[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

@3sixty

Add Avatar to BP Forum Extras – Forum Index

Hmm… I’m not seeing it in the Forum Index. Let me check my theme and see if that’s the problem.

update: I changed to the default theme and still not seeing it.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Can I request the ability to stick a specific forum category at the top of the category listings in your plugin?

If you’re talking about the Forum Index part of the plugin, I am not seeing this behavior?? The Forum Index lists the forums in order of forum_id number, so the oldest forum gets listed first, the newest forum gets listed last. But yeah, that is not ideal either – forum software like phpBB usually allows you to reorder forums however you want them to appear.

So I would also vote for “category reordering” on the feature wishlist for this plugin.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

So if anyone wanted to contribute code, how would they do it?

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Topic Preview is amazing! I’m still thinking a little about the implementation and how I might tweak it, though. The expanding DIV is clever but a little jarring, and there is no way for users to avoid it. My recommendation would be:

1. Instead of making the whole title “hot” for the mouseover, append a small mouseover [preview link] to the end of the topic title. (To conserve clutter, eventually it could optionally be linked to the new post indicator I’m working on)

2. Instead of disrupting the page layout with an expanding div, do an overlay div like snap, http://www.snap.com/snapshots_faq.php

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

How is BuddyPress “Like” better than the existing BuddyPress Favorites functionality?

I was initially excited about this plugin, and I really appreciate Hempsworth’s efforts because it works great… but I kind of agree with r-a-y in that it’s probably best to extend the existing BuddyPress “favorite” functionality:

Hey Hempsworth, looks good!

But, do you think it would have made more sense to take advantage of BP’s already-available favorite button?

I’m happy to be convinced otherwise, but at the moment I don’t see the point, and if even I can’t see the point, then my users are going to be freaked out.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Can you list the items you need help with on Classifieds?

Here is what I can see you need:

-support for basic tags: bold, italic, hyperlink, image, etc

-better instructions and translation (e.g.) don’t ‘warn’ friends about new classifieds

-improved layout on main classifieds page

what else?

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

how would I trigger storing the last_activity?

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

The Easy Button tutorial is very straightforward. Unfortunately, I don’t think that posts made from the external bbPress will appear in the site Activity Stream.

There was a plugin to do that, but it’s a little out of date now, and you’d have to do some custom coding to get it to work right. The plugin author is not developing or updating it at this time.

If there’s any other way to get externally made bbPress posts to show up in the Activity Stream, I don’t know how to do it.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

So I think Boone’s code works for filtering blog comments but has an unintended side effect of causing the “Load More” box to disappear. We may be discussing this in another thread at the moment…

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Yes, better tag support is coming, but not sure when:

http://testbp.org/groups/buddypress-testers-614548248/forum/topic/tag-test/

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

What is all this extending people want to do with forums (is bbPress) I am having trouble wrapping my head around what was deemed “weak forum functionality”

It’s not “weak” functionality, as the core forum code (bbPress) is very elegant and versatile. However, there is a long list of moderator/user features that are missing from BP Forums, but we are trying to add them in (hence my “last visit” code here). The Forum Extras plugin is a laundry list of essential forum features that have been added in just the past few weeks: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/new-plugin-buddypress-group-forum-extras

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I was hoping someone would take the “why are you using cookies” bait. Yes, we are aware it’s suboptimal because it’s only specific to the current browser. Here’s the big concern, though:

3sixty, I’d strongly recommend not doing it that way [using cookies to store “last post visited” info]. ISTM that it’s far better if you store this info server-side, not client-side:

In terms of being scalable, isn’t a cookie less overhead than a database query?? BP is so dynamic that I would assume it probably already generates an amazing amount of database queries… would I want to tax the server that much more by storing “last visit” info in a data table?

I’m hoping someone will tell me not to worry about it, but having been “shut down” multiple times in the past for excessive mySQL queries, I’m treading as lightly as I can. BP gurus, please weigh in here.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Please don’t use my customization of Boone’s code above. It seems to be causing a failure of the Activity Stream, at least for me. Have not figured out why yet.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I managed to condense this to about 20 lines of code. Try this (4 steps):

header.php

1. At very top of file, add:

<?php ob_start(); ?>

2. After <?php wp_head() ?>, add:

<?php

if ( bp_has_forum_topic_posts() ) {

global $forum_template; $timestamp=time();

if (isset($_COOKIE[“bp_forum_visits”])) {

$unserialized_cookies = unserialize($_COOKIE[“bp_forum_visits”]);

$unserialized_cookies[$forum_template->topic->topic_id] = $timestamp;

foreach ($unserialized_cookies as $topic_id => $timestamp) {

//keep cookie but unset any serialized data older than 60 days

if( time() > $timestamp+60*60*24*30*2 ) { unset($unserialized_cookies[$topic_id]); }

}

//NEED HELP HERE: unset cookies for any deleted topics. How to do this?

