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I have only tested the plugin on PHP 5.2 and higher, and there are a couple of required functions that only exists in 5.2 and up. I have implemented support for the internal WP object cache, but have not fully tested it myself.
Is it possible for you to test in another environment with PHP 5.2 with object caching turned off?
There was someone else a while back that was having a similar problem, but he did not follow up on the testing so not sure exactly what is going on.
@jeffreeeey
Your admin bug is fixed in the trunk. Not sure about your friends_check_friendship() issue. The friends component loads before bp-links, so that function should exist. Can you do any debugging on your end?
Thanks for the kind words. I have put a lot of time into this plugin!
The most recent version of the plugin does not call that function on that line. When you upgraded did you copy the newer links template files into your theme?
I have ustream.tv on my list of services to support in the Pro version which hopefully will be out in February
I originally tried to hook into WP categories and tags and it was a huge nightmare trying to figure it out. I may take another crack at it in the future when the higher priority stuff has been completed. Vimeo is on my list of services that will be supported in the Pro version. Users already can delete links from the link admin page.
@jeffreeeey
Thanks for the kind words and for taking the time to make a bug report! The hard drive in my dev box died yesterday and I am still trying to rebuild it from backups so it might be a day or two before I am able to trouble shoot these issues.
I agree, admin should be able to see all of the links in the dashboard, this is probably a bug. Not sure about the undefined function, that one is weird. Maybe someone else can look into until I am back to 100%.
Looks awesome!
Just a little clarification, not meaning to nitpick. In my post I said that friendship is a one to many relationship, since each person can have one or more friends, but yes, each relationship in and of itself is a one to one mapping.
I think I have a pretty good idea of what you want to accomplish, but I still think you need to re-think how to get there.
Based on everything you have said, what is needed is to make friendship more abstract so that it can be extended. For instance so there can be more than one type of friendship. You could even have layers of friendship types without making things complicated as far as data storage goes. Once you have some abstraction then powerful filtering becomes possible.
And instead of using groups to accomplish the grouping of friends so that you can use the group component’s features, it would make a lot more sense to refactor those features out of the group component so they can be re-used elsewhere. So if there is a particular feature of groups that you want to use for something else, ask yourself how to move that functionality vertically into the core API instead of merging components horizontally to share features.
In case all of that is unclear, basically what I am trying to say is instead of moving functionality around, break it up into smaller generic bits that can be re-used. You get rid of lots of code duplication and increase the depth of the API, while not losing any features.
I agree with both you and stwc. I think you are both correct. It all comes down to the audience and who you are developing the site for. In my limited experience of exposing BP to uninitiated and/or Average Joe type users, the 1.1 branch’s default theme is not very “dummy proof,” and at times downright confusing. It will be interesting to see how the 1.2 default theme does in the real world.
Modeling real world social interactions which are very organic and three dimensional in a software application which is by nature “flat” is not easy, and probably impossible to get perfect. This is why I am always advocating a flexible API type of approach, over a rigid feature set type of approach. Developers need the freedom to tune the app to their audience, because no two sites will have the same requirements. I am not talking just about the interface, I am also talking about how the app behaves and responds to differing requirements.
BuddyPress Links will support this sometime after 1.2 comes out.
Nobody has yet convinced me that the proposed deprecating of the friends component makes sense from a code point of view. I am not disagreeing that some people want/need a different visualization of how friending works, but you have to make the case that it will genuinely improve the codebase while providing backwards compatibility.
There is a proposal to make this major shift in how a key component of the software functions without any supporting code to show that it will actually work.
I know this project isn’t a democracy, but you can’t just say that not everyone is going to be happy all of the time and then steamroll them. A lot of people have invested a lot of their free time into BP, and if they get burned they could very well leave the community. I don’t think its worth the risk to lose smart people from an open source project only due to fear of too much code. Code is expensive to write. Free code is good.
I agree with Erich73, why not both? Just in general I don’t like the idea of any features being taken away. That makes BP feel more like a software package that you have to constantly adapt to instead of a framework that you can adapt to your needs. I don’t want to have to worry about features I like vanishing, regardless of how useful/less they may seem to others.
Its not feasible to support a software package since rich media embedding relies on the URL as a key for which API to use. It would be possible to support a list of websites that use the software, but not all of them automatically.
Eventually I want to support hundreds of sites, the only constraint is time. I have added yours to my list of possible sites to support. Right now I am ranking requests based on Alexa rankings. I can guarantee that sites with a very small reach (like twitgoo with a tiny 0.031 reach) will be in some sort of pro pack.
I am not sure what you mean by “remote submit for gallery2 & 3 photos”
Thanks for taking the time to post some ideas about monetizing. I have been looking into all of those angles, except the documentation one is new, thank you.
I am definitely going to do paid support with a forum, and probably going to sell a “pro pack” that is loaded with advanced features like remote submit (reddit, digg), ad support, rich media pack, theme pack, etc.
The only site I have found that lets me get up and running quickly is wpplugins.com. I would rather do it all in house, but do not want to spend too much time dealing with all of the support software and payment solutions.
If anyone knows of other sites like wpplugins.com, please lmk!
I already have much of the code completed for remote submit and bookmarklet type tools, etc. However, I am probably going to have to release those tools in a pro version and charge for it because so far I have received zero financial support for the plugin despite over 1000 downloads.
A lot of people ask about making BuddyPress Links a feed aggregator, which is kind of confusing to me since there are so many feed aggregator plugins already out there. What are these other plugins missing?
