BuddyPress

@MrMaz has made a pretty cool plugin for BP-Tricks.com, which is now available for download. It allows your members to attach an RSS feed to their profile and imports new blog posts from that feed into their Activity Stream.

It’s based on @apeatling his External Group Blogs plugin, but will be improved and extended in the near future.

Download: http://bp-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/external-member-blogs.zip
Documentation and FAQ: http://bp-tricks.com/coding/allow-users-to-add-their-rss-feed-to-their-profile-with-the-external-blogs-plugin/

Enjoy

Cool! Plugin that long I’ve been waiting. Thanks a lot, @Bowromir.

No problem! Hope you like it

i saw this briefly on your site a couple weeks ago. I am looking forward to working with it. I have been doing the same thing but in a round about way. On multisite i just have users add their rss feed url to a subblog setup on something like feedwordpress/wpomatic. It works well but I’m having performance issues.

How will this plugin stand up as far as performance?

I like the way I’m doing it now because of the expanse of what can be done with wordpress posts. You can manage and manipulate the posts.

How will external member blogs allow us to handle the activity items for external posts? Is it possible to call them seperately something like (type=external_post) ? Is it easy enough to exclude them from the general activity feed?

Tags, Categories? How does it handle images?

I remember when the groups external feed plugin came out, this was one the first things I asked about doing…for members. I look forward to the future development of this plugin. Thanks for it.

@nahummadrid

Maybe @MrMaz can tell you something about the performance of the plugin in more detail, but the feeds are cached and only checked once an hour or on a direct profile visit. So far the plugin has been performing great, and I have not noticed any performance issues with it. It is a lot less heavy on resources as a dedicated RSS feed importer plugin for WordPress, that’s for sure.

You do have to remember that the posts are not stored anywhere other then the activity stream itself. You can filter the stream for external blog posts but it does not save it as a regular post or anything. Excluding them from the Stream would mean that the entries are not stored anywhere basically making the plugin useless

If you feature requests just leave a comment on the blogpost on BP-Tricks itself so we can keep track of them!

Ok thanks! I am definitely going to try it.

*by Excluding them I meant filtering them out from the main activity loop. sorry! hehe.

I’ll go over to the tricks post for the request! thanks again

I will try it too, thanks @MrMaz and @Bowromir for the info

This is a great plugin, but there is a problem that I need to figure out how to fix…

By default, external member blog posts are imported either when someone visits that member’s profile page, or every 60 minutes. Except, the 60-minute part isn’t working. I’m sure there could be some conflicts with other plugins, but, from the discussion over at bp-tricks, it seems like a lot of us are having this problem.

Maybe there is a way to tweak the code, or even a chron job to run.

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks!

@MrMaz – just wanted to give you a heads-up about this issue…

@Bowromir – On the last activate this plugin I got some error. I tried to activate it on the WordPress 3.2-beta1 (multisite) and BP 1.2.8.

@Bowromir Hello Bowe, tried to reach you on BP-Tricks, but thought I’d try you here.

Or if anyone has any hints on how to make this possible please let me know…

We started working with External Member Blogs, and now looking to extend it in a good way.

I was wondering if we can associate feeds with a certain group or category – kind of how Digg member feeds work (they require you to choose a category). We would like members to choose a group or category where all feeds would post in. Please let me know if this is possible, something you may consider working on, or some hints on how we could work on it from here.

Thanks for your good assist with this.

Also, if anyone is up for working on some other savvy feed ideas
please contact me and let me know the best way to keep in touch.

- Jeff – Jeff@Vybee.com