Cheers from Australia, and I want to wish all of you who live in the US, happy Thanksgiving. I have received lots of best wishes from many of you and I do want to say thanks and tell you how much I respect and admire you guys for your genuine admiration and gratitude for all the people right back to the early pioneers, who went through hell and hard times to give you the wonderful country you now live in.

I understand it’s very cold in many places where you live, and there has been lots of snow. We do have our snowfields in winter not far from where I live in New South Wales, and also in northern Victoria. There would be quite a few Aussies of various ages who have never seen snow and some have never been to the beach and seen the ocean.

Our weather has gone crazy and there is extensive flooding in New South Wales because of constant rain so that several large dams are overflowing into creeks and rivers. Some of the areas hardest hit include what we call the Central West and many large towns are flooded and isolated. The Central West is the gateway to the true Outback and after that there is desert. I feel deep sorrow for the many farmer families who have suffered years of drought, and just now when it looked like they had a bumper crop of wheat etc it’s all been wiped out in a short time. What tragedy when they were just recovering from a plague of large grasshoppers. I have driven through thousands of these grasshopers, and that’s why my car has a special mesh in front of the radiator to catch these pests.

Speaking about the Outback, in Aussie folklore there is a mythical place called The Black Stump where black refers to charred timber from bushfires and intense heat. The Black Stump as a place or town doesn’t exist so if an Aussie mentions The Black Stump they are referring to a very far away barren desolate hot place where nothing can survive and no sensible man or woman would even consider going there.

Also, if an Aussie says “out the back of Bourke” they are again referring to a far distant place except that Bourke is a real place, a large outback town. My cousin used to manage a sheep station there. There seems to be a constant problem  with wild pigs, big ugly mean black boars with huge tusks. The latest news is the land owners are trying out a new poison.

Back to blogging. I have been searching for awhile to find just the right medium for you to communicate with and exchange knowledge with other readers who have left comments at my blog. At first I thought I needed a traditional forum, but having looked at what is available, ease of use and judging by my own experiences, I have decided against this idea. So here I am yelling with excitement to tell you that BuddyPress has been installed on this blog as a plugin. BuddyPress is free in the same way that WordPress and Wikipedia are free.

I’m writing this articleto give you an overview of what BuddyPress is, what great features it has and how it can be expanded in the future by adding other plugins so it can grow with us as Kevin Johnston’s Blog becomes bigger and better. Some of you are concerned that the number of articles I’m posting are less than before. Don’t be worried, it’s a temporary lull while I catch up with other business matters that take time. There will be lots of new posts soon on topics that I’m sure you will like and find useful. If you love the articles posted so far then you will surely love what’s coming up. The only major difference will be a broad trend towards articles that will help you set up a blog, website or ecommerce store, plus make money at home in various ways through Internet Marketing (which includes eBay).

Back to BuddyPress which was born in 2008 during a project to add social networking features to a WordPress MU powered site. MU means multi-user, so you will likely see the acronym WPMU which is a fork of WordPress created to allow multiple blogs to exist within one installation on WordPress 3.0. The first official release of the BuddyPress platform was in May 2009, but it has grown and morphed very quickly and many times over, in a similar manner to WordPress and Wikipedia. To give you some idea, there are already more than 125 BuddyPress plugins available, and this list is growing every day, especially since the release of  the powerful WordPress 3.0.

BuddyPress sees itself as a community whose whole purpose is to bring people together and allow them to connect and communicate, especially if there are some common interests. These groups or social networks don’t have to have anything to do with Internet Marketing, and can be setup in schools, sports clubs, hobby groups, colleges, universities and companies. The site address for BuddyPress is  http://buddypress.org The BuddyPress people recommend that you first go to WordPress (http://wordpress.org) and create a WordPress ID and then use that to log into the BuddyPress site.  The idea is that you can then ask questions and build your BuddyPress profile so that other developers and contributors can keep in touch with you but none of this is compulsory.

If you have a look at the top left of this blog page you will see two headings “My Account” and “Notifications”, and both of these have drop-down menus. This is where you can set up your profile; send and receive private messages; have favorites and friends connections; change your avatar; create, join and participate in groups. Admin can also send notices across the entire site.  So I’ll be quite delighted if you start setting up and creating.

Some of the BuddyPress optional plugins which are available to me to add are:

WP-FB-AutoConnect………this allows users to log in to this site using their Facebook credentials.

BuddyPress Facestream………this allows users to sync and post to their Facebook stream.

BuddyPress Tweetstream……………this allows users to sync and post to their Twitter stream.

BuddyPress Profile Privacy………..allows users to have privacy options on their profile data.

BuddyPress Group Blog  (WordPress MU only) ………..groups can include a fully functional WordPress blog.

BuddyPress Group Wiki……………Wiki function can be added to groups so that members can contribute to pages.

***** The big things you/me  have to be careful about is making sure the versions of WordPress and BuddyPress are compatible. This shouldn’t be a problem because the BuddyPress site under heading Plugins, lists 269 plugins with their versions, then tells you what version of  WordPress and BuddyPress you need for each plugin. These are all clickable links so you can click on any plugin summary data to get more info.

You can see how really awesome BuddyPress is by clicking on WHO is already using it? You have the option to visit various sites such as:

CUNY Academic Commons of  The City University of New York

Solo Practice University (for lawyers and law students)

hMAG (high end luxury magazine for the Hoboken market)

GigaOm Pro (research membership site)

***** I sincerely hope you are truly pleased, as I am, and I’m looking forward to getting some feedback from you!

ps BuddyPress does have some free themes for you to download. Just remember that not all other themes are directly usable with all the BuddyPress features and optional plugins.