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

is it any good?

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

I’m glad you brought that up, because while BP is awesomely powerful and brilliantly extensible, sometimes I feel the activity stream is “polluted” by the fact that activity updates don’t have a true home. They live in the stream itself, unlike any other content type.

I think this is the most confusing thing about BP, and the part I have a lot of trouble explaining to users. They “get” the Wall concept, and would understand Wire, but the way BP is set up by default now, posting a status update makes me feel like I am intruding, as if I were on Facebook and posting directly into the News Feed. (You actually can post directly on Facebook’s news feed… but if you do, your post is quietly moved out the next time you refresh and “Top News” shows up).

BP would be so neat and easy to “get” if the activity stream was just that – a meta-stream of activity, so indeed, deleting someone’s status update from the activity stream would simply remove it from view. It would still live on the Profile page or where-ever. The fact that “activity stream delete” behaves inconsistently depending on content type — sometimes it deletes, sometimes it removes — is at least an argument that the BP metaphors might do well to evolve a bit (beyond their already highly evolved state )

So yeah… for “activity updates”, I’m going to have to do a conditional based on activity type (if activity_update then display “delete”, otherwise “remove”). Maybe a fancier solution would be to store an activity meta value (is_removed) and if that’s set to 1 (true), skip it when the activity loop is polled?

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

re: forum index

etiviti (rich!), I spiffed up the forum index by adding Group/Forum avatars beside the forum title/description (see code below)

Question: can you think of an easy way to include a link to the last active post, say, in a final column? I looked at the code last night didn’t get that far.

—

Add Avatar to BP Forum Extras – Forum Index

Under:

<td class=”num td-title”>

Add:

<div class=”item-avatar”>

<?php $width=50;$height=50;$type=’thumb’; echo bp_core_fetch_avatar( array( ‘item_id’ => $listing->id, ‘object’ => ‘group’, ‘type’ => $type, ‘avatar_dir’ => ‘group-avatars’, ‘width’ => $width, ‘height’ => $height ) ) ?>

</div>

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

Can somebody please try this? Especially if you are running Chrome on a Mac?

Even if it works for you, that feedback would be helpful (though I suspect it is a browser issue, not a local user issue)

Thanks!

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

From your plugin page:

Future Consideration:

* Report Post to Mod (use notification system to group mods)

* Support Forums (run nongroup forums)

* Best Answer or bb-reputation (Karma)

* bbPress Favorites functionality (renamed due to conflict of activity stream?)

Report Post w/notifications to group mods: That is excellent, and exactly what I had in mind here. Would there be some “admin” screen for reported posts, or would the notification just link you to the reported post?

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

paging @wpsec

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

My “zombie notification” lasted for about 3-4 days and then finally disappeared… I think it was finally pushed out by a new notification.

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

My recollection is that “Last Active” Blogs are defined as those that have the most recent POSTS… not most recent COMMENTS.

It would be a cool option (someday) to select on the back end how you want the Blog Directory to display (“display by last active (X) post / ( ) comment”). For now it would probably be easy for someone who knows BP to write a custom filter that lists blogs according to most recently commented upon.

That said, you can get an Activity Stream listing of latest blog comments. If you are using the bp-default theme, it’s in the pulldown menu under “Show Blog Comments”, if that helps?

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

It’s on the radar for the next release:

https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2224

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

This is great – I was just about to add a “freshness” link to the last column on my install (just like they have on this forum). Thanks!

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

Are you using the bp-default theme?

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

Note: please try the SENT messages template page. It works perfectly fine in INBOX.

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

Actually, I ran out of time. I’m just going to use the $thread_template->message->date_sent variable and convert it to “posted … ago” using the “nicetime” function found on the PHP manual pages… works for now!

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

OK, starting to solve the issue. I think the root of the problem is that my BP installation is on shared hosting (I know, I know…) and the server time zone is different than my WP installation time. HowEVER, BP Messages is pulling the SERVER time when it INSERTs the message record (bp-messages-classes.php:

// First insert the message into the messages table

if ( !$wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "INSERT INTO {$bp->messages->table_name_messages} ( thread_id, sender_id, subject, message, date_sent ) VALUES ( %d, %d, %s, %s, FROM_UNIXTIME(%d) )", $this->thread_id, $this->sender_id, $this->subject, $this->message, $this->date_sent ) ) )

I added a variable and changed the query like this:

$wp_current_time = current_time('mysql');

// First insert the message into the messages table

if ( !$wpdb->query( $wpdb->prepare( "INSERT INTO {$bp->messages->table_name_messages} ( thread_id, sender_id, subject, message, date_sent ) VALUES ( %d, %d, %s, %s, %s )", $this->thread_id, $this->sender_id, $this->subject, $this->message, $wp_current_time ) ) )

Now the message inserts correctly using my WP installation time instead of the server time, and REPLIES show up as having the correct time (such as “posted 4 minutes ago”). However…

While REPLIES report time correctly, for some reason, the INITIAL MESSAGE does not. I think that <?php bp_the_thread_message_time_since() ?> is somehow not reporting correctly. Let me check to see what’s wrong with that.

