[DoctorDR]

If anyone else is desperately awaiting this plugin, I have posted a fork of the current code on github. I’m still working on it, but if you feel inspired to contribute then you’re welcome to join in. It’s BP 1.5 compatible and works fine on my dev site, I also attach an image to show how it looks when wrapped in some nice CSS..

Github fork – https://gist.github.com/1274930

[DoctorDR]

@r-a-y did you ever post the plugin code on github or pastebin? I have recently forked a plugin to enable users to upload a profile image, as per Facebook timeline, but at the moment this only works for the member header – not groups.

I chose not to provide a range of default images – but this is easily done by hacking the header function that comes with the Twenty Eleven theme.

I will get around to sharing my modified plugin when I’ve finished tidying it up. It is also BP 1.5 compatible.

[DoctorDR]

I have spent a little time porting this plugin over to BP 1.5, so that it now enables a profile banner image to be uploaded just like a Facebook timeline.

The inject_css function targets the div#item-header container (in the bp-default theme), however there are a couple of functions that are needed to make the user experience smooth and trouble free;

1. add a crop function after image has been uploaded, but before new header is displayed (I’m taking a look at the standard bp-default header customisation to see if we can adapt this), but would welcome any suggestions.

2. the delete function really needs to be javascript enabled with a bit of ajax, in the same way that ‘Delete My Avatar’ functions within ‘Change Avatar’. It doesn’t make sense for a user to select the (delete) radio button and then upload an empty input field.

3. I’ve noticed that the bp_core_add_message is not being cleared after a successful upload – any suggestions on how this can be fixed?

4. ideally for non coders the plugin would need an admin page to customise the ‘inject_css’ parameters to suit the theme. I have mine set as a single image (background:url() no-repeat scroll left top transparent), but some themes might wish to allow the choice of repeating a background image, or even providing for some CSS3 gradient fill code.

So, apart from adding image cropping and a bit of javascript it’s pretty much ready. If anyone is able to offer suggestions on the above fixes, I’ll wrap it up and fork it back onto github.

[DoctorDR]

Thanks @davidtcarson I was literally typing up my own response when you posted yours. –

[DoctorDR]

I’ve managed to answer my own question. It’s necessary to add define(‘BP_USE_WP_ADMIN_BAR’, true); to wp-config.php.

I heard we were ‘phasing in’ the wp-admin bar but to be honest I didn’t understand why it wasn’t just standard from the get-go.

Is there anything I need to watch out for, or is this because the admin bar in WP3.3 will behave slightly differently and you’re adding a patch before including this new admin bar as the default?

[DoctorDR]

@djpaul “No, this site has plenty of its own problems. It is not reflective of either BuddyPress 1.2.9 or 1.5.”

I haven’t had time to set up a test site myself, does anyone have a publicly accessible BP 1.5 site that they don’t mind us looking at?

BuddyPress Test Drive – http://testbp.org/ – still lists itself as running BP 1.3, so I’m assuming that is no longer reflective of the latest dev version..?

[DoctorDR]

I use a combination of the Sitewide tags plugin and a series of custom functions to grap the first image on a post (or a custom field, attachment or post thumbnail), after aggregating the main post meta data into the tags blog (I.e. The main site blog)

You can see it on our home page – http://skiddnet.com

[DoctorDR]

@jpfaraco the following method worked fine for me.

“

But the methods discussed in other posts did not, namely;

“ and “

Perhaps somebody more knowledgeable than I could explain why, since the first method was recommended several times in the past by @hnla – https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/how-to-show-custom-profile-fields-in-a-template-file/

[DoctorDR]

That’s excellent news @sidjags, I think I might try this out for myself. So you’re essentially building an array of 9 image urls and then cycling through them and returning the latest value each time the function is called.

Simple and Cute!

[DoctorDR]

No problem. I look forward to hearing how you get on.

[DoctorDR]

You can certainly replace the default avatar picture, either with a bp_default instruction in wp-config.php or by adding a new function (into functions.php). If you wanted to achieve a random selection from a pool of avatars then I suppose you would need to write some php of javascript to intercept the avatar display and randomly select from an array.

