Let’s Get Started with BuddyBoss: The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide – Part 1

BuddyBoss is an excellent platform for adding community features to your website, but it can become overwhelming especially if it's your first time using it. BuddyBoss is NOT a difficult platform to use. It does hav a huge number of features, or components as BuddyBoss calls them, and that can be overwhelming.

Let me go over the BuddyBoss components, the features they provide and how to properly select them to give you a better understanding of how BuddyBoss is organized. This will save you a lot of time looking for and finding the BB features that are right for you.

I'm Jorge Diaz, president and founder of Larry Jacob Internet Marketing and Jorge Diaz Online. My team and I have been building online course and membership sites since 2014. Our goal has always been to  provide business owners with the resources and guidance needed to add online courses and memberships to their businesses.

Let's get started.

The following section shows information we reference in the video.

BuddyBoss' Major Features

In general, BuddyBoss provides the following general features:

1. Member directory
2. Member to member communication
3. Activity feeds and forums or discussions
4. Groups
5. Site wide search

If you visit the BuddyBoss->Components area, you will see the following components listed.  I have organized these mapping the BuddyBoss components to the features above.

1. Member directory.
   1. Member Profiles. This component is required. You cannot deactivate it.
   2. Profile Fields. This component is required. You cannot deactivate it.
   3. Account Settings. This allows members to modify their account and notification settings.
2. Member to member communication.
   1. Notifications. This defines how members will get notified of the activities going on throughout the site.
   2. Private Messaging. Enables member to member messaging.
   3. Member Connections. Adds a feature that keeps members from connecting unless both members approve of the connection.
   4. Moderation. Add a feature that allows members to block other members from connecting with them.
   5. Email Invites. Allows members to invite people outside the site to the site.
3. Activity feeds and forums or discussions.
   1. Forum Discussions.
   2. Activity Feeds. These function similar to a Facebook newsfeed.
   3. Media Uploading. Allows members to upload images and videos to forums and feeds. This can be used to keep members from uploading content that could put a strain on your site resources.
4. Groups.
   1. Social Groups. This turns on the group feature making it available on the site.

Visit part 2 of this article to get the whole story.