[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

I believe you can already do this, at least to some extent I know. I was looking into it last year and there are plugins to set defaut user roles to from admin to author, and then limit what they see, I would have to dig all into it again but I know it is possible.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

And all these loops are all written in the function file somewhere like modemlooper said? And they some how generate the different pages? Is it the functions.php file that is in the buddypress theme folder?

I also just noticed another quark. If you reply to something you posted on your own wall/activity/whatever it will show up again on your wall just above it. It makes sense for your comments on other people’s stuff to show up on your wall, but when it is on your own stuff it seems redundant.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

Well with WordPress though you have one file, for one page, one the_content, one category or post type query. The way Buddypress works though, to me it is as if it is magically generating pages out of thin air haha.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

I can’t even locate the file that tells each page what activity it is calling. Would it really make it more clunky? WordPress itself is really straight forward and doesn’t seem clunky.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

I guess all I am saying is I would like to see things more customizable and easy to follow. I’m sure it makes sense to programmers like you guys, but to designers like me, I just spent all afternoon messing with all the members/single/ php files trying to figure out how each /activity, /activity/just-me/, /activity/friends/, etc page works and pulls in that particular feed and I just realized all five of these pages some how come from the /activity/activity-loop.php file, and that file doesn’t seem very clear cut either.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 4 months ago]

Would either of those methods result in faster loading times? Or both probably equal? To me, something like this should obviously be built and only exist if a theme includes it, not something built directly into Buddypress and requiring a hack (or whatever you would consider that) just to not have it.

I also think it would be great to have a tutorial/codex on how to Buddypress’ify a theme or inividual pages without having to use the template pack. Being able to build pages from scratch would be a giant step forward for Buddypress I would think. There is just so much going on behind the programming scene it is spilling over into the front end scene.

I’ve tried to follow this a bit https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/the-activity-stream-loop/ to produce something like I described in my previous post, but I don’t see the connection between bp_has_activities() and the “accepted arguments.”

bp_has_activities(friends)

…seemed like the only logical way it could work, but no luck. And like I already mentioned, all the files for each activity page are all slurred together and editing them individually, is that even possible? I can’t even find the file for the @mentions page.

@modemlooper I’m not sure how you took what I said that way, I am suggesting for more options and forcing less built in stuff that not everybody wants, but still can be created, like the navigation bar.

I don’t see why any one would not enjoy a notification page, but that is something you could simply not link to if you don’t want it and wouldn’t require any special programming knowledge.

If more people than me have been suggesting a more Facebook like flow, I would guess it is because both do the same thing, but Facebook isn’t as confusing, Buddypress is too anal about things trying to divide everything up and categorize too much. Does anybody really need 5 tabs under the activity tab?

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 5 months ago]

Buddypress isn’t setup to do that for some reason.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

@Driftless1 “Are we trying to artificially create a difference where there is none? Or is the difference there – Buddypress is just not making it clear enough?”

I think they are all the same, they are all just conversations, with different ways of going about having it. Buddypress seems confusing or lost in between because it is rightfully tyring to integrate these barely different means of having conversations into one more complete and convenient system.

The site I am working on has had a main news/blog section for about 3 years now. So I am looking at 3 main types of conversations

1. Comments on news articles and the comments on their comments which can become a lot like a forum topic.

2. An actual forum topic started by the user them self about something they feel is important enough for the world to hear.

3. Short and pointless twitter/facebook type comments that they don’t necessarily care to share with the world, whether it is because it is private or they know it just isn’t important enough, just something for friends who might be interested in know “omg! i finally finished all my cleaning my gutters!”

I think it just comes down to the user. It is about a user and their conversations, where ever they are taking place, then being fed back to one convenient location for all their buddies to find. I think it would be really neat to create some kind of universal user profile similar to gravatar so what ever website you are on, you can comment there and it will feed back to your personal profile with a link to that website and that comment so your friends can see what you are talking about out there and maybe jump in the conversation also. This would obviously open a pandora’s box of options on how or where you want your conversations to appear, but I’m certain that is the direction for “web 2.0.” The same way we boycot proprietary code, browsers, file types, or software, I think we will boycot myspaces and facebooks for universal profiles.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Modemlooper so I take it then you don’t know of any way to go about doing that?

