If you haven’t heard about buddypress then please head on to buddypress.org and check out what it is…Buddypress is a plug-in that enables any self hosted wordpress blog into a niche social network. From last few months I am playing with this cool new plug-in and really got hooked to it and decided to build Digital Challenger using buddypress because a niche social community gives more power and leverage in the marketing space.

Recently buddypress community announced buddypress 1.7 which is a revolutionary release I have been waiting for this version so as to give my community a great design and features. Here are some of the features of buddypress 1.7 which are my favorite,

Theme compatibility

Awesome and my most loving feature of buddypress 1.7 is theme compatibility….in earlier versions of buddypress we need to use buddypress compatible themes and for a non technical guy like me this was frustrating. Now I am running my buddypress powered sites on Canvas woo themes which my designer added with ease. Everything seems working smoothly as off now and while we are working on the design phase, our community is ready to start its activity.

Group Management

The most frustrating aspect of running a social network is to manage spam and in buddypress I have seen robots creating profiles and groups. While the users are easily managed from the backend, going to each group and deleting them became a huge time consuming task. Now we can manage and delete groups with a click of a button from the backend. This feature helped me to delete more than 10-15 spam groups on digital challenger recently.

While these two features are my favorite there are other improvements and hundred of bug fixes for this release. You can check this article 7 exciting new features in buddypress 1.7 or the following video