[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Probably easiest if you gave these threads a quick read as they will probably answer all your concerns:

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/use-forums-without-groups/

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/forum-integration-without-groups/

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Well forums run under groups, so I guess the answer is yes.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Might not make you a lot of friends though

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

This plugin might also be worth a look?

http://epicalex.com/new-user-email-set-up/

I originally used this to get round a problem of needing to manually add some new users to the system but didn’t want emails/activations being sent out immediately. It provides two very customizable sections one sent to admin one to new user, I simply swapped it round so that admin received the sign up email to a specially set up email account and the user got sent a “changes are afoot you will receive your login details shortly” type message, worked quite effectively.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Looks as though that plugin was failing possibly because it’s running before bp has loaded? at least it’s failing on any bp function that exists in header.php

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

But isn’t that worthy of discussing in a dedicated thread? I hear what you’re saying, is this not too some degree UI though? the API questions raised were indeed sounding like steps in the right direction especially where they touch on easing life for the presentation layer frontend developer but redefining The API doesn’t necessarily clear up ( or does it?)some of the concerns some have in regards how conceptually the whole ‘thing’ works and how the end user (frankly the only person that actually matters) finds it to use.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Boone there is this plugin which is really for dev setups where passing emails through the dev network is awkward so allows you to register a user normally then go into backend and manually approve using the activation id

WPMU Manual Member Approve:
http://mattkern.com/wpmu-manually-approve-new-members-on-local-install/

Would you believe though I just tried to run it on my local site and it’s broken! at least it’s throwing an undefined function error bp_page_title()

Haven’t time to look into that but it doesn’t look to much of an issue.

Of course this doesn’t get round the issue of letting those users know they have been activated and not really sure one wants to simply activate a bunch of accounts when the users are never going to know about it.

Of course once activated and once you have established you are sending emails correctly you might be able to work some means of adding everyone to a group and posting an update to that group that will send a notification out to email addresses?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

But while waiting for Boone to code a plugin (there is one for activating signups that I’ve used on test beds, which I’ll look up when I get home) You must try and establish what has occurred kriskl, if you fear your server might have been blacklisted then it might be worth checking your domain against the blacklists? then you’ll know if you have any remedial work to do to get removed from the lists,. Find a user that you can send test signups to or an account you can check and see where the email is landing up – is it being marked as spam.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Both questions you need to investigate, if either of those are true you need to establish why otherwise you will struggle to ever grow your community, I would test ferociously the sending and receiving of emails and how your server might be configured, you may need an SPF record available so certain email servers don’t flag as spam i.e the likes of your hotmail accounts etc

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Ah ok hadn’t realised that was the issue with post formatting.

I would be happy to start the thread and will do when I have moment to write an introduction/prologue to qualify the purpose of the thread but equally would be more than happy and not upset if one of the older hands with BP decided to run with it and start things off.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’m having to echo all of the sentiments that were very well expressed by stwc a few posts up.

I’m especially worried by the activity stream now as I find it confusing and am not sure of it’s true worth?

Earlier in the thread (yes I refer to this as a thread in the classical sense) there was mention of lack of UI focus, it brought to mind the thread started by I think Mr Mazz? requesting feedback on API design, this thread was and is extremely arcane and esoteric and even makes the point of requesting that all but real programmers steer clear, and for acceptable reasons; however it prompts my feeling that emphatically BP and the project as a whole is simply far far too mid tier heavy, so far it feels that it’s all about the logic and less about the top tier or presentation layer (Frontend in web app terms) I think in order to determine best how BP does indeed work at a user level it is going to be essential to open real dialogue with people who have UI architecture experience who’s focus is on that presentation layer. I would vote for a companion thread to run alongside the API one dealing specifically with UI and user experience, better I would love to see the project balance out it’s developers and bring on board people to work on this aspect. It must be seen as an extremely critical aspect, you can develop the API ad infinitum but it means little if communities simply don’t jell due to users finding things too confusing.

Back to the site design or functionality are we going to have basic formatting for posts, or rather what is the formatting available, why can we not blockquote how do we add code formating? How have these aspects just managed to vanish?!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Guess the two are much the same thing really at least the ‘myGroupslug’ == bp_current_item is as for the difference between bp_is_group() and bp_is_groups_component() is in this scenario I’m not too sure, I think that probably bp_is_group() would work equally well in my situation.

I was more interested in seeing just how you were dealing with the widget as such, I tend to dislike widgets and although used where I need to affect something would tend to write it as a function. taking the important working parts and setting them as a function which I could then gain a finer degree of control over in terms of how or when it appears.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

It’s the actual group name.

