Me and a buddy of mine are looking to start up an online type of community for collectors. We mainly want to focus on the aspect of allowing people to build up their own profiles with following/followers features and allowing them to show off what they own. Would need them to be able to post images and interact with other’s profiles. These are the main features that we would like to start off with as we try to begin building our community. I have seen things about “buddypress” and “bbpress” but am unsure if they would be able to provide what we are looking for. I have also seen things for websites like “discourse” and “mighty networks” but those seem more tailored to forums and conversation rather than allowing people to build up their own collections.
Would really appreciate any sort of advice or insights, I am a beginner in this space and would love any feedback!
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I’m not too sure about the specifics of what you asked, but noticed you’d tagged your post as ‘[wordpress.com]) help’.
Do not use [WordPress.com]). Use [WordPress.org]) (see the pinned post in the subreddit) with a hosting service (see r/hosting).
[WordPress.com]) will give you access to a severely limited version of WordPress, where you’ll need to pay to be able to do basic things like install plugins.
[WordPress.org]) is the open-source WordPress CMS, which can be installed on any server/hosting of your choosing. There are no limits or additional costs to do basic things with this option.
You can also install WordPress locally on your computer using something like [localwp.com]). That way you can just start installing plugins / setting up your site on your own computer to test things out.
I think your question is more for web development.
Your use case require membership plugins which allow users to have their own profiles, but note that certain plugins can be bloated or cause performance issues that you can accept the trade offs. Which means, your site will definitely need to deals bloated assets by using paid optimiser plugins.
If you foresee your community size will grow to a large user base, it’s worth to explore tailored build stack e.g. Vue, ReactJS if you need a lot of interactivity for SPA aka Single Page Application.
Discourse is built on Ruby programming language. You can find some example on GitHub how other developers built their bespoke social network/clone/forums as well.
In my experience building member platform for property community, AstroJS simplify our developer experience, and allow us to optimise our lighthouse score right from the start instead of performance is an afterthought. That’s especially important for mobile user.
Buddypress is probably suitable, but you’d likely have to hire a developer to customise it to your needs.