As far as using it to aggregate activity from other social networks, I think that is not a good idea because links is a content aggregator, specifically of links and rich media, which is a totally different concept from activity. There is a big difference between sharing “stuff” and “actions.”
Just speaking strictly from a software design standpoint, calling someone’s friends a group does not make sense.
A friendship is a direct relationship between two people. It is a one to many relationship which is handled by using a lookup table that points back to the user table. It is just about the fastest possible relationship that you can have in RDBMS because both keys point back to the users table and the optimization of that query is killer if you have the right indexing. The only faster one would be a self join, for instance Bob is Jane’s spouse, which requires no lookup table.
A group however, is a one to many relationship, which is handled with a lookup table that acts as a bridge to a third table that holds the groups data. This is much different when it comes to querying. If friends are just Bob’s private group, it is going to make querying for relationships between two people very convoluted in many situations, especially where a fourth, fifth table or more is involved. There will be round tripping for data and/or nasty DISTINCT queries in many cases where it would not otherwise be necessary.
Thank you Mike Pratt for doing all my typing for me. +1
The software that will win out in the race for enterprise collaboration is a combination of all applicable web services that have an API that allows them to be easily mashed-up. Social media/networking/collaboration software should be glue not paper.
No software can be all things to all people, but if you create a platform where the CTO of a small company can pick and choose from hundreds of online apps from multiple sources and easily mash them up, then it will hit the stratosphere (although not sure how to profit from this). The key word here is “easily.” I am not talking about plugins, I am talking about marrying separate applications.
I don’t think this will ever hit the huge corporations though, because of all of the privacy regulations and security issues. Small firms with small budgets will be willing to take the risk, I think.
I agree with a lot of what David Lewis said, but my description would be that most open source collaboration software has a very “huge” and/or clunky feel to it. I want something that feels “light.”
I think you have hit the nail on the head with this post. I don’t think that it is necessarily a long term assessment, but it describes what BuddyPress is best at right now. I think more advances are necessary to take it beyond this where users can contribute more content without having to be a full invested writer/blogger.
I am not saying everyone will want those features, but it seems like a lot of people do want to use BuddyPress as a content aggregator, not just a publication.
I made a poor assumption when this was initially reported that this was a CSS issue when in fact it was a mismatched tag. Here is how to fix it…
In bp-links-templatetags.php on line 2245 replace ‘</span>’ with ‘</div>’
Here is the file/line in trac for reference.
https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/buddypress-links/tags/0.2/bp-links-templatetags.php#L2245
I think that should put this one to bed, which is where I should be, hehe.
Can you post a screenshot of the site? It looks fine in FF. There have been some reports of Safari bugs, but nobody has been kind enough to submit a fix/patch yet.
File server permissions are kind of beyond the scope of support for this particular plugin. The files are set up to be created in the standard WPMU directory, the same as the core BP components. In your case the directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars needs to be writable by the web server. You would probably have better luck opening up a support ticket with your hosting company.
Thanks for taking the time to test and post feedback.
I have not worked on BP 1.2 support yet. They are saying that it will probably be late January before 1.2 is officially released, so I don’t want to try to support it yet when a lot could change between now and then.
I am getting a lot of requests to support 1.2 “now” but all I can say is that 1.2 is bleeding edge right now, and I don’t plan to ever support bleeding edge versions of BP. Once it is closer to release I will start working on support.
I didn’t use the word “strictly”, I said it was what it did best. Huge difference.
Btw, I don’t speak for the BuddyPress creators. I am just another user like you.
I think in its current form, BuddyPress is still very much a WP(MU) plugin. What it does best is create an instant social network around a community of bloggers. Since there are so few good looking options out there for out-of-the-box social network software, I think some people want BuddyPress to be more than it is. I don’t think this is a negative, but a positive. This means that BP is lighting a fuse in people’s brains about the possibilities.
If you look at it from the other angle like I first did, where I wanted social network software, that supported blogs, its hard to embrace the fact that blogs are the heart of the app. I found peace with it by remembering that publishing content is what drives the Internet, so basically you are building onto one of the most popular free publishing platforms available.
I know Andy is working really hard to move a lot of the back-end admin into the public interface, for instance the awesome work with forums, but it is a huge job. I don’t think there is any way to make the admin dashboard simple to use for every Joe Shmoe out there just by skinning it differently. Over time bits and pieces will need to be exposed in the public interface in a way that is intuitive for noobs and gurus alike.
Can you please provide more details about how its breaking the formatting of your site? Is it possible to provide a link?
There is no way to change the directory where avatars are stored, except maybe with a filter, I would have to look at it. I don’t think its a good idea though. They are stored under the same parent directory as user and group avatars to try and do everything the standard BP way.
I have a couple of lazy questions.
1. Will BP 1.2 still support the 1.1 default theme if people still want to use it?
Edit: Yes
1(b). Is the wire totally dead, or just not used in the new theme?
Edit: I am guessing it must still be there if the old theme is still supported.
2. Is there any kind of timeline as to when the new default theme will be considered safe to start working on plugin support? I want to avoid any extra iterations due to sudden changes in direction.
Edit: Late January?
Ok, that was three.
I am assuming it won’t work because 1.2 has a new theme. I have not even looked at theming for 1.2 yet, because from what I hear, it is still under heavy development. Once it has stabilized I will create a new theme with templates that work with the new 1.2 theme.
