[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I use and am familiar with all those tools, and always test own site development work especially where scripting is concerned but also spend a fair bit of time correcting or helping with others site layouts and sometimes the plethora of scripts running is simply overwhelming

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Now I’m taking this thread too far of topic.

Yes sorry that’s my fault, yet I agree with your sentiments above re BP foundation and do think the nature, nomenclature and plugin/module approach is worthy of deliberation by the project team.

The plugin that caused me confusion was buddypress-classifieds which does have site-wide set to true yet doesn’t activate sitewide from ‘activate’ link only from the site wide link, suggesting it’s possible to circumvent the site-wide only: true.

I’d like to find out as it makes a lot more sense that ALL BP plugins simply activate site-wide and correspondingly automagically deactivate when BP not activated present. less to go wrong then.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

On Live test site:

I’m logged in as hnla navigate to:

/members/ethelred/invite-anyone/

Successfully send email from this screen

The sent invites listing is actually my! sent invites listing NOT ethelreds however url is as above ethelred/invite-anyone/sent-invites/send/

Don’t like the fact that one can send from another users account settings/screens?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Hmm does look as though I can log in as a general member navigate to another members profile and see my user name in message and seemingly send an email from their profile with the event recorded in their profile, but I’ll check that further on the live test site.

On local dev site although it recorded the sent email details on the sent invites screen when I log out and back in as the actual user of that account there was no record of any sent invites – as there shouldn’t be for that user.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Wondering if setting a quota? monthly? to the number that may be sent – not sure if there is any point to that but also mainly concerned with spammerish type issues arising and of trying to second guess non technical minded users managing to something very silly – not unkown

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Excellent; downloaded stable and overwrote local dev and test live, all appears fine , those issues I had locally with file paths were I think due to me probably updating only selected files? either way cleared up with the new set.

Good backend admin settings, I like being able to set a period of membership before emails can be sent .

Thanks a whole bunch for the work.

I’ll upload to production site tommorow!

Edit/ One minor thing spotted, not sure of the importance really. Logged in as admin I go to another members account/profile click the link ‘send invites’ and as well as being able to see the email screen (not an issue?!) the email message states my admin username – perhaps it would have to, in fact it would have to, unless the screen was removed only being visible if logged in user == user profile

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

That sounds like a good approach, worth suggesting to the powers that be?

Have to admit I haven’t noticed any great issue with Gravatar but have had pages stalling at times due to waiting on… and there’s the rub it becomes increasingly difficult – to a degree – to debug just how a page is loading and where bottlenecks occur.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Slightly tangental – apologies. This discussion brings to my mind the fact that in many ways I find the description of Buddypress, Buddypress-links, BP-Events, BP-Album and others of the same ilk as far more than plugins; plugins tend to make me think of things that are fun but not essential in any way to the operation of the core application whereas Buddypress whilst not necessary to WP is not simply a plugin it changes the working nature of WP and is far more suited to being known as a module or something to set it apart.

In an ideal world I would like BP installed much as is but described differently but along with BP are installed a series of modules that can be activated or not by admin but that these are only activated from within BP so to speak always sitewide as BP is these modules representing some essential core set of features e.g Links, Events, Album etc. In some ways that would also remove any confusion as to how they were activated, but I also realise that single WP probably has to be considered somewhere in all that.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

I sort of had it in mind that BP specific plugins should be site wided or at least not sure I’ve come across an instance that I would like any general site member gaining access to them? But I remain a little confused on the issue.

If I have bp-links available but not activated it appears in general members dashboard on MU, however despite attempting to activate it doesn’t, if I then activate as admin on main blog and as site wide then general users never see that plugin mentioned – regardless of whether they can activate/deactivate. Taking bp-links as an example I can’t think of a reason that I would want users having or needing any access to this level of plugin and would prefer that it activated automagically as site wide much in the same fashion that BP itself does?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

The issue is that whatever theme you are working with has a style.css that applies rulesets using descendant selectors and on the elements you mention your style.css describes generic styles for things like ul li elements but as child elements of parent such as #content.

The stylesheet that appears to be created to apply the necessary styles required by buddypress i.e bp.css is styling on the class tokens.

As an example the div.item-list-tabs ul element requires and has a margin:0 applied in bp.css however in styles.css you have #content-body ul applying large margins and this ruleset has a higher specificity or weight due to the use of the ID selector which will override the clas selector described in bp.css.

I’m afraid that you have a little work to do to in getting whatever theme it is to work for BP, perhaps the fastest approach is open up bp.css and where you have :

div.item-list-tabs ul {}

Add to the beginning of the selector statement #content-body

#content-body div.item-list-tabs ul {}

This would enusure that the BP rules carry a higher weight and will win out or overrule.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Not sure if the OP actually expressed a dislike for Gravatar especially , but the overall issue is an interesting one. Over the last few years with the rise of offsite script calls and general offsite info being called into pages there are noticeable times when page loading stalls. It’s not a BuddyPress issue per se.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Thanks Jeff, that’s an incredibly useful bit of info. I had wondered about when site wide should be used as was never too sure, but had noticed that certain plugins activated NON site wide would place themselves in the top section of activated plugins as site wide only, now I understand how this happens.

