[Shmoo]

No I’m busy focussing on the bbPress items for starters, topics and replies as of now.

I have disabled all activity_items to the stream by default except topics and replies. I want to add more items but one at a time and controlled. A BuddyPress site can become overkill feature wise very fast because everything is so connected and relative with each other.

Topics and replies in the stream.

View post on imgur.com

[Shmoo]

Did you maybe change your username after registration?

[Shmoo]

Thanks,

I’ve been testing the get_post() option and the overal number of queries stay the same in the debug bar.

[Shmoo]

True, but because the content I’m after is all glued together as one solid string inside the action column I have to fish in other database tables to get the content relative to the item. Nothing is saved separately in the wp_bp_activity table.

But the Primary or Secondary item ID of an activity item always matches the ID in the wp_post table depending on what you’re after.

I just don’t know what impact this will have on overal performance when I go wish in other tables for content.

[Shmoo]

Wrap the message button between this code.

<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {

    // your code here

}
?>

[Shmoo]

Thank you,

I just noticed it’s better to use is_null() instead of isset() because when people leave those fields empty it returns a FALSE boolean inside a var_damp().

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View post on imgur.com

[Shmoo]

Looks like in the codex by types the ‘updated_profile’ type is missing.

Are those all default activity types or are there more?

—
Following up question
—

I went into the database to check what the last added activity type was and found it at the bottom, but what are those first few rows with last_activity types that belong to the members component?

Screenshot

View post on imgur.com

[Shmoo]

Yes, bp_is_user() does the job. Thanks.

[Shmoo]

A Server error can be a lot of problems..

Maybe your hosting company doesn’t let you to run powerful websites. BuddyPress & bbPress are not small scripts. It’s not like you install a simple Twitter plugin for WordPress. BuddyPress & bbPress are advanced scripts that require some power of your server.

My advise, check your server logs and maybe that will give you some idea of what is happening.

[Shmoo]

True, but some Plugins and software today have some kinda of deactivation script that cleans-up everything they do when you deactivate them.

That’s why I asked. 🙂

Thanks!

[Shmoo]

I think you can use the default Xprofile fields for this.

Just add a new tab ‘video’s’ and another tab called ‘photo’s’ and let them copy-/paste links to YouTube-/Flickr and others inside a multi-line text input field. ( Xprofile )

I believe the WordPress Embed service will auto complete those links into embedded video’s and images.

If not –> Search: BuddyPress auto embed xprofile – something like that.

[Shmoo]

Well there is nothing much to it.

If you understand what BuddyPress is, you know it needs to active a few components – you can decide what components you want to activate when you activate the BuddyPress plugin.

Let say if you don’t want private messages then don’t activate it. If you like your member to message each other you should activate.
Only if you activate components you need to create WordPress pages to show those components – simple right?
BuddyPress plugin helps you do that and creates those pages for you, you can save those default pages or change them to other pages.
Lets say you want your Groups not to show up on the example.com/groups/ page but at the example.com/community/ page then you can do so by just changing the name of that groups page.

Normally every WordPress theme should be able to handle the BuddyPress plugin just fine because BuddyPress uses the default WordPress templates to show all the BuddyPress pages.
But if you have an older WP theme or a very complicated WordPress theme you can get into some troubles of course.
There are some WordPress themes that are made for specific fields like photographers or portfolio websites those themes are often made just to target those fields of work and don’t need social media integrations.

[Shmoo]

They’ve made it more easy to use over the years.

If you look at where BuddyPress was years ago and where they are right now it’s a huge step forward to WordPress like coding.
Will they ever become as easy as WordPress, no I don’t think so, simply because there are only a few people looking after the code of BuddyPress and bbPress.

WordPress has become so easy because they have thousands of great developers looking after the code on a daily base. Those people push each other to the max, for example you have one guy who’s really good at programming new stuff and another girl who’s very good at understanding how a function should work for ‘less experienced’ computer users. Both can connect very well at the Make.wordpress pages and share ideas that become great code and working products in the end.

BuddyPress and bbPress only have a handful of developers who for the love of coding and this plugin put their time and knowledge into this. #respect!
I think they’re doing a great job and yes I also wished it would go faster 🙂
But hey, who am I to say anything, I don’t know anything and have tried to learn PHP a few times so I wish I could contribute more to those products but I failed to understand.

I do have to say if you know HTML + CSS you can do some stuff in altering the layouts which is great in my opinion.

Next up:
Some people are also living on the wrong foot, because they started with WordPress and it’s so easy to use they think WordPress has become some kinda magic power tool that can let everybody do anything online.
Wrong, it’s easy to use and you can do a lot because of all the free tutorials and code online but there are limits.

Some people have zero understanding of coding and want to become the next Facebook – that’s not gonna happen how easy the code ever will be.

[Shmoo]

Have you tried to hit the button Save Permalinks settings again?

Maybe that will help.

Also look at the Pages section if you don’t have any pages in the trash – maybe an older ‘register page’ is still active in the trash.

[Shmoo]

I’ve tried all themes but they all stay with a default 15px avatar.

I always look at the source to show what values are given in the HTML.
And I’m working on a clean WP 3.8 and BuddyPress 1.9.1 system no other plugins or features are active.

It’s strange..
But 15px will do for now, maybe in the future I’ll digg into it a little deeper, thanks.

[Shmoo]

Very nice!

Lots of work went into this.. Cool.

