[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

If your blog is at wordpress.COM you can’t install plugins. – I didn’t know that. This notice: http://en.support.wordpress.com/plugins/

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Hi, welcome to BuddyPress.

BuddyPress is a WordPress plugin and available for download within your WP admin panel. Within plugins, click on “add new” and search for buddypress. You can install it from there.

BuddyPress Documentation: https://codex.buddypress.org/home/

Also, there are a few things to be aware of – depending upon the version of WordPress and Hosting. For example, in your .htaccess, you may need to increase the amount of memory alloted to php.

A few steps and cautions
1. Make sure you have the database and files backed up.
2. If possible, practice on a local site or developer site before you try this on your live site.
3. Deactivate your other plugins first.
4. Check your permalink structure
5. Download and activate the buddypress plugin.
6. A new panel should appear in your WP-admin panel
7. Activate the default buddypress theme.
8. Activate forums (if you are interested)
9. Test your site
10. Activate one plugin at a time – and verify the site after each activation

Come here and find extensions – ask questions – etc

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Here is a link to more details on building a child theme (an excellent way to work with BP).

https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/building-a-buddypress-child-theme/

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Very nice. The admin bar is shifted to the left from the rest of the site. Is this intentional?

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

@r-a-y – thank you for the link. I’ll add to the whiteboard.

@mercime – password worked for me. Hmm.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Is this thread only about buddypress.org or about the Buddypress script?

The intent is to just discuss the website.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

@apeatling — Here is my thread for an “action plan” for the website.

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/requests-feedback/forum/topic/buddypress-org-changes-what-id-change-about-bp-org/

I’ll gladly help out with the changes as I’m learning BP.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

OK. I’m taking Andy at his word and am changing this thread to an action plan. Instead of complaining about the website, let’s get it fixed as a community.

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/miscellaneous/forum/topic/is-bp-dying-a-slow-death/?topic_page=4&num=15#post-59790

So – come on – let’s get this fixed up.

Action Plan
Create list
Prioritize list
Accomplish the first one on the list – get feedback
Go to next item on list
etc

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Good point rich – I was just making the assumption he meant background image to the body.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

OK. The code is almost right. This is what needs modification but the field descriptions are duplicating.

http://pastebin.com/vKKwZsD8

AHA !! It’s duplicated on line 155 — removed it — and it works. phew.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Updated

Reading: https://codex.wordpress.org/Writing_Code_in_Your_Posts

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Hey John,

I believe that you can add a css statement to your style.css in the child-theme and it should work.

Something like this – in which the image is in a directory called images sitting off the root

body {
background: #eaeaea url( /images/background.gif ) top left repeat-x;
font-size: 12px;
font-family: Arial, Tahoma, Verdana, sans-serif;
line-height: 170%;
color: #555;
width: 90%;
min-width: 960px;
max-width: 1250px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding-top: 0 !important; /* Remove the top padding space for the admin bar in this theme */
}

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

I can’t help with the ajax part but wanted to let you know that your theme looks exciting.

Oh – and yes – posting code here is a pain in the butt. I’ve seem some people use posting with

code tag followed by & l t ; ?php (remove spaces) .. so you end up with

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: My Wonderful Plugin
Description: Something I threw together for this post
Version: 0.1 beta
Author: LPH
*/


[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Yes – sorry – I’ve been on the phone with Sprint about an overdrive billing – and laughing too hard because their website is such a mess and had to call – only to get a representative who didn’t even know what the “mysprint” website looks like – it’s just too funny.

OK. Yes, the buddypress ajax chat worked fine until the upgrade. Interestingly, I removed it, uploaded an older version and still cannot get it to work and that is with just BP and the chat plugin activated. So, it’s just my luck today.

PS. The dev has their support forum locked out and doesn’t come here often. So, maybe I’m just out of luck.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

It is the buddypress-ajax-chat.

Guess it just seemed obvious to me since it is the only chat for buddypress

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

You are correct. It was the apostrophe issue. Fantastic. Thank you.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Thank you for hanging in there and giving a clear explanation. I didn’t understand what you meant on the first reply. Unfortunately, setting either item_id to the user_id works (mine or the other teachers). So, I’ll keep fussing and try to figure out what is wrong. I tried a copy-paste first – maybe a tic is wrong – or something more obvious that I’m doing wrong.

Update
Yes, I got it to work. It was the copy paste issue of the ‘ …

Thank you for showing me how to do this piece of code correctly!

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

My students fussed when BP was installed; however, tweaking the child-theme, integrating mediawiki better into BP, and getting the activity stream to the front page helped tremendously. There are tons of plugins that helped, too.

The default BP theme takes getting used to – and – this site’s theme is a little daunting. For example, it is hard to find past forum posts.

Yet, I’m new to BP, my php skills are poor, and my css is trial-n-error. So, BP is a great base and I’m quite satisfied that it’s going in the right direction.

My only real wish-they-had-it-now feature is for the activity stream to be real-time – so that a page refresh is not required when something new happens. Other than that – I’m learning BP through everyone’s suggestions here (ripping out php files, changing css, etc). I do look forward to 1.3

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

A few more changes (thanks to the help here):

The wiki is now better integrated
1. Changes to a wiki page is reflected into the activity stream
2. The header and footer of BP are used in the wiki skin
3. The Wiki Append plugin provides a new feature to the left front page called “element of the day.” This is a transclusion of a wiki page that uses the #switch command.

@mercime – Agreed. The forums and blog posts were shifted to full width, without a sidebar.

Again, this isn’t possible without the help of people on here. The site keeps getting better and better.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

Thank you. Since I’m not good with php, my interpretation doesn’t seem to work. This is the echo statement to get the avatar to show, however, I’m not sure that the user_id argument works. The area for this statement is blank.

echo bp_core_fetch_avatar(‘type=thumb&width=30&height=30&user_id=1’);

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

I couldn’t figure anything else out … so I went with a simple fix.

$time1 = time() + (5 * 60 * 60);

then use FROM_UNIXTIME($time1)

At least it is working

To see activity stream now showing wiki edits … see http://www.thechembook.com activity stream on front page, right side

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

The fastest way I’ve found is to open the header.php file in your child theme and modify the text with the line for members.

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

It’s working!

I didn’t see the activity because the time is incorrect. It showed up 5 hours off. I’m not sure how to fix that yet – but it’s working

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

It looks like the INSERT into db does not align for WP 3.0. So I modified the mysql_query statement

Also, I changed the lines with $wpmudp to ($wpmudp, $link) in which $link was added as:

$link = mysql_connect(‘localhost’, ‘db’, ‘db_password’);
if (!$link) {
die(‘Not connected : ‘ . mysql_error());
}

This allowed the extension to attach to the proper database (my mediawiki is on a different host, with different user and password).

The only thing incorrect is the time. And I’m working on a solution for it.

See this thread for how I modified the query statement:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/creating-extending/forum/topic/db-inserts-into-bp_activity

[@lph2005 Participant 16 years, 4 months ago]

I hate to dredge up an old thread – but – is work being done on this for WP 3.0 and BP 1.2.4.1?

@flynn – the server is temporarily unavailable; theme link isn’t available.

@boonebgorges – have you tried your extension with BP 1.2.4.1?

@nicolagreco – did you ever release anything?

Today seemed like a good day to try to get my MediaWiki footer integrated into BuddyPress footer – and just started looking around. Any tips from anyone would be great!