[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

There is another thread on this subject, the ability to invite friends to join the network is essential, it helps grow the community, it needs to be very simple BUT used from the members account area NOT dashboard, and definitely not this notion of pulling contacts from every social network the member has or will ever be a member of, it’s too fiddly.

SN such as Ning have this ability and it’s raised to me as lacking in BP by users/members that we migrated from a Ning network they are perplexed as to why the feature doesn’t exist.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

I would hope BP doesn’t simply ape Facebook as it’s model?

Look at Ning as an example of how another SN does things; they have a single dedicated site forum if you want that and I think to some extent it’s easier for users to grasp that concept?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

It isn’t usually a problem in fact it’s rather straightforward normally. Not sure but it sounds as though you didn’t have correct writable permission for directories at install?

.htaccess needs permissions set to 644 or 604; you might check what it has at present?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

OP probably time to run through your server logs?

I had issues on one server yesterday morning same sort of thing as you, however it had nothing to do with BP or my server but everything to do with packet loss/ and route to my server across the net . What do pings and tracert show?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Always do now disable all BP plugins but Andy didn’t you quite recently re-iterate to plugin authors that plugins have a check to perform to establish if BP running else… If they are not doing this they ought to start!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

haven’t had a second to catch ones breath after 1.2 – 1.2.1 now 1.2.2 !

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

To re-iterate but in the forum as good form dictates:

It looks as though you are missing the rules that style these elements and which are contained in default.css they start from the line:

/* > Data Tables

There is a good chance, as they appear to specify in percentage widths and are not descendant selector dependent, that they should drop in to whatever stylesheets you have, but you may need to play around a bit with them.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Generally speaking a graphic image of a layout issue is not of great help, it shows an issue but with no sight of code it’s difficult to know what may have been changed.

You need to provide people with a little more info for meaningful help such as a link to the site so they can see source markup, styles being applied. An idea of the theme in use, is it the default? Have you made any changes etc.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Google ‘robots.txt file’ for starters

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

A lot of frontend developers are now essentially dropping support for IE6 it’s a rapidly dying browser, many of us have suffered for years getting layouts to work in it and worse in IE5. Acceptable results now tend to be the layout functioning in IE6 but not necessarily having all the bells and whistles that Modern Standards browsers will deliver, personally I will no longer devote too much development time to it, whereas in the past it could have easily soaked up to 50% of the project time

Users must be encouraged to upgrade to at least IE7 although that was an utter waste of space and simply a sop to developers and the wider public while they worked on IE8 which actually is half decent and can claim to be almost a ‘Modern’ browser.

MS themselves would rather people upgrade and MS are only supporting IE6 because they are tied in by the license agreements – but probably wish they weren’t.

The accepted practice to deal with IE issues is to use Conditional Comment structures and IE specific stylesheets as has been mentioned earlier, this approach should provide usable layouts in IE<8

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

I don’t especially want this thread to just be a moan but something I have just noticed has really annoyed me.

Glancing through source a minute ago and I found a plugin had managed to insert it’s style tag and rulesets within the body tag after analytics code just before body closes this kind of thing is utterly unforgivable and now means that I have to waste valuable time working out where this BP plugin has gone wrong and try and correct matters, sadly it was requested and as much as I would like to simply disable it in disgust I won’t be able to.

Tell me this isn’t madness? (Names obscured to prevent embarrassment )

function offensive_function_add_css() { ?>

<style type="text/css">



.****  .left-menu, .group-create .left-menu {

width: 550px;

add_action( 'wp_footer', 'offensive_function_add_css' );

Why?

I now have to work out how to move this to it’s own style sheet and have it called in as other plugins seem to manage!

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

This is an issue though isn’t it? copying a file over to a child theme is an excepted practise with WP and how one legitimately extends themes. If we are to run scared of doing this because the core bp-default files may be upgraded/changed then it suggests that one cannot really extend or create themes safely, short of having to copy over new files and adding all your customisations to it again.

I’m wondering whether I can safely set about creating a full blown theme, in as much as I’m not sure at this stage how dependent BP is on it’s default theme files.

(Sorry bit of a thread hijack.)

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Sounds great been testing a few facebook plugins, hate to rain on the parade but is there any resolution to the tweatstream issue with authorization and to the last question I asked

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

I’d hate to become dependent on someone’s plugin if it’s just going to be abandoned 6 months down the road

This is one of the drawbacks of the extendable model though isn’t it? money or no money we will all be reliant at some point on a plugin for vital (as we see it ) site functionality with no guarantee it will continue to function after core site file upgrades, if an author chooses to abandon something there’s not a lot you can do about it short of pick up the continued development of it.

