Skip to:
Content
Pages
Categories
Search
Top
Bottom

Customizing Buddypress for a non-profit social networking site

  • Avatar of gyonis
    gyonis
    Participant

    @gyonis

    3 years, 2 months ago

    Hi.

    I’m building a social networking site based on WordPress MU and BuddyPress (latest versions downloaded a month ago), I still need couple of things to be done, and I was hoping someone could be generous to help me with, what I’m asking for is the following:

    1. Main navigation bar: I want to remove, add, modify the name, of links on the main horizontal navigation bar. Mostly, I want to add the links for the sub blogs (from the menu under blogs) and add them as main links on the nav bar side by side with “Groups” and “Forums” > http://damacom.net/

    2. I want an NGO directory, one that includes NGOs, charity associations, etc, where people need help can easily find them. I’ve searched all kind of plugins, but what I need is:

    2.1. For it to include: Organization name, contact info (tel., fax., email, address), and one small brief paragraph about the organization and what they do

    2.2. Organization categorized by country and category for people to easily find what they’re looking for among hundreds of organization that will be listed there

    2.3. Entries (organizations’ names and info) could be entered by admin, or users themselves, but when entered by users, it needs the admin approval first so others don’t abuse this section.

    3. People can post project proposal to get NGOs attention to help them, this will be as the main blog

    3.1.1. Can I add more fields to the blog post entry other than the typical title/body fields? It should have at least 7 more fields; 1 in one line text field format, 6 in a text area (where they can write a brief paragraph) format, and a drop down menu for the project country.

    3.1.2. Search the project section for projects

    3.2. Somewhere to post the project from the main page, without having to go into the dashboard, or at least a link that can take the technically newbie users directly to the post project (blog post) section.

    I hope I managed to make everything clear, if there’s one of these point that are not clear, kindly ask me and I’ll clear it up.

    Your help is mostly appreciated; it is for a good cause to help people trying to do good things in their communities, and it’s completely non-profit.

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Avatar of gyonis
    gyonis
    Participant

    @gyonis

    3 years, 2 months ago

    Just wondering, between all the BuddyPress users, no one have the answer for at least one of these questions?

    Avatar of Roger Coathup
    Roger Coathup
    Participant

    @rogercoathup

    3 years, 2 months ago

    @gyonis – the post has only been up 21 hours, and also is quite intimidating to read through (it may have been better to ask each question individually!)

    Any some pointers:

    Q1. You’ll need to write some PHP code, and also understand the BuddyPress hook function concepts.

    There are already some posts on modifying the admin bar, e.g. http://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/modifying-the-buddypress-admin-bar/

    If your list of blogs is fixed, it should be straightforward. If you want it to dynamically add newly created blogs to the dropdown list, I suggest taking a look at the code in /plugins/buddypress/themes/bp-default/blogs/index.php as a starting point

    Q2. I suggest setting up a blog in your install for the NGO Directory, with new users added as contributors… they would then be able to create posts in that blog, but it would need your admin approval before the post goes live.

    You could then use categories for each country, and tags to say what type of NGO they are (or simply have another set of orthogonal categories for type). For a simple ‘code free’ solution, you would then just put a sidebar widget in that provides a menu of all the categories and / or tags.

    [A more powerful solution (extra features for the NGO), would be to give them an entire blog, instead of a single post for their organisation... although tagging and categorising blogs is / was a nightmare (Burt Adsit did some work on this, but I think it is out of date now).]

    [Perhaps the best solution would be to add NGO's as a different type of member in BuddyPress. i.e. users can register as themselves or as their NGO... Create a BuddyPress group to hold the NGO members, and have country, etc. as searchable fields in the profile. We gave up on a similar 2 types of member project, but there the challenges were considerable, yours may well work with this approach.]

    Q3.1.1 You can add additional fields using the ‘custom field’ area of the edit post form. This isn’t particularly user friendly though, so you might want to look instead at something like the flutter plugin, which lets you define separate fields.

    Q3.2 Posting from the front end is the ‘Holy Grail’ ! Check out P2 Blog… a theme that was developed by WordPress / Automattic, but seems to have gone very quiet. My wild speculation: @Andy (the developer of BuddyPress) wrote a blog post about P2… I wonder if that means we can look forward to the P2 blog front end features making an appearance in BuddyPress soon. Any comment @Andy?

    To do what you want, you’ll definitely need some development skills (PHP), a decent working knowledge of WordPress code, and an idea where to start investigating the BuddyPress code (I doubt if anyone apart from Andy has a good working knowledge of it).

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)

You must be logged in to reply to this topic.

Topic Info

Topic Tags