The web is getting social.  Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, orkut and there is long list of social networking tools.  I am big fan of WordPress and I am sure most of us are. I have reviewed and experienced the WordPress from both edge – Development and Customization from developer point of view and Content Publishing and Blog Management from Blog Owner’s end. I have always found it a super easy for developer and blog owner.

I just have an another great reason to love WordPress because now you can build a social network with BuddyPress within WordPress.   BuddyPress – a great plugin developed by Lead Developer Andy Peatling has brought  immense options to add social networking features to a WordPress blog.

BuddyPress is social networking CMS which can be added on top WordPress and built to bring people together. It works well to enable people with similar interests to connect and communicate. Some of the fantastic uses might be:

1. A campus wide social network for a university, school or college.
2. An internal communication tool for your company.
3. A niche social network for your interest topic.
4. A focused social network for your new product.

This means that bloggers and podcasters using WordPress can now have a self-hosted solution for creating social networks, instead of relying on third-party sites like Ning.

Features of BuddyPress include:

1. Global, personal and group activity streams
2. Fully editable profile fields allow you to define the fields users can fill in to describe themselves
3. Powerful public, private or hidden groups
4. “Friending”
5. Private messaging will allow your users to talk to each other directly, and in private.
6. Full powered discussion forums
7. Each of your users can start their own full powered WordPress blog.
8. Easily extendable with plugins

BuddyPress promises to let you get up and running with your own social network in 6 minutes. I have experienced to setup BuddyPress in few of our projects. I found it quite easy and simple. I had also spent a good time to see the plug-in development for BuddyPress. It’s pretty straight forward and similar like WordPress plugin development. Theme development is also something that require a little understanding of BuddyPress standard rest is what in WordPress.

You can visit and check live sites we have build and powered by WordPress + BuddPress.

• PillarCommunity
• Socal Better Homes

We have just finished a wonderful WordPress site at MULTIDOTS. Though it’s not been live yet. The learning or rather would say interesting part of that project is to use a custom fonts on menu. You must be thinking what is interesting in it? Allow me to describe it. Well, as per requirement we had to use a custom font on Menu Navigation for Post Title. The font was “Lettera” that we had to use on post titles. Now challenging part is here. As Post title could by anything almost dynamic. So, creating image for each title and then to use was not going to help. The font is also something which is rare on client machine. Here is the interesting part and something I have written this post for. To overcome this problem our client has suggested us to use Cufon - an online font embedding service. The WOW feature about this service is you can use almost any type of your unique font and style in your web application in case of dynamic text too. You can style any text in any font and it’s hassle free and quite easy too. There is no need to create images for each text. No need to even bother about whether fonts will be installed on viewers machine or not. Let me explain how easy it is

1. Load your browser Tab on – http://cufon.shoqolate.com/generate/
2. Upload the font you want to use in your website, project or page.
3. Choose different options as per your need.
4. At the end you will get a JavaScript for your font.
5. Save the file on your server and link that JS file on the page where you want to use your custom fonts. If you are going to use it on all the pages put it some where on header file or whatever is common for your site.
6. Also link this JS file in your script section – http://cufon.shoqolate.com/js/cufon-yui.js
7. That’s it you are done and ready to use. Just follow the instruction on this page on different way you can embed on your page – http://wiki.github.com/sorccu/cufon/usage

You can check out a live sample of what I am talking about. I have used Kety Berry font on sentence below. I am sure this font is not installed in your machine still you can read it better.

I love chocolate!

OpenInviter - Contact Grabbing Solution for PHP

We were looking for some good contact grabbing solution to implement on few of our projects. We did lots of analysis on paid, free ware and open source tool for this. Our need was very specific.

• Stable
• Priority : Open Source , Free Ware, Paid
• Should cover almost all the possible Popular Email Provider and Social Networking Site.
• Should have integrated Email sending feature for selected user.
• Must be in PHP Language.
• Easy to install, configure and customize.
• Should have an upgrade option whenever there is any change on Contact Grabbing Logic.
• Well documentation, nimble support and rich technical resources.

After doing good search on web and analyzing different contact grabbing, finally we decided to go with OpenInviter. We found it almost close to our needs. We have successfully setup and configured it on our development server. We have started to implement it on our projects.  OpenInviter has separate package/plug-in/module for other CMS and open sources. Which I haven’t tried yet. But looks like it should simple vanilla.

Kudos to Hitesh for finding this wonderful contact grabbing tool.

Do you know any other Contact Grabbing tool which is best? Let’s share.

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