Evan Solomon

Beau Lebens

BuddyPig is a game meant to help BuddyPress group members get to know each other better. It was built during a hack day at Automattic. Since we’re a distributed company, it’s not uncommon to go months without talking to certain colleagues. We came up with BuddyPig as a fun way to work around that.
PIG, in case you’re curious, is an acronym for Personal Information Game.
To use it you’ll have to write a small plugin to create questions and choose the BuddyPress group you’d like to use. PIG is very hook-able, so there’s lots of other stuff you can customize if you’re so inclined. We’ll include an example plugin to setup PIG below.
PIG requires BuddyPress and its Activity Streams feature to be running. It also requires PHP 5.3, which is slightly higher than the default requirement for WordPress.
<h3>Example setup</h3>
You have to tell PIG what profile items to use and how to ask the questions. We gave you a function called <code>pig_register_question()</code> to do just that. By default, <code>pig_register_question()</code> takes 2 arguments, the BuddyPress profile field name and a format to use to ask the question. Here’s an example:
<pre><code>pig_register_question( 'Address', 'Where does %s live?' );
</code></pre>
You’ll notice the <code>%s</code> in the question format, which is where we drop in the user’s name that the question is about. If you’ve written PHP before, you may recognize this syntax from the <code>sprintf()</code> function, which is what is used behind the scenes.
You’ll also have to tell PIG what BuddyPress group to use, which can be done with <code>pig_set_group()</code> by passing the group’s ID. Here’s an example:
<pre><code>pig_set_group( 1 );

pig_register_question() can take two additional arguments. The first one tells PIG whether to make the name possessive when it asks the question. For example, "Where was Beau born?" would not be possessive, but "Where is Beau's house?" would be. If you want PIG to make the name possessive, you can add `true` as the third argument, like this:

pig_register_question( 'Address', 'Where is %s house?', true );
</code></pre>
The last optional argument is a callback. PIG can format answers for you before displaying them. One use case of this is deduplicating multiple phrases that mean the same thing, like “United States” and “USA”. If you use this callback, you must also make sure the function exists for PIG to call. Here’s an example:
<pre><code>pig_register_question( 'Address', 'Where is %s house?', 'a8c_dedupe_countries' );
function a8c_pig_dedupe_countries( $country ) {
 $usa_versions = array( 'US', 'USA', 'United States', 'U.S.A', 'U.S.', 'America', 'United States of America' );
 $uk_versions = array( 'UK', 'U.K.', 'United Kingdom' );
 foreach ( $usa_versions as $usa_version ) {
 if ( strtolower( $country ) == strtolower( $usa_version ) )
 return 'United States';
 }

 foreach ( $uk_versions as $uk_version ) {
 if ( strtolower( $country ) == strtolower( $uk_version ) )
 return 'United Kingdom';
 }

 return $country;
}
</code></pre>
You can put these setup calls into your own plugin and activate it just like any other. If you insist, you could also put them into your theme’s <code>functions.php</code> file. To make sure they’re loaded after PIG is setup, you can hook them to the <code>pig_loaded</code> action.

BuddyPig

A quiz game built on BuddyPress that asks you questions about your fellow members. Built for an Automattic hack day.

electrictreehouse

Turn your site into the game of Asteroids. Click to start and you can destroy 
the contents of your webpage by flying around and shooting them. Check out 
Electric Tree House (http://electrictreehouse.com/) (bottom of the right sidebar) 
to try it out yourself. The plugin is also highly customizable allowing you to add 
a description and/or image as well as controlling which pages the Asteroids widget 
 appears on. Give it a try and I guarantee you will be impressed. The Widget 
implements a javascript by Erik Rothoff Andersson (http://erkie.github.com/), 
 based on the classic game, Asteroids.

Asteroids Widget

Just tried this on a new install. It would be good to tell folks what buttons do what, but it still works like a charm. I really enjoyed destroying my site with this.

Still works!

Turn your site into the game of Asteroids. Click to start and you can destroy

BuddyPig vs Asteroids Widget