How to Build an Online Community Website on WordPress

How to build an online community, or create a social network website of your own, on WordPress. This video covers the four parts every social network needs (profiles, a feed, groups and connections) and the four build steps: install the plugin, run the setup wizard, create your groups and invite people in.

Transcript

Want to build an online community, or create your own social network website? Here is the whole build, on WordPress. Every social network has the same four parts. Profiles, a feed, groups, and connections between people. You do not need a developer to get all four. You need a WordPress site and one plugin. The build is four steps. Install the plugin. Run the setup wizard. Create your first groups. And invite people in. The wizard asks plain questions. The name of your community, and its colour. Who is allowed to join. Anyone, people you invite, or people you approve. And which pages to create, like the feed, the member list and the groups. Then it builds them. After setup, you create your groups. One for each subject, and each can be open, private or hidden. You can change who is allowed to join at any time, or make the whole community private behind a login. This is what your members get. A feed of posts, with reactions, comments, polls and photos. A list of every group they can join, open or private, and inside a group, photos that other members reply to. Each group shows who belongs to it. And every member has a profile of their own. Notifications tell them when someone replies or connects, which is what brings people back. It also works like an app. Members add the site to the home screen of their phone, and it opens in its own window. There is no app store, and nothing extra for you to build. A public community needs rules. Members post freely, and you set what happens when a post is reported. And you watch the community grow on your own member list, which you can export. For your first week, keep it small. Start with three groups, not thirty. Post a welcome poll, so new members have something easy to do. And invite the people you already know, before you invite strangers. When it grows, you add to it. A forum, courses, events, or paid plans. Each one is a plugin on the same site, so members keep one account. Compare that with a page on someone else's social network. Their rules, or yours. Their name in the address, or your own domain. Followers on their list, or members on yours. One page among millions, or a whole site that is yours. A community built on a borrowed page can be changed without asking you. The longer you build there, the more you would have to start again. BuddyNext is the free community plugin for WordPress. Install the plugin and open your first three groups this week. Get BuddyNext. The link is below.