[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

From my brief experience of Ning that option wasn’t ever set and as annoying as it was to see the default avatar get displayed over and over, I think this was due to it being perceived as a barrier to people joining and possibly off putting?

As a user I find I can’t proceed with the sign up as I have to first find some suitable graphic to upload, trouble is I don’t have anything nor do I know about the gravatar option, I’m an inexperienced internet user and haven’t got my head around avatars

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

The Submit input to the left is generally acknowledge as the correct positioning for this type of control from a HCI and accessibility point of view so best not floated to the right. It wouldn’t hurt to wrap your hidden inputs in a paragraph tag as well just in case someone was determined to try and run and validate against a ‘Strict’ Schema.

I agree that the widget lacks something but like yourself and techguy can’t quite see what it is or whether it’s simply a matter of some fluffiness design wise. The addition of ’email address’ ? I have six inputs just for the hell of it and it tends to look a bit odd and repetitive, too many ’email address’, but then again maybe not, it’s now starting to bug me

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I intentionally didn’t do this, because I figured that people who opt out don’t necessarily want to rub it in the faces of the people who sent the invitations. In the future I will think about a way to make this work without risking hurt feelings

Yes on consideration I agree, I guess a possible option could be to silently remove the opt outer from the sent invites list but that has possible issues as well, on reflection it’s an issue best left alone.

Something that I was considering having a play with myself over morning coffee was to run a check on whether the send invites page was showing and if so to either disable the widget inputs or simply remove the widget. It’s another of those non issues though.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

The position of the button named “Continue” is slighly hiding the widget-title of the one widget which I have placed underneath

Good catch. It happened because I am bad at CSS and I was using a float where I shouldn’t have been. It’s been fixed.

Nothing wrong with floating the submit, the issue was more likely that the form or ul parent wasn’t clearing it’s float children, as long as there is float containment a div.widget will position correctly (at least by whatever rules are set in defsult.css) below the last.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

What I described will get the front page pretty close to your original blog layout, there will be certain compromises , possibly ,that have to be accepted, but it may also be a case that the conversion has missed a few steps? or is incomplete but I have no knowledge of the template pack plugin I’m afraid.

There are aspects of the new layout I don’t get such as the 140px x 1000px background that exists in the new version that didn’t in the original and doesn’t look as though it’s really required, it looks as though it’s to facilitate faux columns for a layout that follows default themes body rules for min/max and main width values.

You will be able to play around with aspects such as tab positioning and login form but I would take things a step at a time and concentrate on the primary layout elements first then come back to detail.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

What I’m looking at needs some work before tackling the detail mentioned above.

at the moment you have a conflict between master elements wanting to be fluid and others fixed, it’s probably easiest to simply let the layout run as fully fluid initially. I would remove or override the default.css body min/max widths and width (you can come back to body later and set appropriate min-width)

You are calling your header graphic twice, decide on one image call and ensure it’s set to no-repeat (unless you want to repeat the name?)

Remove the bottom margin on #header, increase it’s height to 150px set a background color to the blue and a background-position: 0 50%, these are best set as background shorthand declarations.

Personally I would do the #header differently and would always tend to favor a image replacement technique; ‘header would simply have the background color the image would be sliced close cropped to the text and set on a span withing the anchor element that span is then positioned absolute so that it hides the anchor text .

This starts to get the layout looking correct as long as you are after a fluid full width layout; body can always have a min-width to prevent the layout collapsing too far.

As for the main text within .entry I’m afraid the way it’s set out doesn’t easily allow for just that text to be dragged over to the left margin. A quick fix for that would be to remove the left margin from .post-content but add left margin to .post-title and .post-date, better might be to move the .author box into the ..entry div but you’ll need to play around and find what you like best.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

You mean like this?

http://www.longislandmartialarts.org/wsblog/

Yeah ok it was early and I’m not a smarty-pants and that url in address bar of the SC was barley legible.

