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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