[Bowe]

@rosyteddy I’d recommended giving RtMedia another try. I would not say it’s dated and I’m very impressed with their feature set and the development of the plugin over the last year or so 🙂

[Bowe]

@alexandra55 you can achieve this by adding a little snippet to your bp-custom.php or functions.php.

add_action( 'template_redirect', 'themename_redirect_author_archive_to_profile' );
function themename_redirect_author_archive_to_profile() {
  if(is_author()){
    $user_id = get_query_var( 'author' );
    wp_redirect( bp_core_get_user_domain( $user_id ) );
  }
}

Hope this helps!

[Bowe]

@synaptic I’m the writer of the Hosting recommendation on BP-Tricks, and you bring up some fair points. I do mention in the article that with the right knowledge you COULD set up something cheaper using a VPS/caching plugins and a CDN. I’ve been down that road, I learned a ton about hosting and caching, but in the end it’s certainly not worth the time and effort it takes, which is exactly my personal conclusion at the end of the article. It is by no means something that I recommend for those looking to build a social network with BuddyPress.

There are so many people around who are not in the least technical, but still have great ideas for niche social networks. These type of people are visiting BP-Tricks and are asking me for hosting recommendations quite often, and that is how the article was written.

Even for someone who is experienced with server management/optimisation, I would still recommend WPEngine above anything else. I’m an affiliate because I use their services myself, my sites are fast and available, and the support has been excellent. I’ve been running BP-Tricks for three years now, and this is first time that I ever used an affiliate link to promote a service 🙂

[Bowe]

Thanks for adding that Chris. Personally I’d never go with shared hosting, but maybe there are exceptions to the rule. If you ever want to share your experiences in more details I’d love to cover it on BP-Tricks!

[Bowe]

I’m reading this right now: http://wpengine.com/2012/04/visitors/.

Especially this point might explain a lot:

If a robot scans 20,000 pages over the course of a month, that’s not just one visit. It shouldn’t be 20,000 visits, but neither should it be 1. Something in the range of 100-1,000 visits is acceptable.

It’s a tricky subject for sure. But to me it has not been an issue yet.

[Bowe]

Thanks Ben! I never really look at my GA in great detail, but I do know that GA does not count visitors who have JS disabled. These visitors are usually bots. It could be that your site is being heavily targeted by bots/spammers which causes a lot of pageviews. On BP-Tricks I use CloudFlare (free) that blocks a lot of these threads and bots, which should save a lot of requests. 8 to 10 times as much hits is pretty crazy though, have you ever contacted support about this?

[Bowe]

If you’re using the WP bundled version of jQuery replace your $ with jQuery.. So:

`

function getMessages(){
jQuery(‘#user-messages span’).load(‘ajax_messages.php’);
}
setInterval( “getMessages()”, 10000);

`

That should do it!

[Bowe]

Use Paul his BP Labs plugin to make it more intuitive for the user.. it shows a nice popup as soon as someone types the @ character: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-labs/

And some preview images: http://bp-tricks.com/featured/add-mentions-auto-complete-to-your-buddypress-site-with-the-bp-labs-plugin/

[Bowe]

I think this sort of an approach to selling themes is a bit too vague for potential customers. I think pretty much all people would like to purchase/use a theme that is working out of the box and has some support and guarantees. They would like to see a working demo and I think a fixed price instead of a pretty vague “tell me how much you’d like to pay for it”.

Your theme mock-up looks ok, but I think you need to do a little bit more to get people interested

[Bowe]

Cool initiative Brajesh.. I’ll write a post about it on BP-Tricks to let others know about this plugin.

[Bowe]

You can read a full tutorial about it here:

http://bp-tricks.com/snippets/displaying-certain-profile-fields-on-your-members-profile-page/

[Bowe]

I love this concept and I think it can work very well for certain communities.. In fact I might be able to use it in a upcoming project I’ll give it a test spin this week!

