[ericodom]

Hi all,

Let me first say… using Buddypress has been a thrilling and exhilarating experience. The past few months of development has no doubt had a large share of challenges, but the learning process of it all is second to none.

That said, we’ve run into significant problems replicating several functions/features of Ning on Buddypress. I suspect some of these problems may be due to the fact that we’re moving 90,000 members and most Buddypress sites are built for much smaller communities.

Specifically, we lose the ability to mass mail and mass content share with the community via admin. On Ning you can do two things. a) You can create html rich newsletters/messages that are sent directly from the dashboard, and b) You can share a discussion or blog post with all members of the network (when logged in as super admin).

Now I understand the complexities and dangers of doing such (possible blacklisting and extra server resources), but Ning is able to pull this off with ease and it’s built right into the system. I also realize there are some existing plugins out there for newsletter like functions, but they all seem to shut down at 5,000 users or less.

The second function we seem to have a hard time replicating is the media gallery system. We’ve tried a couple of plugins that allow media attachments to status updates, but there is no gallery created in user profile, nor is there a community gallery containing all media shared in the overall network.

Third, visually rich discussion editors. Where is this? Even here there is only basic tag enhanced content editors. Our 90,000 users are VERY active in the discussion forums and having this cut down is quite a drastic reduction in functionality.

Perhaps there are plugins that accomplish much of this, but I haven’t been able to find them. We have a dev that has done most of our BP work as far as theming and core functionality, but cannot afford to have extravagant plugins developed from scratch.

Would love to here some ideas if anyone has them. Thanks in advance if you do!

-Eric

[Tammie Lister]

Your going to be best off having a look at plugins – your developer should be able to do this for you also.

A good starting point is the extend section of this site. https://buddypress.org/extend/

Lets see if we can get one on track though for you. For the activity stream editor you may want to start with: http://teleogistic.net/code/buddypress/bp-tinymce/

[ericodom]

Hey Tammie.. thanks for the reply! We’ve been searching plugins for some time now. Most already existing plugins cannot scale to our level of membership.

The plugin you link to is a tiny step in the right direction, but not anywhere near as close to what Ning offers in a full visual editor. I’ve found a few lite editors such as this, but none accomplish much beyond a couple of tags. i.e. no image uploads, attachments, etc…