[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Yup. This is precisely the point I’ve made about buddypress.org (a point that will apply to many of our own sites as well) many many times before, and is at the heart of my reluctant but growing disenchantment. Agree, 100 percent.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

We used to be able to Favorite forum threads here. It was one of many important pieces of functionality we’ve lost. Your favorites from the old site still exist, though, at https://buddypress.org/forums/profile/%5Byourusername%5D/favorites . I haven’t a shred of a clue why @apeatling decided to omit that functionality in the new design.

I’ve ported BP-Like to work with forum posts (don’t know if it coexists happily with the original BP-Like, though, but it should), and have it working fine on my testbed install. I’ve tried to contact Hempsworth, the original BP-Like author, with no response. He’s disappeared from the BP world at least temporarily, it would seem. I’m hesitant to release it to the wild because I am a completely crap coder, and it’s a hacky cut and paste job, but like I said, it works almost perfectly for my limited purposes, and if someone with better PHP/BP skills would like to take it over and release it as a plugin, please PM me and we can talk.

Useability on buddypress.org and in BP in general, particularly in forums, continues to be a major, major concern.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

bbPress as a component of BP is weaksauce, I would agree. But it is a non-trivial project to write a fully-featured forums app/component. I would support native forums functionality in BP, definitely, especially if it let us do more with it, but I suspect given the lack of focus on that functionality here and in BP itself, that we’re not very likely to see it anytime soon, if at all.

I’d love to be proved wrong. BP with a robust forums component, native to the app, with an admin interface and plugin support — I shiver with pleasure at the very thought.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

I think we agree, then, for the first time ever: that Andy &co should be focussing on fixing problems (usability and otherwise) and the dev community can extend core where they like.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Heh. I’m not disagreeing with you in principle, but taken in the context of Buddypress itself, that’s pretty ironic, with forum comments (and everything else) showing up in Activity streams as well as where they were originally posted.

(and in this specific case, it shows up inline, thread-indented on the Activity item and indentically inline, thread-indented on the forum comment itself, and that’s pretty intuitive — may not be best-practices UX, but I’d say it’s better than the default scenario. My great worry these days is that the dev community is being compelled to fix problems with usability of core BP, as much or more so than extending what’s there.)

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Good on you, foxly. There are a lot of significant problems with BP (made more apparent by the new design we’re using here on buddypress.org, which will, hopefully, mean that they are addressed more quickly), and it’s great to see someone from the dev community step up with substantive proposals to address one of the most glaring ones.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

My suggestion (just because that’s the ramshackle way I go about stuff) would be to grab a free BP theme that you like (or just a copy of the bp-default theme), set it up as a child theme, grab a plugin or two that you like, and start messing around with the templates and the css to see how things fit together. I work on an XAMPP install locally for dev, and use Notepad++ and Firebug on Firefox for coding, for what it’s worth.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

It’s been working flawlessly for me.

and throws in a different workflow for people to get used too

Don’t see how — it consolidates rather than adds, the way I’ve got it set up. *shrug*

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Example: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=%2B”is+proudly+powered+by+WordPress+and+BuddyPress”; (front page of every BP site on the net)
Example: http://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&q=inurl:%22/community/members/%22+%2Bbuddypress (members page of every BP site on the net)

Very much behind this, but I will mention that changing those two things are the first thing I’ve done with my BP installs (along with other stuff I mentioned in the article I did for the I-guess-it’s-not-coming-back bp-tricks.org). Agree that an install routine that forces the user to customize their slugs (explaining possibly consequences if they don’t) would be a great idea.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

For stuff like this, the fastest and easiest thing to do is just look at the template files you’ll be modifying for your child theme, the stuff in bp-themes/bp-default to see how it’s done. Have a look at /bp-themes/bp-default/members/index.php for example.