The only real way of avoiding this is to be able to maintain plugins and files ones self and/or to place a onerous burden on core project developers to do their best to ensure things like plugins will always work, that core upgrades have some means of addressing backwards compatibility but it’s a lot to expect if possible at all.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

The new bp-default is already a MAJOR change in a good way since the old BuddyPress theme btw. The old theme was littered with empty clearing div’s.

Agreed out of the box the new default theme is a vast improvement and there are pages that validate fully – that’s not to say all the markup is as good as it could be with the odd div used to present data when a div carries no semantic value and shouldn’t really ever wrap plain text, many of the divs used that way perhaps ought to be paragraph tags or LI elements, and there are still the odd clearing div used (just happened across one on blog listing page)

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks for reporting that broken LI tag. I am going to make sure that is fixed for the next release. I am surprised that its not causing anyone problems, weird.

Ah there’s a prime example of the tag soup rendering engine at work, shame to say. It’s unlikely that it would cause problems as it would be apparent to browsers what needed silently correcting as opposed to invalidly nested markup preventing CSS from being able to compute where to apply it’s properties correctly for example.

I Just though it worth mentioning for the record that all appears to function correctly with PHP 5.1.6

I do find it a shame that the new version ‘almost’ works in backwards compatibility mode, it’s so almost there

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Ditto – ‘Invite a friend’ (outside of community) very evident in other SN; Ning as an example, helps grow a community.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

I just don’t have the patience to go through that codex page telling me how I should do html

Well there you go then!

Enabling areas to be widget aware/ready is really quite simple; as to what markup you want that is entirely up to you to make a balls up of the page explains quite well how to go about doing your own thing, there are no particular restraints placed on what you can or can’t do.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Exactly Peter, it’s looping where the issue usually arises, appending something unique usually works or just change to classes.

and while we’re on the subject most Standards focused frontend coders have a fit at elements misused for clearing please please do not splatter the DOM with empty divs just ask how to contain floats the correct way

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Couple of things that may be of vague interest.

1/ Just tested on a unmodified 2.9.1 / 1.2.1 install live server and the plugin seems to work flawlessly on PHP 5.1.6 in your readme.txt you state requirement of 5.2 perhaps to be safe?

EDIT/ ignore following just read the readme more carefully “not compatible with 1.2.x classic theme” hmm more and more the upgrade to 1.2.1 while maintaining backwards compatibility is simply not a viable proposition. projects like BP / WP rely heavily on third party plugins and the whole extensible nature if upgrades leave major plugins such as Events and Links non functional then there rapidly is little point in backwards compatibility, one finds not much choice but to upgrade fully. I have to know scrunb the theme work I’ve done and start over working on the 1.2.1 stream long before I had wished to given time constraints *sigh*

2/ appears there’s a possible jquery init issue. trying to get plugin to run on dev server running install using backwards compatible plugin / BP 1.2.1

As previous posters report Ajax will not fire whatsoever looking at script debugger shows this occuring in your global.js

‘bp_init_objects is not defined

bp_init_objects( [ ‘links’ ] );

http://********.co.uk.dev/wp-content/plugins/buddypress-links/themes/bp-links-default/_inc/global.js?ver=2.9.2

Line 9′

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Have issues such as this been caught and fixed for next release?

‘function bp_links_dtheme_creation_tabs() {

global $bp;

$href = sprintf( ‘%s/%s/create/’, $bp->root_domain, $bp->links->slug );

?>

<li class=”current”<a href=”‘

Missing short tag after class token

And explicit ‘for’ attributes need to to have a matching ID on the input.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Good point shared hosting won’t allow WPMU to run probably due to the requirement to be able to create sub domains at will.

Not sure even with single WP I would want to run a busy buddyPress site on shared hosting?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

Media Temple are not bad , have one of their Dedicated virtual servers, possibly a bit pricier than the others, but excellent fast support, very good KB, good active forum, server performs well has plenty of bandwidth, memory and disk space, plesk panel plus licences not that I like control panels that much. Full SSH root access, do what you like with the server etc.

As for memory required to run something like WPMU and Buddypress it really all depends on how busy the site is we have on this particular server 1.5GB which is plenty. WP/BP should run fairly well in less, min I would want though is 512MB. More important I would have thought is having a full set of resources to dedicate to the site so wouldn’t consider running on any form of shared hosting only VPS or Dedicated especially when things start to get busy.

All of the hosts mentioned are good and all I think are recommended on wordpress.org so should be fairly safe whichever you choose.

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

This is an odd one you would have thought it would be a glaringly obvious why the failure to add the key to the url.

Peter can we just confirm something or not for the record. What version of PHP does TweatStream need i.e will it only function with 5.2 although Anointed has already confirmed using 5.2 but still having the issue.

Is it json that TweatStream relies on ? I installed json to my 5.1.6 but perhaps with 5.1.6 it will never function?

[@hnla Participant 16 years, 3 months ago]

It’s something I’m asked constantly about. we need a simple ‘Invite friends’ email function for members to use.