I’ve been looking at options today for moving a client’s ning site to WordPress. In my searching, I ran across BuddyPress.org, BuddyDress.com, and WPMUDev.com.
BuddyPress is a plugin to create a social networking type site.
BuddyDress has a bunch of premium themes for BuddyPress.
WPMUDev is the parent of BuddyDress and includes all those themes plus a ton of plugins.
What caught my eye thus far is the BuddyPress Social theme and the Ning to BuddyPress plugin. While scouting for the theme I ran across their contest and figured I’d share the link love for the chance to win a year subscription.
I played a bit with FireBug to tweak the Social theme on their demo site and the colors should be easily changed — including the “gradient” since it is just a transparent png with various opacity over the <div> background color. If they don’t have a built-in option it’ll be straight forward to change the CSS file and get instant color changes.
The only downsides I’ve heard on the Ning user import plugin are that it only works on WPMU installs (not standard single site installs) and that while it does it all for importing users it doesn’t get any of the ning site content. The first was solved and posted by Don somebody, but the second is limited by ning’s closed nature and the lack of API or export function for the rest of a ning site’s content. It could be done, but it’s a lot more scraping of the site than just pulling user avatars and entered data.
Overall BuddyPress looks cool and the stuff that they’ve built over at WPMUDev makes it even cooler. (Now to finish bidding the job so I get to play with them while getting [directly] paid for the gig!)
