shared with friends and groups. Each member is given a certain amount of space, which can be set by the site administrator.

As each one is a separate plugin, there is no reason why site admins can’t pick and choose which components they want and don’t want. There is also no reason why additional components couldn’t be written, or other existing WordPress plugins be used alongside.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://buddypress.org

WordPress seems to be everywhere these days, and it’s no wonder with it’s ease of use and ease of customization. Recently launched NetTuts has written a tutorial which is dissecting the default WordPress theme’s comments.php structure and giving you various snippets of code to make your skinning easier. They have included some of the really useful tricks within the article: Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File.

• Preventing direct access to comments.php
• Basic comment template tags
• Gravatars
• Comment numbers
• Alternating colors for comments
• Comments RSS link

Source: Unraveling the Secrets of WordPress’ Comments.php File

Alexa let us view the traffic reach, rank and page views of up to 5 sites. Although Alexa is not very accurate in my opinion, it let us compare our traffic with other websites. So that we can estimate how we are doing relatively to others.

Today, we have got a new tool called Feed Compare which let us compare our FeedBurner Feeds Subscriber Numbers with others easily. Just simply type in the FeedBurner Feeds name, e.g. Mashable, or the URL of the FeedBurner Feeds (http://feeds.feedburner.com/BlogPerfume). And then press submit, Feed Compare will then shows the subscriber numbers of different sites on a lovely line chart.

Please note that we have Feed Analysis that can analyse your individual FeedBurner Feeds easily and gives you a full evaluation and detailed report too. As we promised, we would like to create anything related to blogging in order to help our readers. So we are releasing something very nice very soon. Please stay tuned.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.feedcompare.com

There are loads of PLR membership sites with low quality of the products. However, we have got one truly amazing PLR memebership site that enables you to sell products on your own site and gain 100% profit now. MonetizeDesignCenter is a PLR membership site offers you something unique, something profitable, and something that was truly top quality.

MonetizeDesignCenter is providing you with a whole range of high quality and profitable products in one membership site. They create all of their products from the ground up, and offer them to you so you can make massive profits from the without effort.

All of the products that they create are high quality and range from all sorts; reports, ebooks to scripts to templates and graphics. So anyone who caters to online business owners, online marketers, and information marketers will be able to give their clients what they need to be successful online. They put huge amounts of effort into the research and development of the products. Every month they are giving you more and more great products so you can profit from them effortlessly!

You can now become a member Of MDC & receive high quality products every month to sell For 100% Profits for only $67.97 a month!

Type: Private Label Rights Membership Site
Source: Join Now

dotCMS Core is the most feature complete open source web CMS available today. Available under the GPL, you can freely download the dotCMS system and get up, running and managing web sites and web content in a matter of minutes. Unlike many other “open source” cms, dotCMS is in no way crippled. When you download the dotCMS system, you are getting all of the functions and features needed to begin creating customized, manageable and scalable web sites. This includes so called “advanced” features such as LDAP/AD integration, clustering support, online templating, Web2.0 Calendaring and the structured content engine.

If you are looking to get a head start in getting your new web sites off the ground, they offer accelerators - starter sites - that combine the power and flexibility of the dotCMS system with cutting edge information architecture, compliant HTML and pre-build functions. These accelerators are designed to be easy to customize and brand with unique graphical design.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://www.dotcms.org/

This is a guest blog post by Eli from PhotoshopStar

Everyone knows that nice images/photos can brighten up a boring old blog post, even if the content is great, a picture of some sort at the top or on the side can draw the visitor’s eye in! In this article we’ll be looking at a few simple Photoshop tips for regular bloggers.

Cropping your Images

If you’ve already been using images in your articles, then maybe you’re not doing it as well as you could be. You should always remember to adjust your images in any way necessary before putting them in, particularly cropping them so that the object inside of the image is more in focus.

Example:

For cropping you should either use the crop tool or the canvas resize option (image > canvas size).

Brighten it, Darken it

I’m not so sure about darkening images before putting them up, but it sure can be helpful brightening your images before putting them on your blog. The easiest way that people know of is using Brightness/Contrast settings (image > adjustments > brightness/contrast), which is all well and good, but sometimes you just need a little more control, so you can use the Levels (image > adjustments > levels) or Curves (image > adjustments > curves).

You can also lighten up or darken particular areas by using the Dodge and Burn tools.

Making Headlines (add text)

Adding interesting headlines to your images can be particularly helpful, especially if your blog post has a theme (see, Star Trek Blogging by Daily Blog Tips). If you want to use a heading in a blog post image, you’ll want to be careful about the fonts, colors and sizes that you choose, it’s most helpful to keep things as simple as possible in this case. For some great font resources, be sure to check out:

• DaFont
• Font Space
• Typographica

Here’s an example using Myriad Pro, and a simple Drop Shadow layer style to help it stand out:

Resize

Resizing your images is in fact very important, and it depends on where your image will be going. At the top, or aligned to the left or right? Another thing you need to know is if you align your image to the left or the right, will your text stick right to the edge of it? If this is the case, you can add padding, or you can add a white strip to the side of your image (if your content area background is white).

