[@sadr Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Has this plugin been abandoned?

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Aaaw, and you even had to say it two times Sorry I missed it, will give it a try. And thanks for making it; forum extras is already an essential addition to our site

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hi dpolant. I’m also from the jMonkeyEngine project. We’re happy to see you’re extending this neat plugin.

We were up late working last night, so in case Normen didn’t make perfect sense about the forum restriction, I’ll reiterate:

What we’re looking for is a way to restrict users from creating a forum once we’ve assigned them a group. I think at its simplest, we’d want site admins to be the only ones who can enable a forum on a group. That way if group admins really think their group needs a dedicated forum, they’d just have to ask us (naturally we’d clarify the process to our users).

Our site doesn’t have open group creation, so we can easily estimate no more than 1 group every week, meaning enabling-by-request would be perfectly manageable at least in our case.

Now for something more advanced, you could consider playing with the Role Scoper plugin:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/role-scoper/
It’s definitely the most comprehensive permissions-plugin I’ve tested, and it’s actively developed. What you could do is make your plugin integrate with his, so that if both plugins are present, a simple group is created, like ‘forum creator’. Now all we as users would have to do is associate the WP usegroups that should have access to forum creation with the custom ‘forum creator’ group.

Maybe this would be easier just added directly to the role-scoper plugin though, so I’ll suggest it ^^

So yeah, enabling-by-request would suit us just fine!

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

@johnjamesjacoby see, that reply of yours right there, that could’ve been a blogpost I for one wouldn’t know where to start finding out all about your extra influx of clients, assignments, WordCamp involvement and WordPress work. Even if you are a transparent character on the world wide web, I only have time to check up on, and be active in, BuddyPress.org every so often. Thanks for all the answers, I’m pretty much content.

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

@jeffsayre , you and many others here have been spot on about the BuddyPress leadership as-is. I particularly liked the notion of ‘proactive communication’ (and the lack thereof) so much that I felt compelled to repeat it.

@paulhastings0 about electing leaders, I just don’t think this is a good idea. There’s just too much to factor in when core development needs and relationships come into play. I’d argue that thanks to the combined user friendliness of WP&BP, this community consists in large of low-tech pseudo-developers such as myself, who are able to build websites and great communities with BuddyPress, but wouldn’t find our way home if we ventured far into any given .php file.

Sure, if it came to a vote I’d think about who in this community I find admirable, productive, dedicated and so on, and I’d put my vote in. But what is my vote worth in such a big matter anyways, when what it really comes down to, besides the obvious qualities of a community hero, is the prospective developer/manager’s ability to communicate and work on the same wavelength as is established in the core team already.

I don’t fear for BuddyPress; I see a very bright future for it and anyone who takes the leap to invest (freely interpreted). This has been an important discussion none the less, and as if the lesson learned was not clear as day already, I intend to spell it out:

BuddyPress development needs an extra layer of transparency. Front-line fighters of the community should be trusted to tap into the ‘inner loop’. As people who’s ‘been around the block’ (see, only mature people would refer to themselves in such a manner) they can be expected to handle sensitive information with care, knowing what to share and when to share it. Whenever the foremost figures of a community are absent, members immediately start looking for whoever is next in line, a search ideally concluded with “oh, silly me, naturally it’s that nice person who’s presence I took notice of from the start”.

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

I don’t believe bp-contents is compatible with BuddyPress 1.2, nor does it look like it will be. Burt Adsit, the developer, has not updated it in almost a year, and there’s no word from him (I tried contacting him earlier).

Your best bet would be the BP Group Tags plugin:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-group-tags/
Latest discussion here:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/third-party-components-plugins/forum/topic/buddypress-group-tags-is-now-available/

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Burt’s definitive absence is exactly why I brought it up So, you think the changes in BP from 1.0 to 1.2 are too vast to consider simply bringing his plugin up to date for the latest version of BuddyPress then?

[@sadr Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

here’s to seeing this plugin appear in the plugin directory

[@sadr Participant 16 years ago]

Loving it, will come to great use.

