Forum Replies Created
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In reply to: Publishing documets to a group
I too have been searching for something like this. Perfection, for me, will be when we build a directory/library of sorts for all site or group members to take advantage of and promote finding and reading of docs. Also – I’d like to see some sort of in-site reading capability a la Scribd
In reply to: Making Buddypress a Social Network for non-bloggers?@David – fair point. fyi, group notifications: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/group-forum-subscription-for-buddypress/
In reply to: Making Buddypress a Social Network for non-bloggers?@David Lewis There are plenty of plugins that add to the ability to both create content and extend notifications
@designodyssey creating a network of blogs is, in the end, going to be a rare use case of BP. Just how many people are sitting around going” Gee, I wish there was a network out there that would let me create my own themable blog as part of a greater community” What people really want is to find a niche community centered around a topic they care about in order to contribute and consume content and build relationships around like-minded people. BP just happens to be the best tool available to do your own custom building of said network. Drupal, Joomla, Elgg and <shudders> Ning are profess to do the same but they are either too difficult or pain in the ass to use (Drupal, Joomla, Elgg) or force you to play by their very constricting set of silly rules (Ning)
The blog part of BP is a minor part…if you want it to be a part at all
In reply to: New BuddyPress Geo plugin@bravenewcode I have to agree with @katendarcy. We have a field for address, city, state, country and postal code so, to which field(s) are you referring when you aks for the field representing “location” Please clarify. Additionally, please explain why you need “description for each user” for what purpose? Thanks
In reply to: Friends and Groups for BuddyPress 1.3@peter certainly not offensive. seemed out of place. no worries
@erich73 the friend group setting could easily be done in the context of merely “grouping” your friends. No need to make them part of a “friend” group. ok, i will stop duping that word. I will call it a friend list!
@bowe I think the functionality is there to filter in the way you suggest. Of course, you are talking something different when you discuss allowing people to create their own Home pages.
In reply to: Friends and Groups for BuddyPress 1.3@Boone I understand, but think about how much you just described to merely add some meta information to a user’s friends. I’m not convinced it reduces and simplifies.
In reply to: Friends and Groups for BuddyPress 1.3@Peter Why would you ask that question in this thread? I’m sure Bowe can tell you how many are in the Dutch BP community in a less non-sequitor thread, no?
@Bowe Nice 1st attempt. t has many elements Andy is trying to capture in 1.2 default theme. I appreciate everyone’ kinds words. My objective is to try and force myself to view this from the perspective of he user. I have a userbase that has a few quirky characteristics: ages 17-90, usually very bright but many find this whole area unintuitive. lastly, they all want to engage with each other. So…every element on the site has to promote that re-connection and engagement…intuitively. As an example, a place to tweet from my site won’t turn many on. Not because they aren’t on Twitter, but they don’t come to the site to do it, don’t usually want to tweet about what they are doing on the site and the added convenience of tweeting from within the site isn’t worth the real estate. Still – it’s a great idea for other sites.
Back to our issue: in a nod to @jjj’s original point, we have a set of groups (graduating class groups) in which users are auto joined upon sign up (having been required to input class year) Now, this is a group that everyone already is “friends” with. There is merit to some sort of auto-friending action which is being proxied by joining the group. Most users on the site seek out their year group and friend them. Maybe we should keep it that way (let’s you keep your distance from the jerks in your class) but we could also do more in making the process easier.
As we start from scratch and redesign the sight with the new parent/chile & 1.2 functionality we will focus on the following questions: What’s going on in the things I care about? e.g groups and friends and What is going on in the site that I might care about? Focus on too much of the former and users miss out on a lot. Too much of the latter and it doesn’t feel like a personal experience of connection and engagement.
The last thing we need o NOT lose sight of: As we connect, sync and add inter-operability to all of our components, how we present all this activity to the user will make or break the success of the site. Actions and activity need to be where the user expects them to be. Not cause we just threw it in there. It can’t appear out of place or cobbled together. Many a site has blown off this aspect and wondered why the user behaviors on their site are erratic. Example (minor but critical) On testbp.org a user made a post onto a topic in the BP testers group. That topic has 3 pages of replies. When you click View Thread you are taken to the topic’s 1st page. There are pros and cons to this. Pro: you get to start from the beginning and go thru all replies Con: you have to start from the beginning and goes thru all replies….or make your way to the end . Now you can reply from the bottom of the 1st page but you will actually never see the reply whose View Thread link you clicked on, so the user is often mis-oriented. I know I digress, but my users have written me to emphasize that it was often the person who made the reply that prompted them to click View Thread and then they never see that reply again.