For images that go on the top or the bottom of the article text, you should use something like 400-500 x 160 pixels or so, and these images go well with interesting text headings!

For images that you will be aligning to the left or right, you’ll want to use a smaller size such as 140 x 165 or something similar, and maybe you could even link that to a larger version of the image, if you have something important to show.

As you can imagine, resizing your images is related to the cropping, so you should crop your images first, then resize them.

Sharpen, or Blur?

Now this one can be tricky.

The only reason you should ever want to blur a complete image would be because you want to add a text heading inside of it, or something of the sort. Sometimes though, you may want to blur the background of a photo to bring the main character/object into focus. For blurring things, you can either use a filter blur (filter > blur > x) or you can use the Blur tool.

After resizing an image to a very small size (400 x 300 for example) they may need to be sharpened slightly, so to do this you can go to filter > sharpen > sharpen (or Sharpen Edges), but if the sharpening seems too strong, go to edit > fade sharpen and input 50% or so!

Using Abstract Images

If your post has no particular subject, it may be a good idea to choose a random, abstract image to place into your blog post, if there’s space free and the post is a little dull without it.

To find some top-notch abstract images, you should check out the resources section at the end of the article.

Colorize, Desaturate

Another interesting thing you can do to your photos is change the color of them, saturate them more-so, or remove the color altogether. For simple color settings, you can go to image > adjustments > hue/saturation, or if you want a little more control, try one of the other color adjusting tools such as Selective Color, Channel Mixer, or Gradient Maps.

For desaturating your photos, I highly recommend using a gradient map with a black and white gradient, rather than desaturating using hue/saturation.

Additional Resources

Here is a short list of resources that you may find useful.

• Good-Tutorials (photoshop tutorials)
• iStockPhoto (stock photos and more)
• Bittbox (textures and freebies)

Thanks for reading everyone, I hope you enjoyed the article.

Visit Eli’s Photoshop tutorial blog, PhotoshopStar

Whenever you opt for a new theme, you’re going to have to do a fair amount of customization to get everything just right for your site. By the time you get to your third or fourth theme, you’ll probably begin to grow a little weary of reinventing the wheel with each new design.

Fortunately, savvy users like you can solve this problem by creating a user-defined functions file that will work with any WordPress theme. Pearsonified has shared How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog by placing all of your common, customized design elements within functions that reside in a separate, non-theme file. This serves a twofold purpose:

First, because your common design tweaks are isolated in a non-theme file, you won’t risk overwriting them whenever you change or upgrade your theme.

Second, using a separate functions file creates a much more organized and less intimidating environment for customizing your theme. You can add and subtract HTML from your user-defined functions file without fear of “breaking” your theme, simply because you aren’t trying to edit the theme files directly.

Source: How You Can Use WordPress Functions to Run a Smarter Blog

Comment Info Tip is a WordPress plugin that provides you and your commenter’s a bit of information on their posting stats. When you mouseover a commenter’s name you will see a tip appear displaying some information about that given commenter. The tip will display 1 of 4 results:

• If the commenter has only posted once then it will say so in the tip (see number 1 in the legend below).
• If the commenter has posted more than once we will look up the last three posts they have commented in and display links to those posts. This allows you to see which type of posts this user is interested in and easily navigate to those posts (see number 2 in the legend below).
• If the commenter has posted more than once we will attempt to search their RSS feed and show an excerpt from their last post (see number 3 in the legend below).
• If it’s a pingback or trackback the tip will indicate so (see number 4 in the legend below).

Pricing: Free
Requirements: -
Source: http://www.search-this.com/2008/05/05/wordpress-plugin-comment-info-tip/

Video blogging is getting more and more popular recently. Blogger can communicate with readers not only by text now. Quommunication Video is another high quality video premium wordpress theme which lets you post and share your videos in a central place with style.

Once Video is added to your WordPress you only have to find or upload any video you like, go to it’s page and search the embed function and copy the code in WordPress to the body of your new post. To add some description, simply write it below the embedded video. Your visitors can watch and comment your videos just the way you want. It also offers an advanced AJAX technology to preview and even post your comments while watching a video.

Pricing: 1 License($95), 5 License($175), Developers ($295)
Requirements: -

Skribit provides bloggers with the ability to receive real-time, user-generated suggestions directly from their readers via an east-to-install blog application. Not only does Skribit help bloggers understand their readers, but Skribit also helps facilitate an interactive reader-writer blogging community. Skribit is a user-generated content suggestion application for blogs. Effortlessly assemble what your readers really want to hear.

Bloggers install the Skribit application into their blogs in four easy steps. Once the application has been installed, your readers can either login to Skribit or anonymously submit questions and suggestions to you. They can even vote on their own suggestions encouraging you to write about what interests them most. Currently, Skribit is under private beta at the moment. But, you can still register for an account, and they will notify you via email as soon as we open up Skribit to the public.

Pricing: Free
Source: http://skribit.com/