Welcome to Author Buzz Dev blog. As a site, we went into live development on the 27th April 2017. This blog, the first in our network, is just for us developers (well, just me at the moment) to talk about what is going on with the technical side of things.

The vision for Author Buzz

The vision for the Author Buzz project is to support UK based authors in reaching audiences and to help readers connect with their favourite British writers.

Right now that entire dream rests in the hands of one geek.

The aim is to create a place where authors can, for free if possible, create a profile which will include:

• Links to all the books that they have released
• Links to the author’s blog or promotional site
• Links to social media profiles
• The ability to follow authors
• The option for authors to talk to each other

Blogging Stuff

While some authors are comfortable setting up and running their own blog and building an audience, not all of us are like that. With the support of the volunteers behind this project, we hope to offer authors a supported blogging service with access to training and tutorials to help you connect with readers using our chosen art form – the written word. Those volunteers are Matt of The Fantastic Site of Lord Matt (that’s me) and Thanet Creative Writers (a writers’ charity).

To that end, we have set up a WordPress network which will allow you to run your own blog. This blog will be fed back through to your profile so that people can discover it.

While I have written my own Content System it was felt that it would be better to go with a more well-known system that everyone is already familiar with. It’s just as much work for me (the geek) but we hope it will make for a better experience for you (the author).

How are we going to do this?

The short answer is that actually, I don’t entirely know. I’m trusting that this is a task worth doing and that I am up to the task.

The longer answer is that we will be combining plugins such as BuddyPress, BBPress, and a whole bunch of custom written stuff to try and make something that, I hope, will be rather special.

Can I help you?

If you are a technical person, then I welcome any contributions that you feel you could make. At the end of the day, this is a huge task and I am going to be doing the work by myself. So please do step forward and join in where you can.

We will try and release any work of a publishable standard back tot he community. So that will probably include a few themes and plugins along the way.

If you are a person who likes playing with shiny new things then you can help but diving on int here and testing things out. Play with the toys and see what you can make of it. Your feedback will help a lot. If you hit any snags or find any bugs please report them in the help and support group.

If you are an author or just highly literate then, as a dyslexic I would welcome any grammatical corrections that you might wish to supply.

Let’s build this together.