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

hmm, it turns out my server is on CDST. However, changing the time zone on the WPMU backend had no effect on the Messaging “Time Ago” inconsistency. I’ll file a bug report now.

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

WP is set to UTC, and so is my server.

I can duplicate this on a fresh BP install, but I can’t duplicate this on testbp.org

In debugging, I sent a test Message that had a Sent Time of 2010-03-24 08:22:03 when the server time is UTC time 2010-03-24 13:22:52. So there is the 5 hour difference.

Must be some issue with my server. Anyone else having this? Either way, will file this on trac as a bug.

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

One of the users of my site also reported this error:

Warning: Variable passed to each() is not an array or object in /home/jewsbych/public_html/wp-content/plugins/forum-attachments-for-buddypress/forum-attachments-for-buddypress-bp-functions.php on line 461

Works like a charm otherwise.

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

There are many people who would gladly donate time and money to help Erwin with this. Not sure if you saw this, but Andy is about to make this much easier:

Andy Peatling (6 days ago): I’m working on a new version of this site that will automatically create a group for every new BuddyPress plugin that appears in the repo. This means plugins will get all the functionality of BP groups – a forum, activity stream, a list of members who are interested in the plugin, etc etc. I’m also going to add a donate page, which should help out a bit.

This has been held up a little right now because I’m trying to get the new upgrade/install wizard done first. This will allow BP to use WordPress pages instead of hacking with root components. It’s all bits of the jigsaw that need to be put in place before I can continue. Hopefully by the end of the month I should have at least the first iteration of the site close to completion.

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/supporting-devs-wishlist#post-43329

Ultimately, this is Erwin’s baby, so he’s free to develop this at his own pace and according to his own specifications.

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

There is a long way to go, but now that bbPress is tightly integrated in BP, forum support is emerging. Etiviti (rich!)’s new “Forum Extras” plugin that is a big leap toward bringing classic bbPress plugins into the BP environment, and it’s getting better every day. Forum attachments is another great plugin that brings a classic forum feature into the BP environment.

There are some core limitations of bbPress that will keep it from being as “powerful” as PHPBB, such as the ability to merge threads, but whether those features are critical or even desirable is open to debate. (Moderators love that feature but I am not sure users do.)

I hope it’s not true that forums are “minimized on purpose” around these parts, because what you have built is a perfect fit with forums. Forums are the heritage of web-based “social networking”, and there are a lot of important social interactions that still lend themselves quite well to the forum structure (such as this thread you are reading right now, for example).

Like that hybrid commercial on TV right now: Forums were social before Facebook even existed or YouTube uploaded its first video.

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

OK, getting somewhere now:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function bp_wire_setup_globals() in /home/mysite/public_html/wpmu/wp-content/mu-plugins/oci_bp_group_forums.php on line 618

so the bbpress and Buddypress plugins are making contact but they are using (at least one) obsolete function. What is the replacement for bp_wire_setup_globals()?

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

I use the bpGroups plugins (“forums” subdomain of the BP site) but the plug-in required some updating to get everything working smooth (activity notifications, public/private/hidden/ready only stuff)

@nuprn1, what did you modify? I noticed that posts in bbpress don’t show up on the activity notifications, and the public/private/hidden stuff doesn’t seem to work either…

Also, the plugin is looking for an Authorized Buddypress Username, or “the user that BuddyPress uses to access bbPress.” Is there actually still a user, or was that part of the older BP/bbpress integration method?

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

hmm, getting there… I changed the first check to

if ( $bp->current_component == $bp->forums->slug || $bp->current_component == '' ) {

That actually sets up the front page to a forum page, so not exactly what we need. Will continue to look at that function and see what can be tweaked.

Thanks for the lead!

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

Thank you! This is very powerful.

I customized it to exclude blog comments and forum comments:

if ( $activity->type == ‘new_blog_comment’ || $activity->type == ‘new_forum_post’) {

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

For sure, “search anything…” is a misnomer and needs to be changed until BP really can search anything. As far as I can tell, some of the ‘sliver searches’ are so limited that they only check superficial elements ( for example, forum search only searches forum post *titles* and not the actual content? What am I doing wrong?

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

I wanted to cast my vote for this bug. Regardless of how we got here, it seems pretty clear that there are ‘friendship request accepted’ notifications that are not going away. Should this be filed as an open issue at trac.buddypress.org?