I’ve not seen anything off-the-shelf for BuddyPress, so you’d probably need to adapt a script and hook it into BuddyPress.

There was a script I used a while back in a Social Engine 4 implementation that basically presented users with choice of standard avatars on signup, which would be a better way of implementing this, since it’s important to encourage users to personalise their profiles which leads to greater engagement.

Here’s an example of what I mean – http://webhive.com.ua/store/product.php?id_product=36 – but I’ve not seen this for a BP environment.

[DoctorDR]

Sam, I’m using `bp_user_link()` in a plugin for displaying the avatar of the user’s page that is being viewed. If you use one of the loggedin conditional tags then clearly that adds a further dependency. In my case I want the user’s avatar and link to be present for both logged-in and anonymous users.

What outcome are you trying to achieve?

[DoctorDR]

What is the purpose of the ‘members/single/plugins.php’ file? It looks like it’s meant to be hooked into by plugin content which is displayed on a members page, but doesn’t seem functional. Is it deprecated?

[DoctorDR]

It’s really the simplest of tasks. You will need to use one of the many favicon generators as suggested by @suchaqd, then add a single line of code in header.php. I’ve added mine directly after the stylesheet declaration, i.e…

` <link rel="stylesheet" href="” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
`

Just make sure you call it ‘favicon.ico’

[DoctorDR]

In ‘Network Admin’, go to ‘Settings’ > ‘Settings’ and then the 3rd selection down (under Registration Settings) make sure you select the radio button ‘Both sites and user accounts can be registered’.

You’ll then find the Registration login widget enabled in the sidebar of your site.

[DoctorDR]

I’ve now got as far as creating a plugin to add a filter for the tumblog taxonomy, but no luck. Here it is in case anyone has anything to add..

`<?php
/*
Plugin Name: SWT Custom Taxonomy
Plugin URI: http://skiddnet.com
Description: Addition of new custom taxonomies to the wpmu sitewide tags plugin.
Version: 1.0
Author: CitizenSlide
Author URI: http://skiddnet.com
License: GPL2
*/

function my_swt_custom_tax_filter( $taxonomies ) {
$taxonomies[] = ‘tumblog’;
return $taxonomies;
}
add_filter( ‘sitewide_tags_custom_taxonomies’, ‘my_swt_custom_tax_filter’ );
?>`

[DoctorDR]

A huge limitation of BP at the moment (and WordPress in general) is the lack of front-end posting and moderation. I’ve had to hack this into my current site by using conditional user level statements to present a restyled admin screen to users – one which looks identical in terms of header, footer and CSS to the front-end – and unsets or removes redundant menu items. The way around this would be to modularise certain admin functions (posting, comment management) so that theme designers have flexibility in the way they are presented and integrated on the page with other functions. This could be achieved with shortcodes or even widgets. I can see no functional reason why users should be sent to an un-themed back end to post new blogs and I’m sure it’s holding BP back as the choice for many sites.

Unfortunately I can’t offer to help apart from documenting my hack as an interim solution.

In terms of the multiple CSS suggested by @bowromir, I’ve spent the last year working with Zend Scaffold as used within Webligo’s SocialEngine 4 and it was a PITA. Scaffold caches an aggregated version of all stylesheets used in the theme into a single CSS, which sounds logical but makes it very time consuming to debug or alter the base stylesheets since tools such as Firebug cannot tell where styles originate from.

[DoctorDR]

Bump. Would really appreciate any responses to this post – it’s immensely frustrating asking for assistance with a real problem (i.e. one who’s solution would probably help others) and then getting zero feedback (even if that feedback was to say – don’t be a douche try this..)

[DoctorDR]

Thanks @nahummadrid, my SWT blog is ‘already’ private and since my SWT blog is also my main site that little trick makes no difference to what appears on the activity stream (which of course is also on the main site).

I can only assume most BP sites are not also running SWT otherwise there would be more debate (and potential solutions) availabe to help.

[DoctorDR]

Well this is frustrating. I implemented Donncha’s SWT plugin, which is working fine, apart from the duplicate blog posts in the activity stream. I have SWT using the main site as the tags site, so clearly the activity stream is showing both the original post (on a user site) and the ghost of that post being tagged in the main site.

