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Which steps to take to move to BuddyPress?

I want to move my current site to Buddypress and I need to know how to do it or in which sequence?

Is there any way to keep it invisible while testing it? (I make this question because my site is currently working)

Should I put the site down for a while or the change can be done quickly?

Would it be advisable to change the theme (and customize it) prior to the buddypress installation?

I will move to your Membership plugin but in the meanwhile would my wishlist member plugin stop working at all? How do you recommend to make this update?

Thanks a lot for your help,
Luciano

  • magichew
    • Design Lord, Child of Thor

    Hi Luciano

    I'm IT Manager for a Primary School in the UK and we have a network of WordPress sites, one of which has BuddyPress installed.

    We decided to have a separate area of our site dedicated to the full social side of the network.

    Having BP on it's own site (on a sub-domain) allowed us to protect that site from the outside world. By that I mean that only registered users could see the interaction that is going on our social network, which is important for a school site, but we also want to showcase the school via the other sites in the network that we need people to be able to see. We protected our BP site with a plugin called (Private BuddyPress). That may or may not be a feature that you need but it was certainly good for us.

    Having BP on it's own site doesn't mean that you isolate BP features to that site. Users on our network can visit any site on the network and (after logging in) can comment throughout the network and post on their sites.

    It could be a good idea for you to set up BP on it's own site, which you could keep private whilst testing.

    I'm far from a BP guru but I've been through enough BP setups to know what I'm doing.

    Let me know if you need anything else.

  • Patrick
    • Support Monkey

    Hi Luciano,

    @magichew gave some great advice there!

    However, if you prefer to install BuddyPress on your current site, then it is advisable to schedule and notify your users of a maintenance down-time.

    BuddyPress installation is pretty straightforward using the install wizard, but you can run into a few hiccups. Having your site offline in case of trouble will keep your users from freaking out while you fix things :slight_smile:

    I just tested installing BP on a site using the Atahualpa theme (same theme you are currently using) and immediately ran into trouble due to the way the theme is constructed.The theme uses a table-based layout which is simply NOT compatible with BP.

    I highly recommend using one of the themes Timothy suggested in one of your other threads

    Hope this helps! And thanks for being a member :slight_smile: .

  • Tom Eagles
    • Syntax Hero

    Hiya, just going through some of the older threads here.

    As it's been a little while since we last heard from you I thought I'd check in to see how you're going?

    If you're still looking for some further assistance with this thread then please feel free to reopen the thread or of course for any new and related issues you are most welcome to open a new thread.

    Cheers!
    Tom

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