So, I’m on a mission to extend the group documents plugin to become a ‘global’ documents plugin and I thought I would solicit any advice from the onset. I’ve been developing a resource site for teachers on behalf of my employer, a state agency. Central to this community will be the ability to effectively upload and share a wide variety of documents, not only to groups and forums, but to also have them appear in member’s profiles as a library. Between Group Documents by Peter Anselmo, Forum Attachments by Boone, and Links by Marshall Sorenson, the functionality I’m hoping to achieve is definitely within grasp – it will just take a fair bit of time of educating myself.

I’ll update everyone about what progress I make in this space so others can replicate a similar extension. Of course this may be over my head, but this project is pending grant funding and may result in us hiring one of the many talented buddypress developers to make this a reality.

Wish me luck…

[@r-a-y Keymaster 13 years, 9 months ago]

You should be able to modify the code to make it fit within a member’s profile… will just take time and work!

—

You might also be interested in a new plugin Boone Gorges is building called “BuddyPress Docs”:
https://github.com/boonebgorges/buddypress-docs

FYI, it’s in development and shouldn’t be used on a production site.

[@arhistoryhub Participant 13 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks @r-a-y! I’ve been noodling around for a few days with varying degrees of success. I was able to pretty quickly retool the BP Album/BP Media to fit my basic needs – but it haven’t been able to get it to provide the sort of cross-posting from group to profile that I was hoping for. Definitely over my head here.

I did not realize Boone was working on such a plugin, which will no doubt be immensely helpful. My abilities are basically limited to mashing things together and trial and error until I stop breaking what I’m working on. No doubt Boone will do a waaay better job than I ever could.

Thanks for the tip.

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 13 years, 9 months ago]

FYI – The first iteration of BP Docs will *not* have any upload features. However, on the short list of near-term developments is integration with Peter’s BP Documents, which is the de facto document storage solution on the site that I run. I’ll make the upload component in a detached enough way that you could build your own plugin that uses BP Media or the native WP media storage functions for file storage on the backend.

[@arhistoryhub Participant 13 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks for the info Boone. CUNY Commons is definitely the site that I point to as an example of what’s possible when I’m ‘selling’ my project to the higher ups around here. So, thanks for blazing that trail.

I spent some time with BP Docs earlier today, pretty cool stuff. Hooray for collaborative spaces… The feature that I think I, and probably some others, would like to see is the ability to cross-post or share the document to the user’s profile or perhaps other groups. I believes BP Links has something like this.

[@boonebgorges Keymaster 13 years, 9 months ago]

Thanks for the kind words

Good thought on the cross-posting. The plugin is built in such a way that cross-posting can easily be done – I just haven’t built anything on the front-end for it to work yet. Also, I’m planning to build a piece that allows users to see lists of their own docs under their profile, but that will probably have to wait for the second public release, as it involves writing quite a bit of code.

[@angslycke Participant 13 years, 9 months ago]

Hi everyone!

Really excited about this project! I believe that document editing and collaboration is a key feature to many professional networks and this feature will be a killer addition to BuddyPress and help lots of people. Great work!

[@kenrichman Participant 13 years, 9 months ago]

Hello!
I have also been asked for this type of feature – people want a site-wide library. So I have implemented the library as a public group. Well, it works!
But they would also love to be able to add details about each document such as author, publisher and so on as separate fields. I don’t have much idea how to do that and would really appreciate any pointers.