One thing though; isn’t this basically a lightweight, yet 1.2 compatible variety of BpContents?
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bpcontents/

I’ve tried getting in touch with Burt Adsit to no avail, but his code might still be useful?

[@sadr Participant 16 years ago]

This looks very interesting! How can one tell whether or not it will be released for free or as a premium plug-in?

[@sadr Participant 16 years ago]

Is this recommended over the “Forums Setup -> Use an existing bbPress installation” import?

I tried it, and for the life of me I can’t get it right. Not right enough anyhow. I installed a clean bbPress, added two forums, populated them with about two threads each. Then I try BP’s magic button. The config was successful it says, and I go check it out. The best I’ve gotten is one group with the threads from one of my forums, while I’ve no clue where the threads in the other forum went. I’ve tried this over and over with different settings. Just not getting there.

Since adding additional users to bbPress is a pain I haven’t gotten around to doing that yet, so I don’t know yet if users would import properly, or if that’s a problem too.

Is it just me or does the bbPress importer leave a lot to be desired?

[@sadr Participant 16 years ago]

I find it a bit annoying that the developers are so hesitant to speak on the matter, as it’s clearly a reappearing debate. Should that be interpreted as indecision, still?

Last I heard, bbPress was going to be rewritten into a native WordPress plug-in, taking advantage of custom pages and all that jazz. mmMMMm, smooth. Probably a year away though?

In my comments on this subject I tend to be a tad too negative towards BuddyPress. In truth, it provides me with all the *essentials* right here and now, I just feel it could be quite a bit better, without all too much effort.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

“Automattic needs to go back to the basic building blocks – users, posts, comments – and make sure they are solid, remove redundancies etc. And then develop different ways to connect those elements and display the data in different user interfaces; blog, social network, forum, microblogging, social bookmarking, etc“.
Just to be clear, on this account I agree wholeheartedly. Forum functionality is one thing, but a separate script all together to make a forum when you’ve already got WordPress and BuddyPress put together with their respective building blocks at your disposal, that seems like a flawed development practice to me.

With WordPress, 3.0 and its custom post types in particular, we’ve got all we need already. This is what I tried to get across on my ‘rethinking posts’ thread.
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/miscellaneous/forum/topic/re-thinking-posts/

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Awesome, loving it. Will donate $20 to a stable version. Flexibility would be great, but it’s not major imo. I’d say just get it done, and consider the more lofty goals for a 2.0.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

@andrea_r I don’t want a forum, I want BuddyPress, just the way it is The extent of “forum-capability” BP delivers fully satisfies my needs. Maybe I’ve phrased myself badly in earlier posts. I don’t need BP to act like a forum; in fact, the reason I take such an interest in BuddyPress is because it acts differently, and better, if customized right. My only requirement is some sort of forum-like functionality that frequent forum users can relate to.

I see immense potential in BuddyPress as an open collaboration platform. I do believe though that traditional social networks do not encourage collaboration, maybe continuity in particular, well enough, and so there’s a lot to learn or borrow from other systems more commonly used in that context.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

@r-a-y @peterverkooijen
Just to clarify: I’m not really for the actual inclusion of bbPress inside of BuddyPress. What I want is the ability to replicate forum-like functionality within the boundaries of what WordPress+BuddyPress can be extended to. I believe social networks can be the next generation of collaborative forums. That is the type of functionality I have envisioned for my still-hypothetical BuddyPress site anyways.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

@andrea_r You say BuddyPress is not a forum. Before it integrated bbPress into the core, I would agree. Now, BP better put that script to excellent use, or else it’s just bloat. The fact that bbPress is ‘in between places’ these days has made many of us bbP enthusiasts turn to BP as it’s successor, since it is clearly actively developed and seems able to use bbP in ways never before possible!

Until bbPress comes back to life, in whichever form that might be; and BuddyPress integration comes with it, BuddyPress might very well be used first and foremost as a forum by those of us who want WordPress+bbPress without any fuzz (because BuddyPress delivers).

