As always, I am brainstorming new business ideas. I sure wish I was better at implementation than I am at thinking up ideas. My newest idea is a school social networking site. This is an idea that first hit me when I first discovered BuddyPress.

BuddyPress is a set of tools that allow you to turn a WordPress MU install into a social networking site, combined with the BBPress forums and you end up with a full featured social networking site that is perfect for schools. I am hoping to have my first implementation up and going in a few weeks.

I am really falling in love with bbPress. It’s a forum software put out by the same people who gave you WordPress. I have used many different types of forum software on projects including phpBB2, phpBB3 and SMF and they all pale in comparison to the sheer flexibility of bbPress.

First off, adding hacks are easy. There is no fumbling through spaghetti code to find out where to stick some code only to find that you have stick different code in 20 different places just to get it to do what it should do in the first place. With bbPress, the hacks are called plugins. Usually all you need to do is upload the plugin and activate it. You might have to insert some code into the templates, but the template files are easy to understand and an easy to modify.

Which brings us to the templates. The templates are awesome. It’s easy to take one and modify it to get the exact look you want. I think bbPress themes are the easiest forum themes out there.

If you are looking for a forum software, I’d say look at bbPress. While it doesn’t have all of the features you might expect, it more than makes up for it with its ease of use and ease of customization.