The Commons In A Box project aims to provide universities and similarly minded organizations with a powerful, professional, free, and easy-to-use platform for community engagement. A central part of any such platform is its interface. CBox is built on BuddyPress and will work with any BP-compatible WordPress theme. Thus, organizations with the right kind of know-how will be able to use WordPress’s theming system to create a CBox interface for their community that is totally unique. At the same time, we believe it’s crucial that CBox comes pre-packaged with a default theme that will serve the purposes, both functional and aesthetic, of users who don’t have in-house WordPress development talent. This means that an excellent default theme is critical to the central aims of Commons In A Box: to bring the power of BuddyPress-based communities to organizations that don’t have the resources to build from scratch.
That’s why we’re thrilled to announce that the Commons In A Box default theme will be designed and built by Marshall Sorenson and Bowe Frankema of PressCrew, using their Infinity Theming Engine.
Infinity is a perfect fit for Commons In A Box. In the world of WordPress Themes, compatibility with BuddyPress is often absent, or an afterthought. Infinity, in contrast, was conceived and developed with BuddyPress in mind. For newcomers to WordPress and BuddyPress, Infinity’s unique configuration file system makes setup a snap. It’s just a matter of turning on and off features to customize your BuddyPress installation how you want it. And for those who do have some WordPress theme development experience, Infinity offers unparalleled features that make advanced customization both fast and easy. The ease with which designers can realize their creations is exactly why the team chose the slogan “More Freedom to Create”.
Just as important to Commons In a Box as Infinity itself are the developers behind it. Marshall is a longtime contributor to BuddyPress and the author of the popular BuddyPress Links plugin. Bowe is the founder of BP Tricks and one of BuddyPress’s most vocal supporters. “3 years ago I was starting out with BuddyPress and I needed something exactly like this,” said Bowe. “Now I’m creating it.”
Marshall and Bowe are as passionate about the value of free software as the Commons In A Box team: Infinity, like CBox, is GPL-licensed, costs nothing to download and use, and is open to contributions from the community of users and developers. Between PressCrew and Ray, we’re pleased to say that the Commons In A Box team probably contains more BuddyPress talent than any other project.
Welcome to the team, Marshall and Bowe!
This is a very exciting project. As the lead dev on a “Commons” where I have taken the CUNY Commons as a mentor text and attempted to build my own box for 51000 K-12 students, using plugins from Boone, custom plugins created by Ray, ad other misc code (and snippets from BP-tricks) for our project, I can testify to both the incredible engagement factor a community like this brings to the table, but also the enormous frustration of launching a project like this when one’s vision and recognition of the importance of these spaces supersedes the skills necessary to pull something like this off. I have never professed to be anything more than a copy and paste coder, and trust too easily in the coded plugins available in the repository, cringing each time I enable something in the hopes that nothing breaks, and everything scales (you can check out our stumbling progress at http://dev.commons.hwdsb.on.ca). The learning curve to create a space like this is huge, and having a team forging a path so that others can benefit from the power of WP and BP in an instructional space is a noble cause worth celebrating. I look forward to the culmination of this project, and applaud those responsible for giving it life.
Thank you for the kind words Jared! I had exactly the same issues when I first started out trying to build a network with WordPress/BuddyPress and Multisite. That’s almost three years ago, and stuff was even harder then it is now!
Like you say the biggest frustration is having a clear idea of what your network SHOULD be like, but getting completely stuck in the process of creating it. I believe that the tools needed for such a network (WP/BP and the Infinity Engine) are matured enough to do pretty much anything, we just need to glue everything together! Frankly it’s going to be a bit more then that, but I think you’ll get the idea!
It’s exiting to work with a group of people on tackling this problem by not only focusing on writing code and other geeky stuff, but making the setup and management of such a network easier and more flexible in terms of look and feel. Not to mentio creating a default theme that will be used by so many people 🙂
Thank you CUNY for offering us the chance to do this project. Everything we’ve envisioned while working on Infinity is coming to fruition in this project.
Thanks for the update, Boone.
Does that mean CBox can be treated as a way of creating BP child theme? If so this is good news for me because I can spend less time dealing with theme compatibility issue when BP/WP gets updated.
Jared – People like you are exactly our target audience. Hopefully we can deliver on what we’re promising 🙂
Michael – Thanks for stopping by. CBox is much more than just a theme. But if you build your site’s theme as a child theme of Infinity/the CBox default theme, then you’ll automatically inherit all relevant updates to the BP templates.