Not really sure how you’re doing things, but if you were creating a function and using Do Action hooks to return the function to where needed could you not simply use the conditional to wrap the code / widget code in so the function returns but it’s code is only parsed if meeting the conditionals requirements – not sure that would work and there will be doubtless a much better method that one of the more experienced hands could suggest, also that conditional would I think only work on an actual group page so may not suit what you are trying to do.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

This works for a single group view:

if(bp_is_groups_component() && ‘MyGroupName’ == bp_current_item()):

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Wow 😮 thanks 3sixty for moving it up, maybe I was being too respectful should have changed it myself

And thanks JJJ for the quick patch to #2343 Can you also look at #2293 if you’re not already.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Well cared for? yes guess it was but I’m still concerned that it generated no other interest or was that simply that the milestone was set to far in the future?

No hidden groups shouldn’t be used period until such time as this issue is correctly dealt with, hacks worry me used to cure this sort of problem. however given that Boone looked into this I’m pretty happy the fix is a fairly safe short term fix.

As you spotted I questioned whether or not the milestone should have been moved up? to 1.2.4 but it was a question unanswered, I placed it in 1.3 as I wasn’t sure where it ought to have been placed but asked the question upon creation and notification in original forum thread.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2293

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

This is similar to an issue I found and have an open ‘Critical’ ticket on.

If you go to your account and then activity > friends you are able to view updates/comments made by a friend who is a member of a hidden group but which you are not, what is worse is that not only can you read content made to a group that you should not be able to read but you can also use the ‘reply’ to add a comment that will then appear in the hidden group.

I’m afraid that for me hidden groups are no such thing and represent a real issue if people use them believing them to be hidden and private in nature.

To date I have had little response on this, the ticket is still open and but for the very kind help of Boone, who helped or rather provided a interim hack to hide the activity altogether, there feels as though there is not a huge deal of concern over an issue of this nature when Andy dropped into the forum thread I raised on the issue it was simply to tick me off for incorrectly referring to hidden groups as ‘private hidden’ – Sorry Andy just thought it may have merited a little more concern than nomenclature issues

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Trying to take this thread back to Boone’s original topic (and I think purpose)

Yep, apologies it was mildly divergent, but felt somewhat pertinent to OP

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@Brajesh I didn’t say it was required, but running vhosts in a local test environment is eminently sensible not just for WP.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Although not necessarily the answer to the problem I suspect that you are not using Apache vhost containers if not they do make life much simpler as using vhosts ensures the site can function as a fully qualified domain albeit one with something similar to .com.dev and a suitable dns entry to point to that in your hosts file. with that set up and a suitable directory structure you can mirror a live production server set up.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@boone – not sure I tend to agree there, yes point taken it would suit my personal likes and wants, but suit the site/community? not too sure it does, based on the notion of duplicate threads and essential forum nettiquette that says duplicate threads are a bad thing giving rise to confusion. You will end up having multiple places to keep an eye on , I will ask a question already asked elsewhere, someone will make a salient point in one place and it might be overlooked? Just thinking out loud

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Master feed doesn’t really replace the recent posts list, it’s an rss feed and formatted depending on your browser, in Opera that isn’t usable for me as a replacement.

I am very conscious of how changes of the magnitude do take time to settle down with from experiences with another forum that went through a similar conceptual change from original Vbulletin trad forum to a far more community orientated site using Drupal. One thing the regulars and mod agreed on was that to a man/woman we all entered the site via the Tracker page labeled ‘Recent Posts’ that simply kept a single list of all posts made across the sites subforums/groups for those of us that checked all posts this was and remains an absolutely fundamental and vital page to enable fast tracking of new or updated posts along with the ability to filter to our own responded or started topics/posts – something that I feel is going to be missed here?

@boone I guess now that your original thread on the Send Invites plugin should be considered closed? otherwise you end up having two separate areas to track and the attendant confusion that brings, but it feels slightly odd that I now have to find that plugin group, join and remember to keep track of it.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

No more backticks then?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

0.6 looking good.

One minor point:
To keep things working nicely for the default layout it would be an idea to add to
`#invite-anyone-group-list li`
`min-height:60px;`

otherwise the float left will be blocked with uneven heights on the list elements, should there be unusually long group titles where the text has to wrap to the li width the resulting height increase will prevent lower li elements from moving left. min-height should even out height for a two line title.