[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@johnjamesjacoby; I’ve just downloaded the zip file again, and oddly enough the readme.txt is now as expected. No idea what was going on there! I’ll have a look at the latest BP soon and let you know how it is.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@thekmen; Thanks, but it doesn’t work. No bother. Most ordinary users haven’t a clue about bookmarking, and ask, “Use the permalink? The WHAT?!” The View link is being perma-deleted!

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

So there seems to be an underlying error, but browsers happily ignore it..? Doesn’t sound good, really, so hopefully @johnjamesjacoby or another developer can take a look at it.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Hmm… @johnjamesjacoby; I did as you suggested, then disabled all BP plugins and BP, deleted the BP files, and copied the new ones in. The readme.txt is still code by the way, starting with;

<?php
define ( ‘BP_XPROFILE_DB_VERSION’, ‘1870’ );

/* Define the slug for the component */
if ( !defined( ‘BP_XPROFILE_SLUG’ ) )
etc., etc.

On activating the new BP I get;

Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare bp_loaded() (previously declared in C:xampplitehtdocswp-contentpluginsbuddypressbp-loader.php:55) in C:xampplitehtdocswp-contentpluginsbuddypressbp-loader.php on line 56

Everything else in WP and BP has been running fine so far.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Reading around here again this morning, and checking our own site design again as regards BuddyPress use, I find the whole thing is an incoherent torrent of information – and that’s for we who are developing sites!

Our test users are clueless as to what’s going on unless most of BP is ripped out or renamed, and everything laid out in simple, logical terms. Frankly, WE need the same. Smart design makes for ease of use, not stuff all over the place because the designers have butterfly minds and want to show what pretty kaleidoscopes they’ve built.

It’s worth the BP devs and admins considering that in the end the tools they’re creating are for ordinary people to use, not people who’s brains are wired differently through years of programming, forum use, etc. To paraphrase an ancient Chinese saying, “The wise love simplicity, but fools tie themselves up”.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Hi @johnjamesjacoby. Yawn… a nice sunny Sunday morning, so I thought, “Why not?” Copied the files into the right folder, ran my local test installation and got;

Warning: require(BP_PLUGIN_DIR/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-admin.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in C:xampplitehtdocswp-contentpluginsbuddypressbp-core.php on line 8

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required ‘BP_PLUGIN_DIR/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-admin.php’ (include_path=’.;C:xampplitephpPEAR’) in C:xampplitehtdocswp-contentpluginsbuddypressbp-core.php on line 8

The readme.txt file is full of php code. Should I be renaming that and running it, or creating a new folder, or something? Haven’t tried a test version of BP yet (as you can tell) but am happy to if I can get it going.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@thekmen; Ok, thanks, I’ll try that. There’s already a Favourite link, so I guess the permalink is just for bookmarking? Too tired to care now!

Edit; Almost, but no sidebar, and the content is squished into the centre. Falling asleep now, so will have another look tomorrow.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@nuprn1; That makes no sense to me whatsoever. A hanging permalink which just sits there, linking to a view which nobody needs, and which wrecks the layout because it wasn’t themed correctly, thus making a site look pathetic to users? Hmm…

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@nuprn1; Thanks, but any idea WHY there’s even a stupid view of something you can already see anyway..? I think I’ll leave it at that and have a cup of coffee before my head explodes!

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@erich73; Personally, I love the Activity stream, as long as a lot of the activities are removed (dumb stuff like, “Fred just did something”, “Mary coughed 2 hours and 47 seconds ago”, etc). With Groups and Members shown first, and Activity renamed to something like Conversations, most ordinary users can cope with it. Out of the box it’s scarier than a gang of axe-wielding clowns on acid!

You feel it isn’t possible to create a proper social network with BuddyPress, and while I agree to a point, it’s the best we have so far, it seems. We struggled with Elgg for some weeks, but gave up on it. The team and community are wonderful (as here), but it’s TOO open, has no real user controls of the required kind, and creating a site that looks like a site takes forever in hard slog coding. Pligg came close, but needed far too much work to turn into a BuddyPress-like tool, and most others have fallen by the wayside or cost a packet. For those without funding, BuddyPress certainly seem to be the best of the bunch, but HECK does it need redesigning. (But it won’t be, of course, because that would cause all the plugins to fail… *sigh*)

Oh, and I tried Mingle for WP too. Wonderfully simple, and Categories could be used for Groups, sort of. But… it fails miserably with most WP themes, or at least the ones I tried for alteration within a reasonable time scale, ie., some time before the world ends in 2012.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I set up WP 3.0 and the latest BP (1.2.4.1 I think), and then tried plugins which turned out only to show on some UberAdmin menu that I’ve never seen and can’t get to display.

WP and BP are easy to install, but sure as hell NOT easy to build sites with.

Oh, and @hnla; the problem is that neither here nor there are providing definitive answers much of the time when it involves overlapping issues, eg., Is it WP, or is it BP? Who knows? The smart ones who code it all do, but most of us are struggling to work with kitchen-sink design.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Not sure if this is the right place, but it’s a complaint for sure, and as this site is a nightmare to navigate here will have to do. I’ll stick my foot where my mouth is and rant, but will happily listen if someone can explain the kind of nonsense I’m coming across while theming BuddyPress.

