Installation

From your WordPress dashboard

1. Visit ‘Plugins > Add New’
2. Search for ‘BuddyPress’
3. Activate BuddyPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)

From WordPress.org

1. Download BuddyPress.
2. Upload the ‘buddypress’ directory to your ‘/wp-content/plugins/’ directory, using your favorite method (ftp, sftp, scp, etc…)
3. Activate BuddyPress from your Plugins page. (You will be greeted with a Welcome page.)

Once Activated

1. If you do not have pretty permalinks enabled, you will see a notice to enable them. (BuddyPress will not currently work without them.)
2. Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Components’ and adjust the active components to match your community. (You can always toggle these later.)
3. Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Pages’ and setup your directories and special pages. We create a few automatically, but suggest you customize these to fit the flow and verbiage of your site.
4. Visit ‘Settings > BuddyPress > Settings’ and take a moment to match BuddyPress’s settings to your expectations. We pick the most common configuration by default, but every community is different.

Once Configured

• BuddyPress comes with a robust theme-compatibility API that does its best to make every BuddyPress page look and feel right with just-about any WordPress theme. You may need to adjust some styling on your own to make everything look pristine.
• A few BuddyPress specific themes are readily available for download from WordPress.org, and hundreds more are available from third-party theme authors. BuddyPress themes are just WordPress themes with additional templates for each component, and with a little work you could easily create your own too!
• 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.

Multisite & Multiple Networks

BuddyPress can be activated and operate in just about any scope you need for it to.

• Activate at the site level to only load BuddyPress on that site.
• Activate at the network level for full integration with all sites in your network. (This is the most common multisite installation type.)
• Enable multiblog mode to allow your BuddyPress content to be displayed on any site in your WordPress Multisite network, using the same central data.
• Extend BuddyPress with a third-party multi-network plugin to allow each site or network to have an isolated and dedicated community, all from the same WordPress installation.

Read more about custom BuddyPress activations on our codex page.

Discussion Forums

Try bbPress. It integrates with BuddyPress Groups, Profiles, and Notifications. Each group on your site can choose to have its own forum, and each user’s topics, replies, favorites, and subscriptions appear in their profiles.