WordPress MU

Hi all,

I'm a complete newbie to WPMU. A friend of mine wants to create a near clone of goodreads dot com using WPMU & BuddyPress. So far I've successfully installed WPMU and Buddypress. I was shocked how easy it was to install.

I've been coding PHP for several years and have created my own solutions for blogging, artcles, cms, e-commerce, etc..

Can anyone direct me to some resources that will help me to understand how to bend WPMU?

Honestly, Im stuggling with where to begin manipulating WPMU & buddypress. Should I write a plugin? buy a plugin? just change the code in the php files to accomplish my desires? kindergarden programming :)

Thanks!

I see this book on Amazon...
WordPress Plugin Development (Beginner's Guide) by Vladimir Prelovac

Does anyone know if it's principals can be modified for WPMU?

Thanks all.

So Far I'm finding this to be helpful
http://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_a_Plugin

A well written plugin for WP should work for WPMU. You may find that some of the code you want to do might be a "plugin" but if you put it into the mu plugins directory you can just use it to add additional functionality.

I've written a plugin that adds lots of specific "goodies" to my site to allow it to interact with my brothers site and allow people to embed googlemaps for specific things directly into their posts without them really having to do anything. Now I've got that working I need to concentrate on getting the rest of the look and feel of the site tightened up.

Have you looked at the WPMU specific part of the codex?

http://codex.wordpress.org/WPMU_Functions

For my work, it is a combination of plug-in development and theme development. Some functions can be written as plug-ins, others as theme functions.

The Codex is a good place to start. Also do google around for plug-ins that might meet your needs. These can either provide the functionality you need without needing additional programming or, at least, give you a foundation to start from.

I did see that link!

What is interesting about this project is that it's basic functionality is really to provide a community for book reviews... not really the blog aspect of Word Press. My friend would like to stick with WPMU and BuddyPress, but i'm not quite sure yet if I can bend WPMU this far or not by writing my own plugins and/or core changes.

If anyone is farmiliar with goodreads dot com, can you see any major challenges where WPMU & BuddyPress will not provide an appropriate foundation?

I noticed on their jobs page they are looking for ruby on rails developers of over PHP... would that indicate that they are not using a WP foundation?

There's a lot of general WPMU information here:
http://wpmututorials.com
And you'll get a lot of buddypress-specific information from their forums.
Part of it is just sitting down and figuring what you need to modify, then determining if it's controlled by a plugin a theme, or whatever.

"I noticed on their jobs page they are looking for ruby on rails developers of over PHP... would that indicate that they are not using a WP foundation? "

Yep. Than means not WP, they rolled their own app in RoR.

For a goodreads clone, you'll have to tweak some things, whip up a couple custom plugins, but this'll get you close for sure.

PERFECT Andrea!!

BTW, I'm loving http://premium.wpmudev.org/wpmu-plugins/

I'll be subscribing to complete the project for sure!