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When I’m not working (or taking photos of shop fronts), I run a community website for people in Hackney called Yeah! Hackney. My reason for posting is to big up some of the wonderful plugins that help make it happen.

yeahhackney.com  is a WordPress website with the uber plugin BuddyPress plus a bunch of plugins to help someone like me who just dabbles in code (I hack other people’s stuff and hope it will work) make it happen.  The site has been running  a couple of years and I am currently going through a bit of a refresh, sneak preview alert! (new logo and everything!) …..

Part of this will be restructuring the website to mainly use WordPress posts rather than forums, so it means fighting with wrangling data into a new format, most of which the users won’t notice too much, but overall it should make things easier for them.

A new format means new challenges and these are some of the awesome plugins that are going to help me meet them:

  • BuddyPress – gives me member profiles and relationships, private messaging and activity streams
  • Gravity forms – to let members post from the front end
  • Autolink URI – so members don’t have to think about how urls turn into links
  • BP Auto Activate Autologin Redirect To Profile On Signup – so members can get straight in and do what they like to do, which is post stuff and comment on other stuff, without having an extra step of email confirmation.
  • Buddypress Humanity – a sensible way of dealing with spam sign ups (and means I don’t have to use unreadable captcha).
  • Comment Images – to allow image upload in comments
  • Imsanity – to resize those images before they hit my server if they are big to save on hosting space, while not just rejecting big images (which as a user is rubbish)
  • Events Manager – a really nice full featured events plugin that uses custom post types for my local events calendar
  • Relevanssi – awesome search, looks through comments (where some of the best content is), exclusions for pages like “login” plus a lot more
  • WP Comment Subscriptions – to give my site more of a forum feel
  • WP Better Emails and / or Mandril – for emails and smtp server (both format emails)

Watch this space for an update when it does launch