[Bowe]

They way JJJ describes it would be the way to go imo.. Looking at the BBPress beta this seems to work well, and it would make things a lot easier (and more fun). I have another question about templating though;

1: Using get_template instead of locate template Is there a reason why locate template is used in BP-Default instead of get_template? Looking at TwentyTen and TwentyEleven they all handle it with get_template.. From what I understand from talking to MrMaz it also allows greater flexibility doing it like this. Because get_template can be filtered/hooked into while locate_template is very inflexible.

2: <get_template_part: This seems to be the way forward for new themes. It allows you to load specific template parts in your theme so you can reuse them. (https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_template_part)

I think both of these things could make the theme more flexible and easier to work with.

[Bowe]

I’d like to chip in on making BP-Default 1.3 awesome as well

[Bowe]

@JJJ: Yeah I thought about the performance implications. Although I must say that the opinions about this are vastly different. a few http requests might make it slower, but these days that might not a big deal if theme development would be a lot easier. Actually combining adminbar.css, reset.css and using style.css for the base layout would solve this problem

Shortcodes: Nice! I’ll look into that.. well I’ll ask @imath. Can’t program

Supporter: Yeah it needs work and a lot of effort and planning.. sounds like a challenge

[Bowe]

I’m interested in working on the bp-default theme. Some ideas:

– Splitting up the bp-default.css file into smaller CSS files on a per component basis. Then in turn load these stylesheets conditionally using the BP conditionals..

Ideally you would end up with:

Base.css (all the layout, typography and regular WP styling for posts and pages)
Activity.css (only activity stream css)
Member-Group.css
Forums.css (BBPress stuff)

In turn this means that theme development would be a little bit easier, since modifying the base theme would open up much more flexibility. In turn this means that the ajax functionality need to be refactored to apply the same concept as well. Splitting up the CSS and JS into “modules” and making them global and not tied to the core template layout would mean a huge step forward.

Besides that I’d like to work with @imath on extending the BuddyPress Shortcodes plugin. When this is handled properly it would allow you to display all kinds of BP content anywhere in a regular theme. It would not be a fully featured BuddyPress site, but it can be a powerful solution.

Finally I’d like to discuss the possibility of setting up a BuddyPress Supporter project powered by the community. The basic idea is so make one giant tip jar for (recurring) donations and using this money to fund cool BuddyPress related projects (chose and voted upon by the community). I understand that this might be hard to do on BP.org, but I’m willing to set up a special domain for that.

Looking forward to see more ideas pouring in

[Bowe]

Disabling the Ajax functionality for the main stream would be a bad idea.. it would kill the activity stream.. not sure if it’s even possible. What type of problems do you have with Ajax? Could be plugin related (JS conflict). Also what theme are you using?

[Bowe]

You can map profile fields from Facebook to BuddyPress with WP-FB-Autoconnect with custom code. It is indeed on the roadmap!

[Bowe]

Mmmm weird.. BuddyPress and WordPress SEO just work fine both enabled. The trick I posted is to offer full compatibility for WP SEO URL rewriting. If you get completely blank BuddyPress pages something is really messed up. I did not know Hybrid worked with BuddyPress but I think the error is to be found there. Try enabling BuddyPress and WP SEO and switch to the default buddypress theme. If it still gives you empty pages then reinstall both WP SEO and BP.

[Bowe]

It should work fine Are you using MultiSite? Also remember that previous entries will not be removed from the stream. only new ones

[Bowe]

One other thing I recommend to add is also adding a max-height rule:

`
max-height: 150px;
`

[Bowe]

Just copy over activity/entry.php to your Child Theme and replace all the code in that file with his:

http://pastebin.com/c3GejrfS

That removes the reply box from comments so you’ll get a one-level reply section

[Bowe]

Just add the following css to your custom stylesheet:

`
div.activity-inner img {
max-width: 500px;
height: auto;
width: auto;
}
`
This sets the height and the width of the image properly. If the image width exceeds 500px (the size of your stream container) then it will (css) crop the image. Hope this helps!

[Bowe]

Good question.. I have only use in for a client project once (8 months ago).. It worked fine, and have not heard about these problems.. But they might still have it enabled so the problem is not popping up. I need this plugin soon, so then I’ll find out

[Bowe]

Cool stuff! Would be very helpful!