I looked at Burt’s patch on trac, (which is 2 years old now) but when I tried the patch in bp-blog.php I found it was already applied in BP1.2.8 (albeit in a slightly different form).

At the moment all I want to do is stop the duplicates being displayed in the activity stream (i.e. hide the tag blog occurance). I’ve tried checking if ‘blog_id’ is equal to ‘tag_blog_id’ and then applying this fix to /activity/entry.php, but perhaps my syntax is wrong.

Has anyone got a working hack they’d like to share?

@apeatling I believe you said it was working on your local install..?

[DoctorDR]

I would probably just use wp-pagenavi, which I’ve been using on wordpress sites for years now – https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-pagenavi/. Otherwise there are a host of possibilities. You’re using a

container for your images, whereas I would normally use an unordered list, but you could do anything from using a continuous page (such as ‘load more’ on the activity stream), or you could load the 24 images in a single page block and then use a content slider combined with lazy loading to scroll from page to page – loading and displaying a further 24 images with each click.

Really, there’s nothing wordpress/buddypress specific once you’ve queried and gathered the content, thereafter you’ll find endless ways in which to present and scroll through it which applies to any type of website.

Would you mind sharing your code for aggregating your images from across the network? I’m about to do the same for blog posts and it would provide a good reference point.

[DoctorDR]

Quickest solution would be to join Buddydev and implement the ‘Global Forum’ plugin – http://buddydev.com/plugins/global-forums/

You can see it in use on Bravesh’s own forum – http://buddydev.com/forums/

I personally prefer forums which link to groups, since this avoids duplication of topics. The other half-way solution would be to use ‘buddypress-group-forum-extras’, https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-forum-extras/ – which would enable you to set up a group for each general forum type (i.e. support questions, introduce yourself, general chat), then pin these to remain permanently at the top of the ‘Forum Index’.

[DoctorDR]

So basically what seems to be happening is the server looks for /public/htdocs/blog, doesn’t find it and then redirects to the home page by default. Since /blogs is a virtual directory created by wordpress multisite, this seems to be where the problem stems from (although the absence of an /images folder is also throwing up errors). Anyone experienced this problem before and would like to take a crack at a suggestion?

[DoctorDR]

Anyone with any constructive thoughts on my dilemma? I feel like I’ve tried everything and yet the problem must be staring me straight in the face.

The last 12 hours history in my error log looks like this:

`[Thu May 05 22:53:01 2011] [alert] [client 184.106.221.215] /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/.htaccess: RewriteRule: bad argument line ‘^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+)’
[Thu May 05 22:54:01 2011] [alert] [client 184.106.221.215] /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/.htaccess: RewriteRule: bad argument line ‘^([_0-9a-zA-Z-]+/)?files/(.+)’
[Fri May 06 09:01:04 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/wp-content/themes/images, referer: http://site.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css
[Fri May 06 09:01:09 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/blog, referer: http://site.com/
[Fri May 06 09:01:57 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/wp-content/themes/images, referer: http://site.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css
[Fri May 06 09:02:03 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/blog, referer: http://site.com/
[Fri May 06 10:15:05 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use ‘LimitInternalRecursion’ to increase the limit if necessary. Use ‘LogLevel debug’ to get a backtrace., referer: http://site.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css
[Fri May 06 10:15:10 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] Request exceeded the limit of 10 internal redirects due to probable configuration error. Use ‘LimitInternalRecursion’ to increase the limit if necessary. Use ‘LogLevel debug’ to get a backtrace., referer: http://site.com/
[Fri May 06 10:16:05 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/wp-content/themes/images, referer: http://site.com/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css
[Fri May 06 10:16:13 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/wp-admin/network/images, referer: http://site.com/wp-admin/network/
[Fri May 06 10:17:03 2011] [error] [client 86.137.115.250] File does not exist: /home/public_html/site.com/public/htdocs/blog, referer: http://site.com/ `

[DoctorDR]

You’re in luck (i.e. great timing) – a new version of @Buddystream will be released tomorrow, which does exactly what you’re asking for – http://buddystream.net/