KidSpirit – An Online Community Built with BuddyPress

We are proud to announce the launch of KidSpirit Online, a non-profiit magazine and online community for young teens who enjoy writing, creating, and exploring meaningful subjects such as spirituality, values, and life’s “big” questions.

BuddyPress Online Community

KidSpirit’s new website is powered by WordPress and BuddyPress.

Using WordPress as a publishing platform, KidSpirit Online now offers a more welcoming and secure environment for kids to interact with each other. BuddyPress powers the site’s social networking features, allowing young writers and artists to create groups and chat in forums. The BuddyPress registration process has been customized to comply with child privacy laws; comments, profiles, and other aspects of the site were all customized to protect personal information.

The project included the development of a custom avatar plugin that limits profile image selection to a handful of predesigned choices. The plugin integrates with existing WordPress and BuddyPress avatar functions to seamlessly display a users’ chosen avatar across the site, overriding both the Gravatar service and avatar features built into BuddyPress. This custom functionality prevents members from uploading their own images, ensuring child privacy and an appropriate environment.

The new site’s creative was designed by Mixit Productions and features a look that is colorful, kid-friendly and true to the spirit of the magazine.

Ning’s Reminder: The Value of Open Source – Free as in Libre

About a month ago we started to see some announcements from Ning that made us wonder whether trouble was brewing. Today Ning announced the end of their long time free online community service and a cut of nearly half of their staff. Although this bodes well for other online community platforms, there are a lot of nervous Ning customers out there today – some of our clients included.

Given today’s events, I thought I would take a moment to discuss one of the core values of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS): Free. As in Libre.

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on April 6th, 2009 in Social Networks.

Just in case you haven’t noticed the new Twitter button on our Blog pages, we’re . Follow us to learn more about what we’re up to in real time.

Introducing the “Ning-tranet”

Over the last year we’ve helped several clients deploy social networks on the Ning platform. Our early Ning deployments were elegant, but traditional: we helped member organizations create rich, dynamic online member communities. Recently, we’ve been breaking out of that box.

Earlier this year, we customized an instance of Ning for FIRST Credit Union in British Columbia, creating a social network that enables their staff to meet up and share ideas online. The project included a custom design (implemented via CSS), custom home page components (via the Ning API), and some creative hiding and renaming of core features (using CSS and JavaScript).

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