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Modemlooper I guess that is what i was trying to ask, how would one go about adding things like @mentions to the default profile stream. I got that post to user’s wall thing going which is nice, but then it is directed to the @mentions tab still.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Modemlooper I’m not talking about that page, I’m talking about individual users’ activity. When someone @’s you on here, it shows up in your activity stream. I’ve never “favorited” anything so I don’t know if that shows up in your activity stream also or if you still have to go to its individual tab, but that is what I would want to setup, all activity in one stream.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@Modemlooper I mean how it is broken up into Personal – Friends – Groups – Favorites – @mentions

I’d like to find a way to merge all of them accept for the friends activity into one personal stream like bp.org and facebook.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@cpkid2 try this, I’ve been trying to figure out the same thing for a while now.

http://pastebin.com/7QFJ5fUV

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop well I’m just playing around with this at work when I should be working, but it seems like this is working for all the user pages.

http://pastebin.com/7QFJ5fUV

I don’t know why I didn’t think to look at that sidebar thing a long time ago

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop that seems to be working only if you are on your own member page. Other wise it just shows members//activity

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop the <?php things right? I really am a newb when it comes to php

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop Are you saying it might be possible to write something like

a href= members/bp_displayed_user_username()/profile/change-avatar

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I’ve just noticed two problems with this technique, it seems anytime you use a bp-custom.php to accomplish more than one thing at a time, it breaks the entire site, which is always a real bummer.

Secondly, when you go to

/members/membername/topics/my-groups/

it still displays my-groups and I haven’t found a way to change that, and if there is a way it will probably require another bp-custom.php plugin

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop I’ve had the login stuff working for a while now, clumsily got the notifications working, but all the links under the “My Account” tab are a mystery to me

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop Well I hope you got everything figured out and working

What I was suggesting is just something I am working on, not to create two admin bars, but to remove the old one and create a setup that allows you to design it into your theme however you want.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

No, just paste it in your header or footer. It uses all the same classes and id’s as the original admin bar so where ever you paste this code, the style sheet will put it in the same place on all your pages.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop

http://pastebin.com/aEEZYXY8

It is just a list item with the class “bp-signup no-arrow”. It doesn’t work pasting it directly into the bp-core-adminbar.php file, if you paste that into your header it creates a navigation bar just the same but only with the links you put in it. I’m still working on figuring out the php to generate the “My Account” and “Notification” links.

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@justbishop I don’t know if this will work if you are using the bp-core-adminbar.php file, but…

li class=”bp-signup no-arrow” > img src=”” </li

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@hnla I mean the buddypress links. All the individual items under “My Account” and the “Notifications.” I’ve clumsily figured out how to generate a link to a logged in users account page, just by copying and pasting random bits of php from the admin bar file into my design. If there was a simple way to pull the individual links to each page that would be perfect, if there was something like…

get_myactivity_personal();
get_myactivity_friends();
get_mynotifications();

And then I could move on from there designing whatever I wanted without worrying about the admin bar knowing that I could write

a href=” php get_myactivity_personal(); “> < img src </ a

(I don’t know how to post code on here so that is why that is written incompletely)

[@alanchrishughes Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@pcwriter “It does everything you want a dropdown menu to do, and it does it all automatically behind the scenes.”

That’s what my problem is though, it does too much and all behind the scenes. From a design stand point, when I’m trying to figure out programs like wordpress or buddypress I try to break everything down to its most basic state so I can completely control things, so I can make a website function around an attractive user friendly design instead of limiting my design to the functionality I am stuck with because I can’t figure out what is going on hidden behind the scenes. It would be great if there was a buddypress codex with individual lines to generate single links to each page.