[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Yeah I definitely think this should start as a BP component. A route I was looking at was taking the URL of that item, because every item has a unique URL; comments, blog posts, forum posts etc.

What I was thinking was having a link next to each one which saves that URL (using AJAX) into a table as a new row: user_1_favourites.

Each item would have three pieces of data,

* the item name

* the item URL

* what type it is (forum topic, blog post etc)

Then the user could visit example.com/user/favourites and see/manage their favourites.

But… I’m a PHP newbie and haven’t even written a WP plugin before… help? lol

Cheers,

Alex

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Regarding widgetising the profile page, I think checkboxes to choose what you do/don’t want would suffice – I’m not really talking about fully fledged WP widgets managed from the backend.

And getting friends’ activity onto a widget obviously shouldn’t be too hard by the sounds of it!

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

The sort of functionality I was looking for was the following:

An admin of a group can go to the group settings page and select ‘Create Group Blog’, which would take them to a blog creation page.

They could set the name of the blog, they could set the privacy level (to appear in Google searches or not), and they could choose from the members of that group who would be set as contributor, editor or admin of the new blog, probably through radio buttons next to each group member.

Then, they could click ‘Create’, and the blog would be registered with the group members added and their relevant roles set.

An item in the groups sidebar, under ‘Forum, Wire’ etc, could be ‘Blog’, and would go to the designated blog for that group. We could even output their posts *within* the BuddyPress theme, either pulling from the RSS feed or directly from the DB, and have a ‘Visit the blog here’ link above the most recent posts.

Is this at all possible? I think it’s a much more user-friendly way for groups to set up team blogs.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Completely forgot about this thread, but very glad I found it again! This is actually a feature I really wanted but didn’t think was possible.

The plugin looks great, will certainly test; thanks Burt!

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

That’s great news! I’ve always been so thankful for WPMU DEV when building MU based sites, its brilliant your getting excited about BP and helping us out!

Something that’s currently being discussed is a Facebook Connect plugin, I’m sure you will have read the thread already. I pinpointed some key features I’d like to see from such a plugin (http://is.gd/kC9C), and I’m getting some feedback on those ideas at the moment. The community seems willing to chip-in on paying for this, and I’m eager to see it remain open source thereafter.

A real beast of a component would be ‘Live Chat’, much like the IM features seen on Facebook/Bebo at the moment. At least making a start on that and keeping it open source for people to add to would be great?! I can imagine you charging for that, but I’m sure people using BuddyPress at the moment would chip-in to see it built; but I’m guessing you’d want continuous revenue from such a component!

Also, until it becomes core, a dedicated ‘Invite Friends’ component would be great, where you could insert your email address (Gmail, Hotmail etc) and invite all of your friends that way.

So yeah, my 2 cents!

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks for your recommendations, I’ll certainly take a look at Slicehost!

I’m currently on Dreamhost, and I like their unlimited diskspace and bandwidth offerings – I’m looking at installing nginx and eAccellerator on there.

Any other hosts/hosting configurations people would like to recommend?

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

I really appreciate nicolagreco’s willingness to give up time for the plugin, but are there other plugin devs here who could take a look at the Facebook Connect API and see if they would be able to make a start?

I’m eager for it to be open source, and like the others here would be willing to chip-in for it.

Re: Facebook API; all of the features I mentioned are able to be completed using the API, I had it open as I was writing them

If only I knew PHP better, I’m still learning and picking things up, otherwise I’d give this a shot…

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Do we have a set of requirements for this plugin? Also, if we all chip-in, can it be made open source afterwards?

For me, a good feature set would be:

* On the signup page have a ‘Create an account using your Facebook details’ button so that information is already added when the users account is created.

* For existing users, a button they can press to connect their accounts up.

* New events on the BuddyPress site to be published on their Facebook account. So, what you would normally have on their profiles ‘Activity’ area, posted onto Facebook. Eg, “John created a new group on The BuddyPress Demo Site”.

* This activity ‘syncing’ can be configured from the users settings page on BuddyPress, so they can turn off activity updates.

* In the same settings page, the user can choose to either use their Facebook avatar, or their BuddyPress one

* Have a page like buddpress-site.com/members/MEMBER/friends/invite, and having the ability to ‘Invite your Facebook friends to BuddyPress Demo Site’, would be great.

Are there any other features people would like added? I won’t be the one building it obviously, but if we can have a set of features then we all know what we’re chipping in for! lol

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Well, one solution would be to have a blog created for the group with all group members set as editors.

The BuddyPress Codex (http://codex.buddypress.org) is run off WP and instead of a normal wiki users log in and are able to edit the pages – revisions are saved thanks to post/page revisions.

It would just need a plugin to add some options to the group admin area; Group Blog settings for example.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

There’s a quick five-line plugin to do that in this thread:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1095

Just change:

$redirect_to = bp_core_get_userurl($user->ID);

to whatever URL you want the user to be redirected to.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Nice workaround actually, but that’s a lot of database space for just a small job!

This *seems* to be a relatively small component to make, I’m surprised it hasn’t been included in the 1.0 set of components…

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

The Status component will probably be started along with the Albums feature after the 1.0 Stable release.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

A great addition for me would be to create ‘Group Events’, events which are associated with specific groups.

Say my group wanted to organise a meetup, we could go to our group page and under “Forum, Wire, Members” etc there would be a “Group Events” option, which when clicked would show all our events and have an option to add a new one. When creating that event we could choose to send invites to the members of the group instead of adding them individually.

If the group is private or hidden our events would also be private/hidden. Group Events would also appear on my personal Events page.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

We definitely won’t see albums in the 1.0 release – no sign of it and we’re at “Release Candidate 1” stage now. Hopefully when 1.0 is out the door we can see some work on the Albums and Status components.

[@hempsworth Participant 17 years, 3 months ago]

Have you changed the image in both themes? The home theme and the member theme?