open-source
Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...
social networking
A social network is a social structure made up of a set of social actors (such as individuals or organizations), sets of dyadic ties, and other social interactions between actors. The social network perspective provides a set of methods for an ...
software package owned by
Automattic
Automattic Inc. is an American global distributed company which was founded in August 2005 and is most notable for WordPress.com (a freemium blogging service), as well as its contributions to WordPress (an open source blogging software). The co ...
since 2008. It is a plugin that can be installed on
WordPress
WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...
to transform it into a social network platform. BuddyPress is designed to allow schools, companies, sports teams, or any other niche community to start their own social network or communication tool.
BuddyPress inherits and expands on the functional elements of the WordPress engine including themes, plugins, and widgets. As it is built on WordPress, it is written using the same primary languages,
PHP
PHP is a general-purpose scripting language geared toward web development. It was originally created by Danish-Canadian programmer Rasmus Lerdorf in 1993 and released in 1995. The PHP reference implementation is now produced by The PHP Group ...
and
MySQL
MySQL () is an open-source relational database management system (RDBMS). Its name is a combination of "My", the name of co-founder Michael Widenius's daughter My, and "SQL", the acronym for Structured Query Language. A relational database o ...
.
In 2010, BuddyPress was placed third in
Packt
Packt is a publishing company founded in 2003 headquartered in Birmingham, UK,with offices in Mumbai, India.
Packt primarily publishes print and electronic books and videos relating to information technology, including programming, web desig ...
's Most Promising Open Source Project Awards, losing to
Pimcore
Pimcore is an open-source enterprise PHP software platform for product information management (PIM), master data management (MDM), customer data management (CDP), digital asset management (DAM), content management (CMS), and digital commerce.
...