By all means, I think it should be possible (and rather effortless at that) to mold BuddyPress into a more forum-like environment. After all, forums is the ‘light’ social network most of us low-tech people know as a do-it-yourself collaboration platform. Remember all of those free-install forums on a sub-domain, usually with nasty ads forced on users? Millions used those; it’s the platform we’ve come to know better than any other, as a social administrator.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

The list of browser-based Jabber clients on xmpp.org seems to have been updated:
http://xmpp.org/software/clients.shtml

I found a handful of great-looking projects here now I never knew existed! If someone starts a collaboration with one of these projects and creates a BuddyPress Jabber chat, I for one would be all over it.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

My ‘social network’ in a nutshell: Give us the tools and we make the content.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Some great points in this thread.

I think the whole concept of the ‘activity stream’ is best migrated into a per-user basis. By that I mean, I get to see the activity I care about. Groups that I follow, threads I’ve started or replied to (or even viewed often, as a sort of auto-subscribe), the activities of my friends and so on. When you have a community with thousands of active users, no one’s gonna be interested in every single new item except maybe the ones most deeply invested in the site, and even they will barely have time to skim-read through it all.

I found the new site-wide activity feed very confusing, especially since it pulls in not just threads, but replies. I have no interest in reading a snippet like “I’ll look into that” without a clue what the discussion is about.

If a site really believes that new users won’t be content just reading the latest blog posts before they dig after their items of interest on their own, they could just make a ‘featured activity’-page, which would work just like the personal activity stream except in public.

Heck, why not just make groups able to subscribe to content the same way users do? An example use case would be a developers group, where the developers could monitor particular activities that all devs should be aware of. This way, every item on BP that could be subscribed to would have both a ‘subscribe’ and ‘subscribe with group’ (for which you could select many of course).

—

Now, as for the very activity stream of ‘updates’ itself, I never fancied this feature. The way I see it it’s just a lightweight forum, in which case it makes no sense to keep it separate from BP’s other forum component. The way I’d make an activity stream (or, simple microblogging rather) would be by tags. In my group the ‘microupdates’ plugin would be enabled. Now all I’d have to do would be to add the ‘update’ tag to a forum post whenever I wanted it to appear in the dedicated ‘microupdates’ feed. It’d probably also be integrated with twitter/identi.ca

For REAL microblogging with BuddyPress, I think a proper integration with StatusNet would be much more appropriate, seeing as this application can afford to thoroughly optimize microblogging (talking both performance and API) to the extent that it can be used with stand-alone applications.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

http://www.jfusion.org/ should make this possible; in the 2.0 version anyhow, which you currently gotta get from the source as its not 100% done yet.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

For those interested or already invested in GroupWiki’s future, you should really come by the plugin forum and check out this discussion:

http://namoo.co.uk/groups/bpgw-feature-requests/forum/topic/blogwiki-vs-customwiki-pros-cons/

Your input could shape the plugin’s future

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

Excellent little treat this one, I use it all the time on traditional forums. The ((bbpress)buddypress)) discussion is important, I’ll have my say.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

One solution would be to make uploads from specific sources apply specific pre-defined tags. For instance, by default a picture uploaded to (via) “Sadr”‘s album would be tagged “sadr” and “personal”, while a picture uploaded to the “Soccer Fans” group would be tagged “soccer fans” and “group”. Additionally, more auto-tags could be defined for each of these.

Ideally, I’d like to see the possibility to easily switch between “local” view and “related” view when viewing any one’s gallery, be it person or group. That means, on the one hand you have all the pictures uploaded specifically to this page, and on the other hand you have the pictures that relate to it based on identical tags. Automatically mixing the two would be annoying when you’ve carefully put together a piece of pictures e.g. to tell a story or showcase a product, but getting a “side-tab” so to speak for related images should usually be welcomed.

[@sadr Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

+1, really need this! BP Contents seem to cover everything suggested in this thread, if not more.

I have a feature suggestion, though I’m unsure which platform (WordPress vs BuddyPress) it actually targets. I would like the ability to make certain categories and tags private, i.e. for moderators and above only. I found a plugin called “private tags”

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/private-tags/

This plugin however hides content, while all I want to do is to hide the option of adding certain tags. For instance if your website pulls official site news from various sub-blogs by checking for the ‘official’ tag, ordinary users should not be allowed to apply this tag.