This chapter introduced you to several inalienable truths to building social networking sites. These community sites are first and foremost about the community, their interaction, and site engagement, which you have control over.
In this chapter, we learned about the following:
It only takes a few minutes to set up BuddyPress and WP Symposium, but it takes a lot of resources to build your community.
There are ten excellent plugins that will speed up site development; nine of them are free.
The concept of progressive profiling is an immense asset to producing more meaningful content.
UGC also helps with SEO in that your site generates more content, which translates to more chances of search engines indexing your pages.
Gamification can make your site more enjoyable to your users, which will attract even more users.
The Facebook and AddThis API can lower the barrier of entry to your site.
WPS is ideal for smaller niche communities.
We also saw some interesting factoids on Mark Zuckerberg's...