The response to the new series, Behind the Site, has been great. A number of you have offered up a look behind the curtain of your sites, so there are plenty on the way.

This week’s Behind the Site is WP eBooks, a site run by Ron and Andrea Rennick. In this post they (well, Andrea) will tell you about the site, what plugins they are using, and what they’ve customized to make it work the way it does.

About the site

WP eBooks is a commercial site that specializes in products for WordPress networks (Multisite). The shopping cart is handled by e-Junkie and we use BuddyPress for the support area.

User registration is manual, and users request invites to product-specific support groups. Once we cross-reference their username email with their payment, we add them to the right group.

We’re using the following plugins:

• BP Group Management – Very handy for managing BuddyPress groups.
• BuddyPress – Used for the support areas.
• BuddyPress Auto Group Join – Let’s us (group admins) add users to groups.
• Cookies for Comments – Comment anti-spam plugin.
• GenesisConnect – Adds BuddyPress theme support for Genesis & Genesis child themes.
• Genesis Promotion Box – It adds a promotion box below single posts.
• Genesis Simple Edits – It allows theme customization via an admin panel and Genesis hooks.
• Genesis Simple Sidebars – When Simple Sidebars is active GenesisConnect allows us to show different sidebars to logged in users
• I Make Plugins – We’re using it to list some of Ron’s plugins on WordPress.org.
• Recently Registered – We really, really miss this column (which is in the network users screen) in single WordPress installs.
• Secure and Accessible PHP Contact Form – A simple contact form.

We have also customized a couple of plugins:

• WordPress Download Monitor – Ron made some minor tweaks for our own use.
• WP eBooks BuddyPress Group Email Subscription – Ron added some jQuery to this for our own use.

We created these plugins custom for the site:

• BuddyPress Navigation – Logged in users have an extra menu in the BuddyPress admin bar which gives them direct access to the support area of the support groups they belong to. Also, a handful of the BuddyPress navigation items are removed.
• Block Site Activity Feed – For the privacy of members, the site activity feed is completely blocked.
• Group Downloads for BuddyPress – Ron wrote a secure BuddyPress component to handle uploaded product updates.

We’ve customized templates too:

• The BuddyPress site activity stream is only visible to site admins.
• Group membership counts are only visible to group members on private groups.
• Only site admins are allowed to post to the activity streams.

Theme customization

The theme is a Genesis child theme which is a customized version of Enterprise. It’s been tweaked several times over the last year with most of the customization via CSS & a custom home page.

Be featured on “Behind the Site”

Thanks for the insight Andrea and Ron! If you have a WordPress site with an interesting story, using a clever mix of plugins and a theme to pull off its beauty, let us know and it just might be the next site we take a peak behind.

In the meantime, what do you think? Did you find this look behind WPeBooks.com to be an interesting one?