We have spent a over a year in development and it’s finally here. We are very proud to announce the release of PeepSo – the Next Generation Social Networking solution for WordPress. You can find it here: https://wordpress.org/plugins/peepso-core/
In February 2015 we started talking with the good folks at IJooma, makers of JomSocial, about building a social network platform for WordPress. They’ve been the experts in this field in the Joomla world with their product and they wanted to move into the WordPress world. So we started talking about what a WordPress version would look like. There were certain things that we all agreed on:
- it had to be fast.
- it had to be super easy to install and set up.
- it had to be extensible.
- and it had to look good.
What we came up with meets all of the goals. We built PeepSo to be as lightweight as possible. You can use this plugin on shared hosting. It only takes a couple of minutes to install. In fact during development we gave some friends a sneak preview and some of the responses were that they expected the install to take hours and they were surprised at the simplicity of the process. They thought they were missing steps or the installation was broken because it was effortless and then they looked and saw that they had Social Networking on their site.
In addition to the Activity Stream and User Profile features in the core product, PeepSo comes out of the gate with several add-on plugins that you can use to complete the Social Networking picture and customize your users’ experience. We’ve included a Friends feature, Messaging, Moods for your posts, Locations for your posts, Photos, Videos and Tagging. Our idea was to build something with no “learning curve”, so we implemented features that we saw in another well known Social Network tool in a way that were familiar and intuitive.
And the results were very well received. PeepSo works with any theme you want to use. Unlike some other popular WordPress solutions that require the use of specifically built themes, PeepSo works with them all. We did extensive testing with some of the popular themes available to ensure there were no problems. We accomplished this by implementing a templating system similar to what is found in some popular ecommerce tools. The templates can be overridden by theme specific files to allow for customization, but for the most part everything comes from the PeepSo plugin and it all works right out of the box.
I’m very proud of the result of this work. It’s more than 30,000 lines of code, which sounds like a lot. But we wrote this in a way that the resource load on the server is as small as possible and allows the web site owner to focus on growing their audience instead of fighting with technology.
So if you’d like to add a Social Networking component to your web site, I would encourage you to take a look the new kid on the block: PeepSo. I think you’ll be impressed by what you see.