I was going to have a look at the last few points for you but checking that link so neatly provided by 3sixty proved not actually to be the BP install? QED? or have you disabled BP?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Ok installed dev and ran pretty much every scenario I could think of on live test site.

It appears rock solid, no issues found.

– Sort by column

Seems fine, ‘Sent’ column toggles descending /ascending not so sure whether the ‘Accepted’ column shouldn’t be sort by accepted/not yet accepted ?

– Clear screen

works as expected – with minor reservations noted below

– Admin group invite control

Great addition as it adds back control so effectively allowing admin to retain original functionality of group invites, disable completely or extend to complete membership base, tested and appears to work just as expected; tested on subscriber – no invite allowed , promoted user to Mod – allowed from friends list then set mod to allow access to All, Admin allowed access to All etc all works as one would expect and hope.

Minor issues, not bugs.

Having cleared a sent invite from a users list I then dragged up the old invite email and actually accepted the invite, of course as I have removed the invite from my list I am not aware they have accepted – perhaps not a huge issue or an issue at all? What would ideally be nice would be that if invitee did accept we re populated the sent invite list but with Accepted column showing true? Probably tricky to do though , something along the lines of matching is_joined to Is_hidden ideally being able to establish if is_joined was dated later than Is_hidden remove is_hidden and allow to reappear in list. Looking at able I realise this is likely not really possible though especially as you would need to still allow user to clear the entry so a lot of dates would need to be stored joined to the various fields.

In a similar vein as above should someone who opts out update the sent invites list with one further column ‘Declined’ it’s really one of those non issues but as things stand I have no means of knowing the person invited has opted out and they remain on my sent list waiting .

As always excellent work, hope others might test as well, as there may be things I have missed but am continuing to test and will report back anything found.

btw you will need li element margins as the default styling makes use of that horror the ‘reset ‘ knocking out all margins and many other things, your input fields on the widget are stuck together like glue

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

SC just serve to show what’s wrong but aren’t much help in working out what styles need adjusting/correcting.

If that site is live post a link to it, that way people can use debugging tools to examine and test what needs changing.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

If the plugin was available for anyone to download, but with an option for support for $79 then that’s a different story

Which is why I made the comment I did earlier, this is a viable and far more honorable model to follow, a lot of those escaping Ning will not be developers and will look for support and I’m sure delight in finding a premium support model to give them a feeling of reassurance.

I can’t support the model WPMU runs on I spent some company cash to look into what was provided in the paid subscription and I wasn’t that impressed and as a frontend developer the themes left a lot to be desired and if I had used any it would only have been after heavy correction of the many errors found throughout them, and to find that out of the box I had to do a fair bit of work didn’t really leave me that impressed.

On reflection I actually find it in slightly poor taste that you posted to this forum a link to a premium plugin behind a paywall and if it were down to me perhaps would have considered pulling the link.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Aw shame thought for a minute it might have been made available to all to further the Ning to Buddypress cause

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Language files? Same link as Modemlooper posted.

somehow missed your “other than language files” erm this is the best way!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Not sure I understand your question but I use a variety of methods in sidebar.php to control what manifests.

It can call the sidebar widgit area under much the same circumstances you describe above it also allows for a number of new custom widget areas that I show on specific directory pages done like this:

<?php if ( BP_GROUPS_SLUG == bp_current_component() && bp_is_directory() ) : ?>

<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar group page' ) ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Which I think is what you’re referring to? of course you can place anything within that group check doesn’t have to be dynamic_sidebar.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

One approach that could work for you would be to place this in your sidebar.php perhaps after do_action(‘bp_after_sidebar_login_form) and use it to wrap a newly created widgit area as described I think earlier.

<?php if(bp_is_groups_component() && 'my-group-name' == bp_current_item()): ?>

<?php dynamic_sidebar( 'sidebar group page' ) ?>

<?php endif; ?>

Or simply hard code stuff between the conditional. Of course there are undoubtedly other approaches one could take

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

There is a todo.txt in the folder where BG lists features to be implemented and in that ‘Sent Invites’ has a few entries one of which is to look into method of clearing individual accepted/all invites.

