Forum Replies Created
-
There are lots of wordpress plugins that will do this. A simple to use that redirects by role is:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/peters-login-redirect/If you want to have a look at the Suffusion theme and go to the theme’s site there is a BP extension for the theme. One of the options in the theme is to have tabs in one widget area. You might like to look at the code if you are using another theme, or just use his theme. It looks nice, but some BP plugins need a little reworking to display correctly. There are some good help in the forums though. Maybe this will help.
Actually I disagree. I would suggest looking at Kaltura for video, and I think there is another media plugin that handles video and images although I haven’t experimented with either, I think that BP-albums is being updated to handle other types of media. If you can wait there is a very interesting plugin being developed as a Google Summer of Code project that will turn a WordPress / Buddypress install into an LMS, it has some interesting features and looks to be very extendable. I expect it will be like Buddypress itself and spawn a series of additional plugins that enhance its features. Have a look at it at:
http://sushkov.wordpress.com/Existing LMS systems do have a lot of pluses, but many are either difficult to customize and quite rigid (Moodle comes to mind) or very difficult to install and configure (Sakai project for example). That said, it may be easier to get a quick system up and running and your intended audience should reflect your choice of system as well. I find that most systems are aimed at older students (high school or university and beyond) and so do not fit what I hope to do with a learning system.
Hope this helps a little. All the best.
@LPH2005 Sorry, I completely forgot to say thanks the other day. I’ll have a look at what you did. Hopefully I can get rid of moodle and use WordPress / Buddypress for everything. Moodle is such a pain to customize and even then it still looks like moodle.
All I really want that WordPress/Buddypress doesn’t do now is a gradebook that will take grades from SCORM or other learning modules. Will BuddyPress Courseware do that? When do you expect a testing version will be available? As an aside I’m also waiting for the latest Scriblio so that the whole setup will include a library and extensive reading program as well; how will their be an API that will allow other plugins to include their data in the gradebook (I think I remember reading that you were going to include one). Looking forward to Courseware.
Would you be willing to share what you have done. Are you using one database for user information? Is this a single sign-on type of solution where all of the cookies are created on login? I’m not much of a programmer, but very stubborn so I’ll stick at something until I figure it out if it is within my skill set so I would appreciate any pointers you could give. Thanks.
i think a really great plugin would be one to integrate BigBlueButton with WordPress, and specifically with Buddypress. Then, as mentioned above, individual users or Buddypress groups could be easily invited to sessions. The api for integration is here:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/APIand the main site is here:
I finally sat down and read through the whole discussion. Some great points. I don’t know how possible it would be to do this, but what about multiple streams? @Sadr made a great point that the activity stream should have elements that users could subscribe to or not subscribe to. Right now there is one stream that either has too much information or doesn’t have the right kind of information. With multiple streams, each of which could be put on a different page or within a different area on a main page, the information flow could be tailored by each site designer and user to serve their needs and the needs of their communities.
Another point that was brought up was navigation, now I know that this is partially the theme setup, but in a default install even if a user is redirected to their groups, it is still another click away to a the groups wiki, blog, forum or documents or whatever your groups are based around. It needs to be easier to place the sub areas of a Buddypress site where you want them. Maybe the new menus in WP 3.0 address this (I haven’t had a chance to play with them much) but navigation needs to have small blocks that can be quickly and easily rearranged in order to design navigation paths that fit your community. And navigation is all about menus; activity streams are a form of navigation if they send you quickly to the information you are interested in. Couldn’t the profile, for example, be more widget ready so that either admins or users could pick and choose the pieces they want (think iGoogle).
@Peterverkooijen made a good point about members profile / privacy. It is possible to do it now to a certain extent, but this needs to be easier and more comprehensive.
As many people said the users are who are important and poor UI will drive people away, but Buddypress is used in such a wide variety of situations, that it needs to be easy to customize for each communities needs. To use an analogy I don’t want Buddypress to be like Moodle, for example; if you’ve seen one Moodle site you’ve seen 98% of all Moodle sites. The strength of WordPress is the ease with which one can customize not just the functionality but the looks and UI of the site, let’s not lose that.
works again, but the input boxes aren’t cleared after posting the update.
wpmu 2.9.2 and buddypress 1.2.1
@D Cartwright, I get the same “You do not currently have access to view any of the wiki pages of this group.” error even though I am the only member and the site admin. I can add pages, but can’t see them. I’m using wpmu 2.9.2 and Buddypress 1.2.2. Are there any know plugin conflicts?
Great plugin. I’ve been waiting for this since wpmu 1.0. Would it be possible to be able to choose the template of the setup you like. That is have more than one blog id for cloning, post setups, page setups, etc. Then for, in my case, older students I could automatically give them more features. Or for paying sites, there could be different plans (ie setups).
Thanks again for the plugin, the superlatives don’t begin to describe how grateful I am for the time I can now save.
It’s not any one plugin that does the job. Here’s how I do it.
Create a new blog (let’s call it Test) and set the privacy (more privacy options needed here and bp-mpo-activity-filter to keep it’s content out of the stream) to “only blog admins can see this blog” (this is necessary, but keeps things clean since nothing should get added to this blog).
