Topic: [BP1.2] External Group Blogs plugin

[BP1.2] External Group Blogs plugin

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 3 months ago

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.

Viewing 21 replies - 1 through 21 (of 21 total)

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 3 months ago

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.

Mark
Participant

@markschafer

3 years, 3 months ago

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

Lsm_267
Participant

@lsm_267

3 years, 3 months ago

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

Andy Peatling
Keymaster

@apeatling

3 years, 3 months ago

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.

Lsm_267
Participant

@lsm_267

3 years, 3 months ago

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

Michael Berra
Participant

@miguael

3 years, 3 months ago

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

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 3 months ago

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.

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 3 months ago

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’.

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

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.

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

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?

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

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..

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

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.

Andy Peatling
Keymaster

@apeatling

3 years, 2 months ago

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

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

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.

Mark
Participant

@markschafer

3 years, 2 months ago

@stwc – I confirm the same issue on my site with full public access to the external blog admin area. I noticed you’ve got duplicate external blog posts on your group home. That’s an improvement over the 5 duplicates I’m getting for each external blog post. Keep talking to yourself… I think you’re on to something

stwc
Participant

@stwc

3 years, 2 months ago

Thanks, Mark. I thought I was going crazy there for a while!

Yeah, it’s just the one feed from one site that’s giving me 5 duplicates, actually, I think. Scratching my head over that one.

rich! @ etiviti
Participant

@nuprn1

3 years, 2 months ago

posted my temp fix for the dups – and i haven’t seen any on my site since the change

http://buddypress.org/forums/topic/external-group-blogs-bug#post-40090

Sunandan
Participant

@sastry

2 years, 5 months ago

Hi , Is there are a way to redirect avatar link to group page instead of sending the user to members page.

When i am using External group blog. The posts coming from external sites have avatar of this group but the avatar link is redirecting to members page i want this to redirect to Group page. Where should i change the code.

Boone Gorges
Keymaster

@boonebgorges

2 years, 5 months ago

@sastry Please please please do not post the same question in ten different threads. It is disruptive to those monitoring buddypress.org for new information, and it makes it more likely that any answers to your question will be fragmented across the site. When you have a question that has not been asked before, your best bet is to start a new thread rather than bombarding a bunch of old ones.

Hugo
Moderator

@hnla

2 years, 5 months ago

In fact in one of those other old threads you post the same question twice and with a 2 minute interval I fail to see that it could have been an error. Please observe what Boone has said above and do not post in this manner any further. the old posts shall be set to read only.

roman
Participant

@romanriebow

2 years, 5 months ago

great plugin! im using it right now, im looking for something else even so:
Short scenario description: scientists of different fields forming workgroups. Collecting and presenting really different scientifical articles (rss) to each other. Those rss have to be structured.

We are using the external group blog plugin until now. In our case the possibility to classify rss-feeds to certain groups is really necessary and a must have. Even though this is not going far enough. im looking for the possibility to allocate external rss-streams to sub-blogs or sub-forums of a certain group so that the flood of information is again more structured. Any hint? May is put it on xmas-wishlist? The possibilty of adding rss to group-forums would do the job already

roman