BuddyPress

Buddypress 1.2, WordPress MU 2.9.1.1, External Group Blogs plugin 1.1.

Version 1.1 of the plugin according to the changelog was released to support BP1.2, but I’m having some issues I hope someone can help with on my 1.2 testbed. Grabbing RSS items and throwing them into the global activity stream is essential to the functionality of the site I’m working on.

With the previous version of BP, you could navigate directly to the list of recent RSS items. Here’s an example from the live site in question: http://jobsee.kr/community/groups/jobs-and-work/external-blog-feeds/

Notice it’s just adding ‘external-blog-feeds’ to the Group home URL and that there’s a ‘Blog feeds’ item in the Group Menu.

That doesn’t seem to work anymore with the latest version, which seems like a fairly significant loss of functionality. There’s no item in the UI for the Group to get there, nor does manually typing in ‘external-blog-feeds’ at the tail end of the URL get you to a list of recent RSS items.

But this isn’t just a matter of aesthetics or loss of functionality, it’s also a pretty big problem of having the plugin actually work, because the only way I ever found to get the plugin to actually pull in new RSS items was to visit that page, and it would kick off, and update the list. Annoying and clumsy, but it worked, more or less. Without anywhere to visit now to manually kick off an update, I’m at a loss!

Am I missing something, or doing something wrong here? I’m deep into redesigning a new child theme for BP1.2, but I’d really like make this work before I upgrade on the live site.

I’ve tried going into the admin panel where you add RSS urls (http://localhost.localdomain/community/groups/jobs-and-work/admin/external-blog-feeds on my testbed) and updating that doesn’t seem to update the RSS feeds either, sadly. Functionality is pretty comprehensively broken for me, then.

Anyone else having these issues? @andy any ideas what’s happening there? Thanks in advance.

To be clearer, I’d expect to see a menu item for ‘Blog feeds’ in the Group submenu above the view filter dropdown and activity listing et al, so that we’d have something like

Home * Admin * Forum * Members (234) * Send Invites * Blog Feeds

The Admin item would only appear when logged-in as one, of course.

I’m don’t think I’m seeing your issue of ‘manually’ needing to initiate an update but the rest of what you stated is accurate for my situation. I’ve been confused as to whether this is how it’s supposed to work in 1.2 – or if an update is needed or if there’s a problem with my wpmu/bp installation. Functionality on BP 1.1 was different and better for my needs than on 1.2. As of now, I only see external feeds in the ‘Home’ page of the Group. I’m also getting double entries for some reason (as shown in link):

http://img.skitch.com/20100218-d7qafyfa9x6wk2c7988kpx45h5.jpg

I’m currently running BP 1.2 on my WP 2.9.1 (single user ), after that I’ve made my old niss theme BP compatible (it worked like a charm).
After activating the external group plugin, I get this php error :

Warning: array_map() [function.array-map]: Argument #2 should be an array in /homepages/…./blog/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-groups.php on line 2454

sorry if it’s a newbee question, i’m no php guru, far from it
thanks in advance for any help
cheers

I need to fix this plugin. In 1.2 instead of a pointless extra tab – you now get a new entry in the drop down filter. The old tab in 1.1 was basically a duplication of the activity stream with a filter.

OK @andy I will be waiting, no problem
by the way, thanks for the good job ; BP 1.2 is really a BIG step ahead
With the codex tutorial, I installed BP on my old theme for WP single, it didn’t take me more than 10 minutes and it works like a charm
thanks again

Thanks Andy, looking really forward to it! As I have mentioned before – I like it very much as it is now (without a pointless extra tab) – but it doesn’t pull acitvity without visiting the admin-area and push the button (same stuff with some other issues on the twitter-plugin)
See my older thread with more detail here: http://buddypress.org/forums/topic/external-group-blogs-group-twitter-doesnt-work

Thanks Andy — looking forward to the updated plugin.

If it updates itself without being touched and throws stuff into the Activity stream, with a filter that you can apply in the dropdown, I’ll be happy as. I’d still like the option to be able to see the RSS item stream (as a filtered activity stream or whatever) in the actual Group interface, too, if possible, as well as being mixed in with global activity.

Oh, yeah, I reported this elsewhere (the 1.2 plugin compatibility thread), but I’m also getting errors on adding RSS streams when creating a new Group, but I’ve found if I back out through the ‘wizard’ and do it again, it ‘takes’.

I’m sorry, I’m an idiot. I didn’t read the readme.txt, just installed through the WPMU interface, and only (after months), just now discovered that you need to move the bp-groups-externalblogs.php file to the /plugins folder.

It seems to be working fine now in terms of updating feeds automatically — all that’s left on my wishlist is some UI goodness for BP1.2, and I can go live with 1.2 on my site, I think.

EDIT: Or maybe not. This is frustrating. Suddenly, all the updates via RSS that appeared in the stream have now disappeared again. I am very very confused.

Just upgraded to v1.2.1 of the plugin, and things seem to be working OK! Thanks, Andy!

Will report back if stuff goes wonky again.

One note — I got errors in activation when trying to move the bp-groups-externalblogs.php file to the /plugins root following the instructions in the readme.txt. Leaving it and loader.php in the /external-group-blogs folder seemed to work OK though, so….

Should that be way to do it — just leave the files in the external-group-blogs folder?

Things are looking good! One last thing I’d like to ask about/request: previously, we could link from elsewhere into a single page that displayed all the RSS items for a group, like http://example.com/groups/examplegroup/external-blog-posts. With the advent of dropdown filtering, that doesn’t seem to work anymore, which I understand, but I’d love to be able to do.

Is there anyway we can pass a parameter in a URL, say, that would autofilter the Group page on load, to show RSS feeds (or any of the other ‘sections’ in the Group)? I’d really like to be able to do this, rather than just linking to the Group with instructions (for non-savvy users) to click on the filter button..

I’m talking to myself here, it feels like after all these comments, but MAJOR BUG FOUND (I think).

I can get to the

at http://example.com/community/groups/example-group/admin/external-blog-feeds

without being logged in, and edit the feeds list! That seems like it might be a Very Bad Thing.

If you are a site admin then you can get to any group admin page. Try as a normal user.

What I’m saying here is that without being logged in at all, as just a random visitor, you can get to the admin page to edit external blog feeds, complete with Update button, if you know the URL, like the one above.

Testing as a logged-in non-admin user (subscriber level) has the same effect.

Have a look at this URL (http://jobsee.kr/community/groups/jobs-and-work/admin/external-blog-feeds) — you should be able to see the relevent admin page for that group, despite the fact that you have no credentials to do so.