I’ve spent long, long days for weeks on end setting up BP and modifying a simple theme to suit what we want. Some problems, it seems to me, should never have been ‘designed’ into it. For example, in the Activity stream there are links to View and Delete the post. Fair enough. My theme causes View to wreck the layout and display everything off-centre, with no sidebar. I’ve spent hours trying to rectify it, then had to take a break to help someone out with an old clanker of a PC that stopped working. When I came back I clicked on View, to continue working on getting the View page to display correctly. Then I thought, WHY?! What on earth is the point of a View link, to display something I can already see, on a blank page of its own?

So I’ve done it another way; deleted the code which inserts the View link from the core files. I’ve backed it up for when there’s an upgrade, along with a few other things which make little or no sense. That’s just one example, along with the stupid admin bar which only gets in the way in the WP back end, and confuses users on the BP front end.

Now we’re very grateful for WP and BP, and all the wonderful plugin work done by others. But come on; who designed this thing, and why is it so Heath Robinson, with more unnecessary options and bits than you can shake a stick at? For the next version, wouldn’t it make sense to re-map what’s actually required in a social network site and what’s just a waste of developer time, and our time? Or can someone make better sense of it all (including this site) because we sure can’t!

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

David’s idea is best actually, as the css will just hide the nav links. My version is more along the lines of changing all the links, which I’ve done.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@MattKern; Nice site, very clean looking. Is that a custom theme of your own?

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@Veneration; First, clone the default theme (there’s help around about doing that, and it’s pretty easy). Then edit your theme header.php template, where you should find the links. Any files you clone into a new theme override the default theme’s files.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Our site is for one UK county only, so would it be possible to put a rule in .htaccess to block any connections not from the UK? (Not brothered about search engine spiders, as it’ll be local word of mouth advertising). Or, is it possible to just block anyone from outside of the UK from signing-up? That would allow others to read, but not register or post.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I might be missing the point completely here, but I changed my theme’s sidebar.php code to call up the root sign-up using this;

<?php printf( __( ' You can also create an account.’, ‘buddypress’ ), site_url( ‘/wp-signup.php’ ) ) ?>

Mind you, it shows the sign-up form complete with the extra fields I added via Buddypress. Does this mean it’s still being hooked into by BP and is actually bypassing the standard WP 3.0 sign-up code? I noticed that even pulling out the php and replacing it with a normal href link, it still does the same thing.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Thanks for that @mercime, I’ll give it a go sometime soon.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Personally, I and others find the site navigation and layout a nightmare to follow. Never sure quite what we’re looking at once we click something; tabs appear to change but it all looks the same, etc. Ie., am I in an ‘overall’ forum or a group forum? A plugin page or a forum page? A general activity stream or a help/plugin stream? Etc.

Most sites have better visual clues as to exactly what you’re looking at. The insipid colours might have something to do with it as well..? Thanks for the hard work, but something about the design and layout doesn’t work well for us.

Edit: Actually, this is helping us design our site, and most things which seem to be ‘features’ in BuddyPress have been ripped out because they badly confuse our test users. People need to know they’re in one place, looking at a particular thing, not ‘a forum’ which could be overall, for a group, for a plugin, for something unknown leaving you unsure what the heck you last clicked and having to go ‘Back’ yet again… If there has to be a forum and/or blog for everything in the kitchen sink, each needs *very* clear labelling and other visual clues.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@nonegiven; Where are you seeing this error, just out of interest..? Have to agree on the appalling geometric images. I don’t even use them as a fall-back.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Hmm… Just waking up, and browsing around. I’m on Chrome Dev. and IE8 (in case it matters) and your Visit links work fine. I don’t see any problems under activity either (accessed from within profiles).

As I’ve said elsewhere, I removed the admin-bar from our whole site, front and back end. It gets in my way, serves no useful function which shouldn’t be on site pages as links anyway, and confuses technophobes no end. I put the following in wp-config.php to help with that and other things;

define(‘WP_MEMORY_LIMIT’, ‘128M’);
define(‘BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE’, true);
define(‘BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR’, true);

Just my worthacarrot opinion, but I think your site would look much cleaner without it too. Also, your browse/other/search bar goes off into infinity on the right-hand side on MightWorkOneDay Chrome. And bloons are great!

Edit: @blondishnet, I just noticed your “Solved!” update (which seems to have been posted before this, but didn’t show back then).

Care to enlighten everyone as to what was causing it, in case it helps?

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

I was wondering about this too, though it’s not a high work priority right now. You’ll no doubt know that setting up a Home page in WP admin and pointing to it in Reading Settings works fine. As to making it show one or the other depending upon whether someone is already registered or not… I don’t know. Probably easy in the custom theme templates, using a function something like _is_user_registered or whatever (there must be something like that).

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

Looks like it was upgrading Lightbox which did it; perhaps a bad file upload. Deleting and re-installing it fixed everything.

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@Kevin; Needed a break, so had a look around and found your posts. Our avatars work fine in IE8, but those on your site don’t, so it’s probably your CSS. (They’re fine in Google Chrome Dev, too). Sleep and a fresh look helps!

[@lincme Member 15 years, 11 months ago]

@thegreyspot; I’m working from memory here, but I think what you want might be;

#wp-admin-bar { position: fixed !important; top: 0; }

Not sure, as I chopped the stupid admin bar out weeks ago. It just confuses technophobes, who appear to be 98% of Internet users when it comes down to it. Also, removing it from WP via css and using ‘ozh-admin-drop-down-menu’ to minimise everything makes for a very slick interface with lots of screen space when playing Mr. Wizard.