BuddyPress had its first release in April 2009 and is a plugin that you use with WordPress to bring community features to your site.
BuddyPress is capable of so much, from connecting and bringing together an existing community through to building new communities. A few things you can create are:
A community for your town or village
An intranet for a company
A safe community for students of a school to interact with each other
A community around a product or event
A support network for people with the same illness
BuddyPress has a lot of different features; you can choose which you want to use. These include groups, streams, messaging, and member profiles. In the next chapter we'll look at these in more detail.
BuddyPress and WordPress are open source projects released under the GPL license. You can find out more about GPL here: http://codex.wordpress.org/License. A team of developers work on the project and anyone can get involved and contribute. As you use BuddyPress, you may want to get more involved in the project itself or find out more. There are a number of ways you can do this:
The main site http://buddypress.org/ and the development blog at http://bpdevel.wordpress.com.
For support and information there is http://buddypress.org/support/ and http://codex.buddypress.org.
If you use IRC, you can use the dedicated channels on irc.freenode.net #buddypress or #buddypress-dev. The developer meeting is every Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in #buddypress-dev.
Note
IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is a form of real-time Internet text messaging (chat). You can find out more here: http://codex.wordpress.org/IRC.