The point is, it’s the user and his relationship to other users (friend or not) that often drives behavior and expectations. That’s why adding avatars to all activity completely changes a feel of a site and makes it seem personal.
In reply to: Friends and Groups for BuddyPress 1.3I am personally not a fan of taking it this direction (with a few caveats depending on where it goes)
@Peter – Yes, Facebook burned “friending” into the lexicon and made a mess of things as far as that definition goes. But it’s here and it’s what we have to work with. Not sure it would be wise to try and break the momentum 300mm users already understand. Now, expanding on the idea is another thing altogether.
We should start with what a “friend” means/should mean in the BP environment. There is overlap of the concept with Groups, but a major distinction, too that keeps me from supporting this shift you describe. If we expand the friend concept in its current manifestation, I think we’ll be better off.
Yes, @jjj friends are just groups of users. But that doesn’t make them Groups. Groups are organizations around a topic/idea. I think if you try to include an aggregation of users into that model, you will blur the lines as to confuse everyone. Since I don’t want being a friend of me being the same as being a member of the “Mike Pratt” group, you will force developers to have to change everything to make it look like the old process, or do it yourself. Is there really that much gained by you in the process? I mean, so much of the group functionality may not be necessary in a personal group.
Re the “it’s like Twitter following” it’s not either/or there. “friending” requires acceptance on the befriended’s part. Following does not. Admittedly, it would be great for BP to allow for a following kind of capability so I can keep tabs on those whose activity I care about but aren’t really “friends” with.
What is the filtering issue you speak of? On 1.2 I can look at activity of My friends or My groups and it works great. What BP needs, I think, is expanded friend functionality. Ie friend grouping a la facebook style so I can filter my ever growing list of friends into like groupings e.g. Family, etc. I’d even do it on buddypress.org and list @jjj @andy @jeffsayre etc into a group to follow what the sage’s all have to say. In this new concept, I will have to create a group for them? but they will already be in my “friends” group?
One thing to consider – the new Update functionality, in effect, already gives each user his own forum. A threaded conversation can already happen there and it’s centered on that user. If you are truing to make it a private one, then revamp the message system to allow me to send a private internal BP message to a group of friends (need that part too) and have it be a private threaded conversation/message. It’s dangerous to allow me to make it like you suggested
“Not only is it a group of people that I know, the people I’ve added to that group now can talk back and forth to one another because I’ve added them as a “friend.”
It gives the ability for someone to interact more personally with someone to whom they never initiated contact. Perhaps just adding a friend “type” ie “follow” would be very useful. It is the type that doesn’t require acceptance on the followee and the followee’s activities are visible according to their own set terms.
In summary, I think we keep Groups as topically focused “clubs” or “associations” that have members, content and activities and then each person has relationships with other users on the site. Some are “friends”, some they just “follow” with added functionality like grouping (pardon the use of the word), mass messaging (based on permissioning), etc
In reply to: Activity Feed Delete Not Workinghttps://trac.buddypress.org/browser/trunk click on the zip file link at the bottom of the page. this should work nicely for your use case. the wire and status updates are merged into one concept
In reply to: bp-events, directory not workingbp-events is broken in 1.2 and I have posted on Erwin’s site asking for at least a game plan. The trunk has not been updated since Nov 11 (not that he has any obligation to do so!) Hopefully we get some clarity soon. I know this is an important plugin for many
In reply to: Activity Feed Delete Not WorkingOh. I thought you were on 1.2 (which has a seriously revamped SWA) I used to experience flaky admin delete behavior as well on 1.1 versions. I’m not an Ubuntu expert so now I am going to be flaky as well
. It may be worth trying the 1.2 variants but that also depends on how production your sites are.
In reply to: Why is userbar.php loaded from the header in 1.2?then your best bet is to load the parent and new default themes and tweak the default to suit your needs. But I admit to reading your older posts and either you’re faking it well by pasting in a bunch of code to make it look you you know a thing or two about programming, or you know more than you’re leading us to believe. Either way, I’m sure this makes sense to even a non-programmer like yourself:
Retrieve the name of the highest priority template file that exists.
Searches in the STYLESHEETPATH before TEMPLATEPATH so that themes which inherit from a parent theme can just overload one file.
from the Description of locate_template()
In reply to: Easy? Username = Nameit might be easier to help if you explained why you are trying to do this?