@gregfielding – at present there don’t appear to be any rules for the widget markup probably because it’s a dev version, likely styles will be added later in stable release but if you are using the widget ( which appears perfectly stable) live then until stable version released you probably ought to add these two rulesets to either the invite-anyone stylesheet or your custom stylesheet if using one – if thast is you haven’t already sorted this out:

.widget.invite-anyone li {

margin:5px 0;

}

.widget.invite-anyone form li input {

width:96%;

}

This is especially important as without these rules the default layout as rendered in IE6 is borked.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Not really sure this is a good idea.

Slightly surprised that WP make this available and under a CC, seems a bit odd, but regardless scanning it reveals a pretty standard set of points, but they certainly would need adapting to ones own SPECIFIC needs especially sections that deal with VIP services and the last paragraph specifying legal jurisdiction etc which is not pertinent outside the States and possibly California?.

One needs to take a certain amount of care with legal documents even ones of this nature, to start modifying them could lead to trouble unless one had it checked over; to modify one and then to post it up for others to use unless it had been checked over could be considered irresponsible and give rise to others copying a badly worded document.

I am being deliberately over alarmist though

I’m being deliberetly overalarmist though

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

If only you had done that 3 months ago, you have no idea the agony I went through

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Ah that sounds like what I need must have missed that looking through codex; thanks.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Yep I see, I widgitise areas just for the hell of it, just tend not to like using them personally but have to allow others some in to moving stuff around, and thinking about it some greater prominence might help create awareness initially .

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Just to clarify what Boone said by default that message textarea in dashboard carries the replaced tags but due to gremlins at work they have been added as %INVITERNAME% instead of %%INVITERNAME%%

Can’t see why this has gone slightly pear shaped as wildcard_replace looks correct as does invite_anyone_invitation_message() in by-email.php

Widget?? I could of course install and answer my own question but Widget? why? hows one meant to use it? The only place I can think a widget could be used is the me/my bit of the hardcoded sidebar.php but that isn’t a widgitised area.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

If we’re talking cluttered, something that has been pointed out to me is that comments made to updates from the activity stream (and also other types of data) are displayed in full, if a comment is rather verbose it can tend to mean that that one piece of activity can tend to knock all else of the screen, I was looking at filters to find whether there is a means of truncating display, but find the documentation on what filters are available a little sparse? I looked through the WP codex to see what is involved in writing a custom filter if that is the way I would have to proceed?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I mentioned that about halfway back up the page you simply need to double up the %

It should be %%INVITERNAME%%

The sent invites screen groups name shows up fine on my installs, you have definitely activated option in backend to allow group invite to be sent?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

BTW: I am voting for Boone to become the next BP Core Developer…..

Ok I’ll second that

There is a clear core group of people who do know what they are doing and contribute significantly, and it would be great to see them all acknowledged as part of the main dev team.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Erich my concern is that – given your assertion on the other thread “Now your site Is up and running” that it is very difficult to get a new site off the ground without being able to send email when you create groups – you are perceiving an issue where one doesn’t necessarily exist, certainly it might be nice to have the email address fields available on the group send invites screen but it’s not a necessity as there is a reasonably simple path to the profile send emails from the group creation stage, a little explanatory text would smooth things along a little for users. I won’t ramble on as I covered some of these points on the other thread, and I’m in danger of repeating myself and of being boring

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

You’ll probably get asked to add a ticket to Trac

I was simply pointing out that this appears to be verified as such by another thread. it wasn’t a criticism nor am I a mod on this forum.

I assume this is not an issue pre 1.2.3?

Why have you re posted this ? now three threads. A dev or mod will see this soon I guess but how about adding a critical ticket to Trac like most of are asked to do? or perhaps you have?