So for clarity if one adds ‘Site Wide Only: true’ to pluginin files main description then it forces site wide activation regardless of whether one chooses to activate normally non site wide. tested this with buddypress-links and is as described.

Edit/ found a plugin that already had ‘Site Wide Only: true’ set yet does not activate site wide using the plain activate link placing it self in the site wide section unlike bp-links. Is there something else that must be set to enable the site wide activation link or the ability to force the plugin to activate site wide?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

thought that was what I had pointed out , but hey ho

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Does the system not have to go off and check with gravatar whether an image exists against an email and then grab it for the user. I don’t now that gravater is especially an issue but I’m not sure that all scripts wait until the dom is fully constructed do they?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Do you simply mean the call to retrieve the object? It’s becoming an increasing issue with many sites , where you see pages stall while attempting to render due to waiting on third party servers, it’s not simply gravatar that you see this with. We had a discussion on the subject on another forum that was suffering and the conclusion was that attempting to ensure that these scripts and calls loaded as late as possible was best so that at least the page content could load.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Norrismp it likely wouldn’t if you’re editing the rulesets in default.css. Your theme does not appear to be using any styles from the BP default theme all I can see is two primary files ‘styles.css’ that does not conform to the normal stylesheet controlling WP themes and another ‘bp.css’, both thse sheets contain the majority of your styles and it will be there that you need to place the rulesets for your table styling.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

You actually have no rules set for this table. Tables shrinkwrap to contents width; as Paul says define your table width. tables tend to need defining IE can be a pain with tables if you are not stating properties; also sadly your chosen theme is forcing IE8 into IE7 mode so you have to be aware of how your layout is rendering in a browser that still has issues such as hasLayout constructs.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Good spot!

Checked quickly that emails couldn’t be sent from a users profile by an anonymous user and that appears ok nothing received although it looked as though the process completed, checked the DB and no records entered so guessing that essential functions are wrapped in a is_loogged_in.

Think it’s probably important to ensure only admin and logged in user can see or send from that users profile, wouldn’t really want a general logged in user to be able to use invite-anyone from another members profile.

Edit/ tested: user can only send an actual invite from their own account/profile. attempted to send from another users profile and nothing sent no record added so that’s fine.

It would be nice if the only users that could see the invite-anyone screens in a profile was admin and the actual owner of that profile.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

It’s no problem of any kind you can do what ever you wish within reason, how you layout the data is your concern really, I’ve approached it from both adding another simple locate_template() to mirror the existing primary sidebar call creating a new file to hold whatever required and by creating a new custom Page along with a new file with a three column layout with two flanking columns containing new widget aware sidebars and the fluid centre column containing the activity loop, that page is simply set as the static index page and posts page set to a new blank Page.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

As a general rule of thumb 80 characters in width is the most that should be displayed in a given line , the human brain has difficulty scanning lines that run on longer than that.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

The activity stream certainly doesn’t need to have all that width in fact it works perfectly well at a considerably reduced size and in fact centered in a fluid column with flanking sidebars is a perfectly able layout.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

*puzzled* have you just found that out then DJPaul?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Hmm moving require position makes no difference, hard coded path neither nor using include()?

I’s must be a be a path or scope issue though as I copied the function from db.php and pasted directly above the call to the function in by-email.php and that works but when the invites sent page renders I have a new call to undefined for the next function that needs to be called.

I don’t think this is worth you spending anytime over as it’s not happening on my live test server or your servers, I will keep a mental note of the issue, it’s correctable with a little more time spent tracking down the issue but is it worth it?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Sorry should have been clearer it was simply writing a link to the box rather than markup i.e http://example.com which will render as a clickable link.

Markup is escaped, but stripping out would be better as this is received otherwise

<a href="http://google.com">google god of the ether</a> insert escape slashes before double quotes

I’ll have a play around with the require statement positioning

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 7 months ago]

Ah yes the reason was that I was logged in, logged out and tried the email link and all correct..

Hmm html is not apparently escaped or at least if it is that doesn’t prevent links being pasted in the form

http://example.com

It’s a minor point though but just think that it’s probably safer to ensure that just text string can be entered although that’s all a link is strictly speaking.

One error stumbled on – very possibly irrelevant as it hasn’t manifested on live test site – is that playing around on local dev site when I tried to send an invite I received an undefined function error which I thought odd and don’t think I noticed yesterday.

by-email.php is calling function invite_anyone_record_invitation() – function lives in db.php and db.php is being required() into by-email.php and correctly as far as I can determine, yet php keeps returning function undefined on invite_anyone_record_invitation() as though it were trying to run the function before it were included or it’s gone out of scope somehow. Checking the table shows no entries but then it wouldn’t if the function isn’t run. this is just fyi in case it suggests anything possibly problematical.

Yes all in all it does feel very stable with most of the issues not really to do with correct functionality (Most have been user error )but operational refinement.