Building Community Sites with WordPress: 15 Plugins to Get Started
- Posted in WORDPRESS
- 43 Comments »
By Cameron Chapman
Most bloggers would love to see more of a sense of community among the regular visitors to their blog. Sure, discussions sometimes take place in the comments of various posts, but it all seems a bit disorganized and they never really get off the ground. There has to be a better way to create a real sense of community on a WordPress blog.
The good news is that there are plenty of great plugins out there that can help you get your visitors more involved in your blog. Some are simple: they let your users submit content they think is useful, or make it easier to have a real discussion in comments. Others are more complex, on par with full-featured social networks like Facebook. All of them can help you create a community surrounding your blog and your content.
Encourage User-Generated Content
Even if you post on your blog every day, sometimes it would be nice to have some help. So why not ask your regular visitors to submit content they think your other visitors might find useful? Of course, they can do this already by emailing you or adding a link in the comments, but then you still have to do most of the work. The plugins below will simplify getting these user submissions to a publishable state on your blog.
Community Submitted News
Community Submitted News lets any visitor to your blog submit content. All content is sent to a moderation panel and nothing is made public until it has been approved by an administrator (which prevents spam postings from being made live). It’s a great idea if you have an active community surrounding your blog but don’t always have time to write original content. It also gives your blog’s readers a more active role in content creation.
WordPress Wiki
WordPress Wiki was created by the same developers who created the WP e-Commerce plugin. It’s a full-featured wiki plugin for WP that lets you specify certain posts or pages as editable as wiki pages, while leaving other pages or posts in their traditional, un-editable format.
FV Community News
FV Community News is another plugin that lets users submit posts from other blogs to your site for inclusion. It includes a moderation panel and works within a widget on your site. It also has built-in spam protection and give administrators the ability to edit submissions.
TDO Mini Forms
The TDO Mini Forms plugin lets your subscribers or even non-registered users submit or edit posts and pages. Submissions are kept in “draft” form until approved by an administrator. The same can be done with edits. It can even be configured to work with Akismet to filter out spam submissions.
Encourage Interaction
Even if you’re not interested in setting up a social network surrounding your blog, wouldnt’ it be nice to see your visitors able to better interact with each other, and for you to be able to interact with them more easily? Whether this means setting up a forum or just making it easier for discussions to take place in your comments, the plugins below will help.
Gigya Socialize
The Gigya Socialize plugin lets you incorporate social APIs (like Facebook Connect, Twitter, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and MySpace ID) to your site and let your visitors become more engaged. Visitors can invite friends from their preferred social network. It also lets you publish status and newsfeed updates directly to your social networks.
WP-Forum
Adding a forum to your blog is an easy way to increase interaction among your visitors. WP-Forum is a simple discussion forum plugin. It can be used with a single WP blog or with WordPress MU.
Threaded Comments
Adding Threaded Comments to you WP blog lets you turn the comments section on every post into a discussion, where users can reply directly to other users and have their response appear directly under the original comment (rather than just in chronological order). It’s a great option for encouraging your visitors to engage not just with you, but with each other as well.
Comment Per Paragraph
Comment Per Paragraph is actually a WP theme, but it has some valuable features that can really add to the interaction on your blog. Basically, this theme lets your visitors comment on each paragraph within a post, rather than just at the end of the post. It makes commenting or discussions on specific points within your post much easier and more user-friendly.
Digress.it
Digress.it is a plugin that lets your visitors add notes in the “margins” of a blog post, much the same as one would in a book. The difference here is that these notes are visible to everyone, and anyone can add a note. It can be used in an educational setting, to annotate a post, or even to offer criticism.
Feedback by Paragraph
Feedback by Paragraph is another plugin that lets users leave comments on individual paragraphs within a post. Comments are shown in a Thickbox pop-up. Comments here respect settings of individual posts as far as who is allowed to post, and moderation policies are also honored. The fact that paragraph-level comments are kept separate from the main content is a nice feature that makes it easy to implement without requiring any kind of redesign.
Turn WordPress Into a Social Network
If you want to go all in and create a social network on your WordPress-powered site, the plugins below are the place to start. They range from very simple plugins that basically just let you set up user profiles to full social networking packages that let your users do almost everything they can do on mainstream social networks like Facebook or LinkedIn.
BuddyPress
BuddyPress is a powerful set of social networking plugins for WordPress. It’s quick to install and set up, and can be as complicated or simple as you want. One of the nice features about BuddyPress is that you can turn on or off specific features whenever you want, making it as powerful or simple as you need.
Mingle
Mingle is a simple social networking plugin for WordPress. It works with most WP themes, and lets you set up profile pages, friend lists, profile page posts (like status updates), profile activities, social comments, and email notifications. It’s not as full-featured as BuddyPress, but it’s also simpler to set up and works with a wider range of themes.
Customize Your Community
The Customize Your Community plugin lets you not only change your WP login page, but also makes it so subscribers to your site are redirected to a profile editing page rather than the WP backend. It changes the way your registration, login/logout, and lost password pages look so they no longer contain any WP branding information. Users with roles set to anything other than “subscriber” will still see the traditional WP backend, though login/logout pages, etc. will show the customized design.
