Introducing AppCommunity: A New Way to Get Social With BuddyPress
AppCommunity by AppPresser is a re-imagined social component for AppPresser apps.
AppCommunity allows AppPresser customers to create a social mobile app for their WordPress website similar to Instagram or Facebook. With AppCommunity, app users can post activity updates, photos, create friendships, send private messages, join groups, and more.
AppCommunity works with the BuddyPress plugin on your WordPress website, using the WP-API to sync your website with the app. This is monumental improvement over our existing BuddyPress integration (AppBuddy), it’s faster, cleaner, and more native.
You can make some pretty incredible apps with AppCommunity, or just add a single feature like private messaging to your existing apps.
Demo App: PressChat 3
You can try out AppCommunity in the newest update (3.1.0) of our PressChat app for iOS or Android. Download the app, then sign up free by clicking Log in, then Sign Up.
Feature Highlights
AppCommunity has the main components of BuddyPress, including activity posting, friends, private messaging, members, profiles, groups, and more. Everything is incredibly smooth and fast, click an image below to see a video.
Messages
Notifications
Activity
Other great features include member profiles, search for all components, list filtering (all, friends, me, etc), comments, flagging (required for iOS apps), push notifications for messages and mentions, and more.
Watch a video demo here of the setup and functionality of AppCommunity to learn more.
How it Works
AppCommunity integrates with any WordPress website that uses the BuddyPress plugin along with the AppPresser plugins. You can add the AppCommunity feature to any AppPresser app using our app customizer.
Your app communicates with your website using a custom BuddyPress REST API built for AppPresser apps. Anything that happens in the app is also reflected on the website, and vice-versa. Any users on your BuddyPress site can automatically log into the app and interact there.
It’s important to note that this does not work with custom plugins or BuddyPress customizations, it is separate from your website.
How is this different from AppBuddy?
AppBuddy is our first BuddyPress integration, and it displays your site in iFrames with our app theme. AppCommunity uses an API, which means it does not use iFrames.
AppBuddy is slower but can be customized quite a bit, while AppCommunity is much faster and cleaner but cannot be customized as easily. There is a trade-off to get a better app experience that we believe is well worth it.
We know that some people need all their customizations in the app, in which case they would need to continue to use AppBuddy.
Future plans
Our goal is to continue building out AppCommunity until it has most of the core BuddyPress features, and lots of customization options.
We will be adding hooks, filters, and other customization options so you can extend the functionality using the REST API. AppCommunity should be seen as a social app component to complement your website, not a clone of your BuddyPress website.
Availability
AppCommunity is still in development, but it’s already live in a couple of apps and working great. We are looking for beta testers to help us put the finishing touches on, so please contact us if you’d like to try it out.
AppCommunity will be released to AppPresser customers on the Agency and Agency Plus plans as soon as it’s ready.
Watch a video demo here of the setup and functionality of AppCommunity to learn more.
22 Comments
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Look forward to learning more about this. I’m particularly interested to see how (if?) it handles BuddyPress groups, which we use to create private areas.
Hey Jeff, yep it works with groups. Check out PressChat, which has a few sample groups.
Great News! I hope your custom BuddyPress REST API is forked from the official under development repo hoping to see some contribution back on bhttps://github.com/buddypress/BP-REST
Yes it is forked from the official repo, although at the time of the fork there was a lot we had to do ourselves. Much of it is custom to our situation, but I’d love to contribute back!
Can we use AppCommunity and AppBuddy in combination? Andrew
Ya you can, although you’d probably want to do some work with the styling so it all looks the same.
I would love to see support for either PeepSo or Ultimate Member.
I’ll add a vote to support for Peepso.
I’ll also add a vote for PeepSo Support
Please add Peepso compatibility.
My vote for Peepso aswell
Peepso would be great 👍 gets my vote
I vote for peepso support
Also, support for UltraCommunity would be great
Im using Peepso also, and looking at AppPresser.
AP says it works with other shortcodes if they are within a plugin which PS is… so shouldn’t it already work?
What further integration would be needed?
Other than PS shortcodes to display activity feed and other bits, the rest of PS is within normal pages, shouldn’t this work with current AP already?
Please Peepso support.
Hello to all,
AppCommunity is great! I was wondering though, where is the right place to suggest some things that might improve it. I am using it a while now and I have come across some “issues” that, in my opinion, can be upgraded.
Congrats! Continue your great work!
Better support for PeepSo users. Cannot renew AppPresser without better support for our PeepSo website.
Please make it available for ULTIMATE MEMBER!!!
Support for UltraCommunity would be FANTASTIC
https://wordpress.org/plugins/ultra-community/
Hey!
Love this.
I can’t seem to find AppCommunity in plugins. I have BuddyPress already.
Any help is greatly appreciated!
Hey Nick, AppCommunity is only for AppPresser customers, you can get it on our Business or Agency plans here: https://apppresser.com/pricing