In case you haven’t heard, BuddyPress is the latest addition to a series of grassroots social networking software. BuddyPress is no more than a few months old, and just recently out of beta. The concept of a Stony Brook social network has been around almost as long as BuddyPress. I spent months looking for the perfect solution to host a robust campus event system, much like the events application on Facebook. After looking seriously at Drupal, Joomla and Wordpress, I found that there is no particular piece of software made for this purpose, but most content management systems have event plugins available. The other social networking solutions, such as Ning, do have event components, but the software itself is unbearable.

   I found BuddyPress completely by accident after already choosing to work with Joomla. I was looking around for better event plugins for Joomla, and I stumbled across a BuddyPress site that was using a primative Wordpress events plugin. On that day I decided to switch to BuddyPress, and soon after someone began developing the events component I was looking for.

   BuddyPress 1.0 was released just a few weeks ago and it’s already getting a lot of attention. It is stable and awesome enough for VW to base its cool new TankWars website on BuddyPress. TankWars disables most of the features of BuddyPress, but they have made very similar design modifications to the ones I have made on sbulife. They only allow sign-ups through Facebook Connect, and they have removed most of the redundant navigation. This means that not only is BuddyPress officially awesome, but that sbulife is also awesome, because we have made BuddyPress even more user-friendly. And the highly paid developers at VW can back me up on that. So, where is my check?