Use new-blog-defaults to set the blog defaults including menus that the users cannot use.
Members is used to set capabilities of the admin (I don’t change the role of the new blog just the admin’s capabilities) so the admin is “like” an editor or author, but I can still let them change their themes (theme changing is very important to young users).
Wpmu-plugin-manager lets you set which plugins to allow users to use and which ones are automatically turned on (I always turn on Ozh’s Admin Menus for example). Turn on any plugins you want to use and tweek their settings and any other blog settings.
Then Adminimize to further hide menus the users don’t need (it only hides menus, but most users will never find them anyway). Adminimize is great for simplifying the write panels for posts and pages too. Any plugins I don’t want users to change settings on I can make sure they don’t have access to by making sure the menus are hidden.
Now use new-blog-options under the site admin menu and give it the blog id of Test and check off any of the database fields you want new blogs to have (make sure the Members and Adminimize ones are checked). Maybe this isn’t exactly what you want, but it is probably the best overall way to simplify blogs for younger users.
Also since I use these with classes, I just import my whole list from a spreadsheet using DD Import Users as subscribers on the main blog. I use limit-blogs-per-user and set the site-admin/options to 2. Now users can create their own blog, but can only create one blog of their own. This saves me a lot of time, but still gives the users a fair amount of freedom with their blogs.
It isn’t a perfect solution. I would like to see some of the overlapping capabilities put into one plugin for cloning blogs. I would especially like to see the ability to have different templates (ie base blogs to clone from) so that I could have one setup for say grade 1 students and another setup for grade 5 students.
Hope this is useful to someone.
Actually thanks for the post. This is a something I have been doing (trying to do) since wpmu 1.0. I use WPMU / Buddypress with young (elementary school students 6-12 years old) so simplicity is a must. The New Blog Options plugin (if it works as it says it will) would make make perfect customization possible. Here are a list of WPMU plugins that I use or have used that might help. I am in the process of retrying everything to achieve exactly what you are trying to do. Let everyone on the forums know how your testing goes. Hope this isn’t too long. I added links to save time since there are sometimes plugins with similar names).
New Blog Options – this one is fairly new (still beta), and I haven’t tried it extensively yet, but it will allow you to clone on blog setup with it’s plugin options etc. to all new blogs.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/default-blog-options/
Limit Blogs per User – if you don’t want them making more than one blog (set to 2, one is the main buddypress blog and 2 is their own blog)
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/limit-blogs-per-user/
WPMU New Blog Defaults – this will allow you to restrict menus, change default links, etc under the Options in the Site Admin menu
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-new-blog-defaults/
Members – this one takes over where the old Role-manager plugin left off. Haven’t had time to check it out yet, but if you could use this with New Blog Options it would allow you to very finally tune what your users could do and see.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/members/
Adminimize – again I haven’t played with this for a while, but if you could use it with New Blog Options, then you could simplify the look of the menus for your users too.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/adminimize/
Default User Role – will set the user role when a new blog is created
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpmu-default-user-role/
Plugin Manager – does what it says, allows you to manage which plugins users can set, which ones are automatically turned on, and which regular users cannot see
http://wpmudev.org/project/wpmu-plugin-manager
download link is: http://wpmudev.org/download/946613807_mp-plugin-manager.php
Of course with young people you might want to consider a privacy plugin like:
More Privacy Options – this doesn’t work with the feed on Buddypress, but if you search the forums it can be made to work or you can use the following plugin for feed privacy (Buddypress privacy should be coming soon)
http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-Options/
download link is: http://wpmudev.org/download/999830698_ds_private_blog.php
BP MPO Activity Filter – This plugin, BP MPO Activity Filter, does just what the name suggests: it filters BuddyPress activity feeds. Used with More Privacy Options.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-mpo-activity-filter/
The missing menus were probably because I didn’t to a full fresh install of buddypress. I was trying to keep a few core edits I had done and probably didn’t overwrite everything as I had thought. Seems to work now.
With fresh install of 2.8.1 and bp 1.02 I could add and delete a user. And as reported I am having a problem with the member themes. It seems to work when the member theme is in the /themes folder, but not sure if this is related but I am not getting a the menu to edit the profile and avatar. Could be a problem with some mu-plugins, but at this point doesn’t seem to be. Will check more.
For the backend it’s simply a matter of adding another .mo file to the language folder in /wp-content to get wpmu to be multilingual, the same goes for any other plugins, they each have to have their own .mo file.
There is a great plugin available which makes translating plugins or even the the wpmu core itself easy, and allows you to do it a little at a time. CodeStyling Localization (I am not affiliated with them in the least, but it is more than great). It allows you to do localization for themes, plugins, mu-plugins, and wpmu base code itself, absolutely awesome.
http://www.code-styling.de/english/development/wordpress-plugin-codestyling-localization-en
For the front end and to allow different users of any of the blogs to change the backend easily and quickly I recommend qTranslate.
http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/
It is easy to use and easy to setup. Non-technical users will immediately know how to use this once it is setup. The setup may not be for non-technical users on their own, but a simple how-to will easily walk anyone through it. This plugin allows visitors to see multilingual content and change the language on the blog front-end (although I haven’t really used it for multilingual switching for the social networking portion of buddypress, I’ll have to play around and see what it can do).
