BuddyPress has a trial site in which you can sign up for an account and give it a test run, much like the folks at Curverider did many months ago. It gives everyone an opportunity to experience the user interface. I signed up for an account and gave it a quick test drive. I will look deeper into the details over time. This is an overview of the registration, progile, and the blogs.
Going to testbp.org presents the following screen:
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Click on of the registration links to set up an account. You are then prompted to give a username, email address, reply to a captcha and to provide some profile details including an avatar. You are also given the option of just creating an account, or an account with a blog.
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If you selected the option to create a blog, you are prompted to give a subdomain and title for the blog, and have the option of allowing search engines to index the site or not.
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Next you are prompted to look for an email to activate your new account. Once you activvate your account, you are assigned a password and asked to crop your avatar. Once you log in, your are brought to your profile page.
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Notice the navigation on the left side displaying menu options, the submenus in the next column. Clicking on the “Blogs” option brings up a new submenu. Note the ability to create additional blogs.
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When you click on your blog, up comes something that should look very familiar to WordPress users:
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If you click on the site admin link, you are brought to the familiar WordPress 2.7 blog interface.
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As in WordPress you can customize the look using themes.
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Overall, with BuddyPress, the blogs have an individual identity outside of the BuddyPress installation in that they have an independent subdomain, and that they can be customized like any other blog.
Clearly, Elgg and BuddyPress are very different. While this is more of an overview than a comparison, it is easy for one familiar with Elgg to see that these two packages take very different approaches to what might appear the same when one simply looks at a list of features.
I plan to overview more BuddyPress user features in the future and look forward to a discussion of the merits of each.