} else {

$unserialized_cookies = array($forum_template->topic->topic_id => $timestamp);

}

$serialized_cookies = serialize($unserialized_cookies);

//set the cookie. the whole thing expires in 60 days if there are no forum visits

setcookie(“bp_forum_visits”, $serialized_cookies, $timestamp+60*60*24*30*2, “/”);

} ?>

<?ob_end_flush(); ?>

forums/forums-loop.php

3. After <td class=”td-title”>, add:

<div style=”float:left; margin-right:5px”>

<?php global $forum_template;

if ($user_topic_visits[$forum_template->topic->topic_id]) {

if ($forum_template->topic->topic_time > date(‘Y-m-d H:i:s’, $user_topic_visits[$forum_template->topic->topic_id])) {

echo ‘<img alt=”new posts since last visit” src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v502/Vidster/newposts.jpg”>&#8217;;

} else {

echo ‘<img style=”width:20px;height:20px” alt=”no new posts since last visit” src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v502/Vidster/nonewposts.jpg”>&#8217;;

}

} else {

echo ‘<img style=”width:20px;height:20px” alt=”no new posts since last visit” src=”http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v502/Vidster/newposts.jpg”>&#8217;;

}

?>

4. Download the icons and upload them to your own server; edit the src= to point to your own server copy of the icons

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

heh… well, turns out the groups as set up here on buddypress.org don’t actually have forum or activity stream options… pretty much all you can do right now is join, so that renders all this hand-wringing a moot point.

In terms of the “new posts since last visit” code I need to find a way to expire each serialized cookie at 60 days, and then it’s pretty much ready to go.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Yeah, in this particular community, there’s still a pretty good signal-to-noise ratio in the main forum, so I’d advocate that we keep threads on forum stuff out in the open… that said, I’ll definitely join the group and hope some extra awesomeness comes out of it. Thanks for setting it up, stwc.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

You have to add the tag attributes as well. For YouTube, you’ll have to add these to the bp-forums-filters file:

$forums_allowedtags[‘object’] = array();

$forums_allowedtags[‘object’][‘width’] = array();

$forums_allowedtags[‘object’][‘height’] = array();

$forums_allowedtags[’embed’] = array();

$forums_allowedtags[’embed’][‘src’] = array();

That works for me.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I’m a little worried that a bbpress usergroup will marginalize/’ghettoize’ the discussions? Wouldn’t it be better to keep development front and center?

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

+1 on this thread… I wasn’t aware of those allowed_tags functions. Thank you!

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Hmm… Isn’t it possible to add something like this to the bp core code:

1. Require BP-specific plugins to have a special trigger in the plugin header like “Type: bp-plugin” or simply “BP-plugin: True”

2. At activation and upgrade, double check those plugins to make sure they are BP safe. If not, refuse to register them and give these errors:

• “The plugin you are trying to activate contains functions that can’t be found in the installed versions of WP/WPMU and BuddyPress. They are : etc…”
• “Sorry, this plugin can’t be registered because it does not check if BuddyPress is active.”
• “Sorry, this plugin can’t be registered because it uses an old method of BP detection and needs updating to use bp_init loader method.”

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Haven’t tested yet but I think you would find the ‘ while ‘ statement and edit this function like this:

bp_has_activities(‘per_page=10’);

if you want ten items per page.

Let me know how it works for you.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I’d be curious to hear more about what people miss about the bbPress admin panel. If it’s about activating plugins, I’m afraid that access to bb-admin.php won’t do any good. If the plugin is compatible with BP, then you should be able to put it in the WP plugin dir and activate it. But chances are good that it won’t be, as BP and bbPress are very different at the level of the template. bbPress plugins, at least the ones that have big surface effects, need to be rewritten to some extent to be compatible.

It was about activating plugins. At the time I wrote this post, I had no idea that the bbPress in BuddyPress was so different than the stand-alone bbPress. It’s clear now that the best approach is to adapt existing bbPress plugins to BuddyPress Forums, or write new ones.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Np! Where is my Bug Hunter badge??

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Please search my recent posts for some code I wrote to fix this exact issue. In short, BP Messages fetches server time when it is inserting the timestamp. I think I also filed a trac on this. We should probably cross refence our tracs so the developers can get all the info in one place.

[@3sixty Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

this function will return the link to the last post for a given topic (inside the loop) (where 15 is the default posts per_page setting)

bp_forum_extras_topic_last_post_link( 15 )

I love that function, especially when I remember to echo it…

Actually though, I meant, is there a way to link to the last active post In the Forum Index (i.e. outside of the forum loop)? So, for each table row, list the forum name, then list the “freshest” post in one of the next columns?