Each blog can have it’s main language set in the the Settings/General page with the site wide default set in Site Admin/ Options (this is built in to wpmu, it doesn’t need a plugin – it’s been there from before 1.0 if my memory is correct).
I use English and Japanese (which will often not work when the localization is not done right) so I think these are pretty good plugins that work well with wpmu’s built in localization.
Yes, I use new-blog-defaults too and it is great, but it doesn’t allow regular plugins to be setup. For young learners it is often very important to limit what they can see and to have some of the more obscure functions setup ahead of time in order to help them learn the basics faster.
Anyway, I look forward to hearing what you decide to do. Best of luck.
How about something for the site admin. A few ideas. A blog clone plugin. Setup one or more clone blogs including plugin settings, then depending on the role, group or whatever of the new user it would clone the blog with all the setting, menu, etc. already setup. This would of course go great with a true role-manager for wpmu that could create site-wide roles, or edit the site-wide rights of any of the roles. Which used with a wpmu specific adminimize plugin that would recognize not just the old roles, but newly created ones too and then set the menus site-wide for each of the roles (or if we can clone blogs, at least would recognize newly created roles). This would be great for educational or setups that want to charge for extras (although I guess these are kind of wpmu ideas, but still very relevant to buddypress too.
Another tack would be to create some educational plugins for quizzes somewhat like Moodle without Moodles rigid structure. (But those are more WordPress specific rather than buddypress) although buddypress with individual eduacational spaces for each student, but sitewide feeds of grades to teachers would be great. And schools need the free stuff with money hard to come by from administration types who think computers are just big calculators for adding up costs.
And yes, I definitely agree about the privacy issue.
Lots of great ideas above all the best in making your choice and best of luck at GSoC.
I was working on the same problem. Have a look at this thread. I’m not sure how secure my solution is, but it was quick and if you come up with some better coding to handle it, then let us know. See:
Just to wrap up this post. I went into /mu-plugins/bp-blogs/bp-blogs-classes.php and searched for “public”. At each instance where **public=1, I changed it to -1 so that it would recognize the setting from dsader’s More Privacy Options. This is not the most elegant solution, but it works for what I want. It prevents anyone from accessing the WPMU/BuddyPress site without logging in, and makes sure that the blogs appear as public once the users are logged in. If a user wanted to a blog could still be made private using the two other privacy options with More Privacy Options, only blog users can see the blog, and only site-admin can see the blog.
Hope this helps anyone who has similar situations. Of course it could be refined even further by adding a conditional so that public=1 becomes (public=1 || public=-1), didn’t try it, but something like this should work too.
Thank you so much. I don’t think I’ll be able to do anything if you can’t but I’ll try and have a look anyway. Maybe taking out more privacy settings and trying something like your force-member-login, might work.
You have been a great help, thank you.
Thanks for the help.
As a follow-up would it be possible to hard code the privacy check to check for the more privacy options settings rather than the regular privacy options, and which file does bp do this in? (As a note, I’m not a php programmer, but can usually figure out simple php and do some cut and paste and simple editing – so I’m willing to give it a go).
Again thanks.
Thanks for the quick response.
I am using 2.9.1, and “registered users from blog community” on all blogs. I checked and that blog has the same settings. The site-admin options is set to “Site can be viewed by registered users of this community only.”
I am using quite a few other mu plugins as well “New Blog Defaults”, “Plugin Commander”, “Default User Role” and “WP Super Cache”. WP Super Cache is turned off, and shows the cache is empty. I can’t see how any of these could effect the privacy settings unless it is something in New Blog Defaults, but this shouldn’t affect anything, and it didn’t in the past.
I get the message when I go to the user, and click on “blog” <:http//siteurl/members/membername/blogs>. I don’t get a message when I click on the “Blog” <http://siteurl/blogs> since this is the site blog listings, but there also isn’t a listing for these blogs.
Thanks for
Yes
Get the “More Privacy Options” over at wpmudev.org
http://wpmudev.org/project/More-Privacy-Options
Then in the Site Admin options go down to Site Privacy and select:
“Site can be viewed by registered users of this community only.”
It’s been a while since I set that part up, but I’m sure that’s all you need. If you want to have the main blog available, but not other blogs then use More Privacy Options, plus “New Blog Defaults” at:
http://wpmudev.org/project/New-Blog-Defaults
Set the Site Privacy to “Default: privacy managed per blog” and then in the New Blogs Default set privacy to “I would like my blog to be visible only to registered users from blog community” in the Blog Visibility section.
I think that is all you need for the setup you asked about.
Just in case someone reads this quickly like me and doesn’t check the them readme, here is a correction for borkweb’s post:
members-theme/ directory was located here: [WP_INSTALL_DIR]/wp-content/members-theme/
should be:
member-themes/ directory was located here: [WP_INSTALL_DIR]/wp-content/member-themes/
