E.Webscapes Design Studio

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WeEarth is a web site with a blog, social community and e-commerce store that has the goal of fostering social consciousness through art, activism and media. It is a network of socially conscious bloggers and blogs, brands and consumers, artists and entrepreneurs. The folks from WeEarth approached Lisa with their ideas for their social community that involved a custom deployment of the WordPress MU and BuddyPress platforms..

Before digging into their design project and implementing all the exciting WordPress MU and BuddyPress features – we discussed the intent and scope of their project, specifically their existing member base. WeEarth had an existing web site that was running on a proprietary CMS platform that did not offer any type of import/export of content feature – so, in building this new web site, we were truly doing it from scratch. WeEarth is completely sold on the concept of Open Source, and it was important to them to make this move to WordPress – so it was just a matter of getting it done. However, with an existing user base of 450+ – that required the import of all of their existing member data into the WordPress MU database. We accomplished this by creating an Excel (.cvs) spreadsheet of their existing member data and importing it directly into the WordPress MySQL database. Through our discussions on the size of their user base and their expected traffic and site usage, they also made the decision to host their site with our hosting services at Blogs About Hosting and are now hosted on their own dedicated server, which provides them with the space, traffic handling and resources they need now, and to accommodate their continue growth in the future.

Once all that was done, we could set about the process of bringing their social community to life!

WeEarth came to me with their own ideas on the design, having had some organic artwork created by a local artist, Hansomei, they had the basic idea in mind for their site design and base framework, including navigational architecture and content delivery – it was just a matter of bringing the WordPress MU and BuddyPress platforms together to make it all happen.

The first phase included the creation of the custom WordPress theme – which included a front page display of content that included such features as: Featured Content Gallery with a thumbnailing script that allows them to very easily create great visual imagery in their posts and display and spotlight that imagery in various areas of their website to call attention to their great content – the front page also presents the reader with the content sorted by topic, laid out in a grid-based design that keeps it all logical and organized.

The next phase was integrating the BuddyPress suite of plugins to add an exciting layer of social networking to their site. With BuddyPress, WeEarth visitors now have the ability to create an account, have a focused member profile and interact with other community members through Wire Posts, Groups, Forums, Private Messaging and adding friends and contacts from within the community. The WeEarth Community page gives you a snapshot of the current activity going on in and around the WeEarth web site, while the individual member profiles provide you with information that is specific to that particular community member.

In addition, the BuddyPress features give WeEarth very handy Member, Blogs and Groups directory pages where visitors can navigate to find new friends, blogs and groups to join and interact with. The directories are completely searchable – making it quite handy for new visitors, and existing members, to find what they are looking for.

The WeEarth Shop is powered by a great plugin for WordPress called the Shopp plugin, which is an e-commerce plugin that adds a feature-rich online store to your WordPress-powered website or blog. Shopp is not a free WordPress plugin, there are minimal costs associated with running it – - but after discussing the project details with WeEarth, we determined that it was the best solution for their e-commerce delivery. I installed it and integrated their custom design for their display of products, and product categories.

There are many other custom features and design bits to this design, including a very custom category template that presents their category archives in a very unique way (as an example – you can view their Eco Category here), the comments display, search results and many other content areas of their site have been tweaked and pulled in to incorporate their custom design work.

All in all, the site came out really well and WeEarth has achieved their goal of moving to a 100% Open Source Content Management System with all the dynamic features they were looking for to build their community on the web!

For those interested in the BuddyPress project, I am just about to publish the first ever book on BuddyPress – the official BuddyPress For Dummies with Wiley Publishing. The book is due out at the end of this year and covers the most recent version of WordPress MU and BuddyPress. You can pre-order it on Amazon.com today!

I am now in the process of developing several custom WordPress MU / BuddyPress web sites for clients that will be launching very soon. If you’re interested in working with me on a similar project, go ahead and Request a Quote today!