In reply to: Default Buddypress theme as members blog theme?advice: if you’re that early in the process, scrap working on that old 1.1 orange theme and tinker with 1.2
In reply to: Activity Feed Delete Not Workinglikely a permissioning problem on your site and not code. I have 3 separate test environments all running with various bleeding edge 1.2 trunks and can delete from the SWA as admin easily on all 3
In reply to: Why is userbar.php loaded from the header in 1.2?As for locate_template() – you’re best suited to go read about the function yourself than ask it here. It’s a WP function. I founded via Google, the search engine @ https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/locate_template
It’s a better function to use than an include because the array of template files gives the function something to fall back on if it can’t find the sought after function.
In reply to: Why is userbar.php loaded from the header in 1.2?Well…I see it called in bp_sn_parent but it’s not called in the default theme’s header so I am wondering where I can even take a look at it in use
In reply to: New BuddyPress 1.2 default theme@Andy figured. cool. thanks.
I was hoping you’d say don’t touch the default for another 2 weeks! Now I have no excuse not to get to work
In reply to: New BuddyPress 1.2 default theme@Andy Just updated to 2207 this morning and all looks fine so far. One question though:
on /groups/groupname page I see that “View Thread” is there in place of “Comment” for forum postings, which speaks to the sync issue being discussed on other threads but the link on “View Thread” is the group slug not the forum thread slug. For example on my dev site on the page
http://mjpratt.com/groups/usma-1987/
I see a nice listing of activity. The activity item “posted on the forum topic Yet another another test in the group USMA 1987: 3 days, 23 hours ago” has a “Vew Thread” link which points to:
http://mjpratt.com/groups/usma-1987/
Is this on purpose or a bug?
I see it’s generated on line 24 of activity/activity-loop.php in bp-default with
<?php if ( !bp_is_activity_permalink() ) : ?>
" title="<?php _e( 'View Thread', 'buddypress' ) ?>"><?php _e( 'View Thread', 'buddypress' ) ?>
<?php endif; ?>
I need to look further into the return of bp_activity_thread_permalink()
In reply to: Activity DB Design DiscussionWHile I enjoy and learn quite a bit by reading the db design debate I cannot lend the insight that MrMaz et all do.
To @Tore’s point: As much as everyone will love doing all their activity from the activity stream, keep several things in mind. As Groups grow and become enhanced by plugins, users will find themselves also hanging out and revisiting those Groups due to the topical relevance to them. The My Groups and My friends filters on the SWA will also be huge hits but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that people will ask the question “What’s going on in Group X” and I think that highlights the need to make an action on the main activity stream eg the SWa remain a par of it’s originating Group. Indeed, such a stream may kill off the /forums aggregation but certainly not Groups themselves. This also lends credence to the much needed blog-post-like capability to be added to groups (purposely not said Blogs added… merely richer content capabilities that forum postings don’t provide for)
Great thread going on here. Hats off to all
In reply to: Comments on Forum-posts ?In reply to: New 1.2 SWA and Blog/Forum syncing: Feedback Needed@jjj Yes, you see it that way but I will put forth that you are in the minority. Everyone I come across who classifies themselves as a regular user type thinks that SWA entries are actually the entries themselves. They have no idea that when the comment was originally posted it was also written to the activity cache (the reason for which I totally understand – views and on the fly queries are very computationally expensive)
So that is the issue – given they think that what is being represented in the SWA is the comment itself, they naturally think they are replying TO that comment. But in BP they are not. I know Facebook is not a fair comparison but it’s what are users already know and when they comment in-line on FB they ARE commenting on the original stream… so at a minimum, we’ll have to unlearn that behavior to avoid the “Oh, I didn’t realize remarks”
In reply to: New 1.2 SWA and Blog/Forum syncing: Feedback Needed@jjj …time to start doing pull-ups on your asylum bed frame.
They’re the same but different, and if templated correctly now you have comments about the text of my blog post, and comments about the fact that I posted it.
That really sums it up. Those sites around the web that have elegantly implemented threaded commenting and discussion have created a world where people fork off threads via commenting about that thread or simply add another post to the end of the original stream (how BP works now)
We seem to be getting to some sort of theoretical solution here (I say that ’cause I don’t have to build it
In reply to: New 1.2 SWA and Blog/Forum syncing: Feedback Needed@Andy – your recent commit (2189) will certainly give us options while this is sorted out. Appreciate your responsiveness.
In reply to: New 1.2 SWA and Blog/Forum syncing: Feedback Neededone addl thought: if we went the route of disabling blog posts and forum replies, what is left to do on the SWA? Commenting on the activity that Jack friended Joe? or that someone posted an update. Sort of defeats the purpose of in-line commenting doesn’t it?