You probably want bp_get_loggedin_user_fullname(). See here, too: https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-discussions/buddypress-template-tags/

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Could it be that you’re not uploading the files as ASCII where appropriate? (also, please try to name your threads informatively, so those of us who are willing to help can guess whether or not we might be able to… )

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Yeah, this is an annoyance, and a WordPress thing as opposed to something that can be changed in BP. Users can, of course, case their display names however they like, but the actual login must be lowercase with no non-alpha characters. And Buddypress will only send @notifications to the login name, as opposed to the display name. (In other words, @moddedlife will notify you, but @Justin won’t, and may send a notification to completely the wrong person, if it works at all) I’ve reported other issues surrounding that too, but since the redesign of this site, I can’t find anything, or I’d link to it.

The login/display name thing is suboptimal and potentially very confusing for users, but I don’t know if there are any plans to do anything about it.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Rich means that you’ll have to manually go into your MySQL database (with PHPMyAdmin or another GUI tool) and edit data directly until the bug gets fixed, which is not for the fainthearted if you haven’t done it before. Make sure you back up your db first before messing around.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

@wa007 No problem. There are a few threads as well where people have offered advice on doing this sort of thing, or if you get stuck, ask back in here.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Thanks, Paul, I’ll try that tomorrow!

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

The app is using the translation strings (with default verbiage) — that’s why you see stuff like __( ‘Leave Group’, ‘buddypress’ ) for example, in the code.

You need to make a custom language file as well as changing slugs in wp-config.php (optionally). Search this forum for more info on how to create a language file and switch it on with bp-custom.php for your install. I recommend getting poedit from Sourceforge to make editing easier.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

http://bpdevel.wordpress.com/

https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

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

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

I’ve been trying like crazy to get that happening with some success, but some very wonky failure too, that I have been totally unable to track down.

For example, in my childtheme’s members-loop.php, after [?php do_action( ‘bp_directory_members_item’ ) ?]

I’ve added a div with

[span]Website: [a href=”[?php bp_member_profile_data(‘field=Website’); ?]”][?php bp_member_profile_data(‘field=Website’); ?][/a][/span]

which works fine.

What I’ve totally been unable to do is to display that span conditionally based on whether the field has data or not. Not sure if it’s a bug or if I’ve been trying the wrong things.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Oh, and also boldface please a permalink to the latest comment made inthread from the forums directory view, preferably on the ‘2 minutes ago’ (or whatever it is) timestamp?

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

I’ve come to see the wisdom of the Groups as organizing principle, with forums/activity streams/[arbitrary other functionality through plugins or whatever] hanging off them.

I think, as is often the case with these things, that the terminology used has confused the issue for many people (including users).

On the site I’m currently building, I’ve done away with the words ‘forum’ and ‘forums’ completely, using ‘discussion’ and ‘discussions’ instead, globally, through editing a custom language file.

My userbase were completely confused by the default terminology, but got it instantly after the change.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

Our forum thread favorites are still there and accessible from the old site (https://buddypress.org/forums/profile/stwc/favorites for example) (and public for all users, which I just realized). Pleasecan we have a return of an ‘Add to Favorites’ button for forum threads?

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

@el_terko Gee, I was looking for this post, had it as a favourite but when bp.org was redesigned, it misteriously “vanished” (together with all my other favourites)…

They’re still there, but it’s incredibly annoying not to be able to add new ones. Here: https://buddypress.org/forums/profile/el_terko/favorites

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

I agree – the disconnect between the activity stream commenting and everything else is a huge usability hole. It sucks. At the moment, my only solution is to disable commenting on those activity stream items (which you can with an existing radio button on the options page IIRC). That makes it more confusing for the user but at least we don’t “lose” replies.

@jivany Using Rich’s subplugin for Forum Extras allows Activity Stream replies to forum posts to appear inline with the actual comment in the forum thread. It is excellent as a workaround for this particularly glaring problem, but the fact that it (and all the other tweaks that we have to make) is necessary is in and of itself indicative of the interaction design issues we’re discussing.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 1 month ago]

You do know that Andy (who’s the main BP dev) was one of the people who put together P2, right? I wouldn’t imagine that it was ‘overlooked’ precisely. In fact, that pretty much useless ‘What are you doing/Post something’ textarea on the Activity page was lifted directly from P2.