Community Blogs for BuddyPress
This plugin lets you create group or community blogs with multiple authors within BuddyPress. Administrators on a BuddyPress site can use the plugin to give a member registered user status to any blog they choose within the site (or multiple blogs). It’s a great option for extending the collaboration features of a BuddyPress site.
Profiler
Profiler creates user profiles for every registered user on your blog, including Gravatar images. It also creates a members directory and can be used with the User Photo plugin and the Whisper plugin.
Conclusion
Think through the kinds of social interactions you’d like to take place on your blog and then find a plugin that will help you foster those interactions. The above list isn’t exhaustive, so if you know of other great WP plugins for building community around your content, please add them in the comments below!
Further Resources
- 20+ WordPress Plugins for your Membership or Community Site – A great roundup of plugins useful specifically to membership sites (including paid membership sites).
- 10 WordPress Plugins to Help Build Community – A collection of plugins that can help build a sense of community on your blog.
- Creating a Social Network Using WordPress MU – A tutorial for setting up your own social networking site from Holdfire.
- How To Build a Social Networking Site Using WordPress – A great article from MakeUseOf.com on using BuddyPress to create a social network.
Great Plugins! Not the usual and the obvious. Well done thanks. I’ll use them in the future for WordPress projects :)
EXCELLENT blog post dude. I will have to look into some of these plugins. Does BuddyPress sloooow down a WP site though? Just curious.
Cheers!
- Max “The IT pro”
MaxTheITpro.com
EXCELLENT blog post dude. I will have to look into some of these plugins. Does BuddyPress sloooow down a WP site though? Just curious.
Cheers!
- Max “The IT pro”
MaxTheITpro dot com
Thank you so much this is a really helpful post. I spent a day last week looking at Buddy and trying to decide if it was suitable for a work blog I’m proposing, but these plug-ins give so much more scope for us to tailor exactly what we need
Nice read. Thanks for this info.
Great list…some plugins I didn’t know about that I will be trying out. THX!
This is WordPress abusement!
C’mon, if I wannna build a social network like community, I choose elgg.org to build it…
But what is the best way to get your site’s community to reach out to the rest of the world?
you can thread comments under the discussion settings. why use a plugin when it is already a WP feature….
Because not everybody has 2.9.
A nice post. And thanks for the mention of Feedback by Paragraph.
cool plugins for wp i love it
awesome…I’m working on a wordpress community site right now. I’ll be checking some of these out for sure. Thanks!
Wow lovely article .. bookmarked .. :)
Ill definately use them on my site \m/
Another great post
Very cool article! Many plugins I had never heard of…
@Max the IT pro: A little bit of course, because there is more stuff to display, but really it’s almost unnoticeable… Buddypress is very fast, just as WP
useful article ?
really useful post. thanks again.
excellent tips, i never experience before like this, but now following your steps and building an community website for my own testing experience about this great experience with your goodness, can you also show some result after use these plugins, i want to match functions and also user experience. thanks
Same as you match ur logo as psdtuts and family…. cheeky monkey!
Great article and resource for community driven sites.
This is great. Thanks for the suggestions.
perfect – a few months ago i have to search these plugins by myself, so sad that this post comes “too late” thanks for sharing!
I’m a big fan of BuddyPress, but have yet to use it. I think it’s tough to for a company to try and execute a social network in addition to something like Facebook. But I think BuddyPress can make it easy to facilitate.
Also, bigger plugins like this would do well to hire a designer and lay down some incredible GUI interfaces to showcase all their plugin does. The average person doesn’t read everything and then make a decision – they like to see it in action as a means to reading about it.
WOW I found this page so timely – just today we are building a site in WP. Your article has been sooooo much help I am really grateful. Thanks for sharing
Oh this was very useful for us as I want to build a community from our trainees. Thanks.
However, what about WP3.0 and Buddy Press, I think that will be an interesting time for both parties.
thats what I was looking for, big thanks
What a fabulous post. As a long-time WP blogger, I find this one of the more valuable posts about the platform. And definitely useful to me NOW, as I’m exploring setting up a community site soon.
This article would be so good, only trouble is, over half the plugins are not compatible with the latest WordPress, and who wants to run an unsecure community site?
If your gonna write a “top X” blog post (as you do, a lot), maybe do a little bit of research first instead of just thinking about the SEO or the profile building?
Thanks for the info…!!
Wonderful Site! I wanted to ask if I might be able to quote a portion of your pages and use a few items for a term paper. Please email me whether its ok or not. Thanks
Very nice plugins
ok very good info!
10x very much. Inspiring work for me .
Thank you so much for this very helpful.
Good share, Thank you for a useful post.
Thank you for sharing. Have a good articles in your blog.
WP-FORUM has know security issues and allows you entire site to be compromised. Just an FYI. Developer no longer answers requests.
really nice plugins … i wish you’d create the same topic for the Drupal
thank you
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I haven’t read it all yet but i will when i have more time..
Thanks for the great info and great list of plugins.
BJ
^_^ cool blog man