[Shmoo]

No not really, the only places where I’ve changed the avatar sizes is inside BP page templates like this,

<?php bp_the_thread_message_sender_avatar( 'type=thumb&width=64&height=64' ); ?>
....
<?php bp_loggedin_user_avatar( 'type=thumb&height=64&width=64' ); ?>
....
<?php bp_member_avatar( 'height=192&width=192' ); ?>
....
<?php bp_displayed_user_avatar('type=full&height=192&width=192'); ?>

I’m using functions.php to add custom codes, but no avatar related code inside that.

I did a search at bp_core_fetch_avatar and found this at bp-core-tamplet.php

/**
 * Output a post author's avatar.
 *
 * Not currently used in BuddyPress.
 *
 * @todo Deprecate.
 */
function bp_post_author_avatar() {
	global $post;

	if ( function_exists( 'bp_core_fetch_avatar' ) )
		echo apply_filters( 'bp_post_author_avatar', bp_core_fetch_avatar( array( 'item_id' => $post->post_author, 'type' => 'thumb', 'alt' => sprintf( __( 'Avatar of %s', 'buddypress' ), bp_core_get_user_displayname( $post->post_author ) ) ) ) );
	else if ( function_exists('get_avatar') )
		get_avatar();
}

This is the first time I can track bp_core_fetch_avatar as a function combined with an array() and look there is no width and height inside that array only thumb and alt.

Not saying this is the problem because I have very limited PHP knowledge but maybe that’s where echo bp_core_fetch_avatar( array(… is getting it’s Avatar from.

[Shmoo]

Nope I’ve used a remove filter to hide the autocompletefb.min.css and build my custom styles inside my default stylesheet.

I’ve looked at the code on the site and inline on the image tag it also says width 15 height 15 class=avatar-15

Looks like the value is just not communicating with the function.

[Shmoo]

I know, I was just testing to make sure it wasn’t my custom code that caused the problem.

But even with type = full and size changes it doesn’t work like it should be. 🙁

[Shmoo]

I think I’ve got it..

<div class="three columns">
	<?php bp_get_template_part( 'members/single/messages/messages-loop' ); ?>
</div>

<div class="five columns">
	<div class="msg-content-wrap">
	<?php
	switch ( bp_current_action() ) :
	
	// Single Message View
	case 'view' :
		bp_get_template_part( 'members/single/messages/single' );
	break;
		
	// Compose
	case 'compose' :
		bp_get_template_part( 'members/single/messages/compose' );
	break;
		
	// Sitewide Notices
	case 'notices' :
		do_action( 'bp_before_member_messages_content' ); ?>
		<?php bp_get_template_part( 'members/single/messages/notices-loop' ); ?>
		<?php do_action( 'bp_after_member_messages_content' );
	break;	
	// Any other
	default :
		bp_get_template_part( 'members/single/plugins' );
	break;
	endswitch; ?>
</div>

The only thing I still have to do is protect the column 3 – messages-loop.php from showing to the public or all logged_in users.

!Please do not use this code on Live BuddyPress sites!

[Shmoo]

What I did is I changed the form + validation stuff inside the template files to customize my own forms and validation process.

First of all I didn’t like the default validation process that BuddyPress is using where you have to push Submit and then the script checkes if every field is filled correctly, if not it pushes a text_message into the page through an Action.
Result, often the error message shows up at the top of the page where you aren’t looking and not at the form where the problem occurs, and even more important it’s an extra page-load to get this message into the page.

I didn’t like that so I left everything of that untouched as a back-up system and simply used my own ( Zurb’s ) validation JavaScript to check while writing if the fields are correct.
Plus this JavaScript disables the Submit buttons if a form or field is not valid.

This is a screenshot of the Profile Settings page but all forms work the same so you can just diff into the template files and add alter them.

The script I use is part of Zurb’s Foundation Framework so if you don’t like to work with Frameworks like me you have to strip all the needed code out of it.
http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/components/abide.html

There are probably also scripts like this one to be found online.

[Shmoo]

Thanks..

We’ll keep learning each day.

I just found out that you can easily overwrite exciting functions or actions with just two little steps.

function shmoo_messages_screen_notification_settings() {
	if ( bp_action_variables() ) {
		bp_do_404();
		return;
	}
.... wall of code ....

}
remove_action( 'bp_notification_settings', 'messages_screen_notification_settings', 2 );
add_action( 'bp_notification_settings', 'shmoo_messages_screen_notification_settings', 10 );

I just copied the original code to my functions.php renamed the function name by simply adding shmoo in front of it and last add the remove_action() tag just above the add_action with the original function that you wanna hide.

So cool. Now I can change more dynamic content into my own content.

[Shmoo]

Cool 🙂

[Shmoo]

Better customisation options of the activity stream: ie to be able to define a set of “or” filters for content type, and who. So (with plugin support) I can define a feed to include things from “me or friends or followers” showing “topics and topic replies and posts and new users” (and ideally be able to have a permalink to this with no other fluff on display). The current activity feed selectors are a mess and don’t provide what most people want to see.

Should be nummer 1.

And I don’t even want lots of new features to the activity stream but first just an easy way to customize the default lay-out would be so much pleasant!

All BP pages are very easy to customize, move code around to give the page an unique feeling but when it comes to the activity stream the code is very fixed.

There are about 50-75 Premium BuddyPress themes online for sale and 99% of them have the same activity stream page-layout. While all those premium theme developers can do lots of customization to all other pages the activity stream is like Twitter’s Bootstrap to BuddyPress it always tells you it’s a BuddyPress website without looking at the code.

[Shmoo]

Yes that works much better, no error to show up this time.

Thanks.