[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Also, the new comprehensive search is sooooo much better than before. WANT!

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

OK, because I’ve been moaning so much, I will say that the ajax filter by clicking on a tag in the cloud, filtering the view of every section in /support, is kind of nice.

One thing I’d love to know how to do is get that ‘Click here to clear the filter’ item in the sidebar, too…

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@djpaul I spoke too soon, I think.

If I’m right, I’ve finally figured out how and when things were going wrong.

If I use bp_has_forum_topics(‘per_page=30′) in groups/forum/single/topic.php in my child theme, on pages that have less than 30 posts (or possibly 15, the default in bp-forums-templatetags.php), I get duplicated thread posts — in other words all the posts in a thread show up, then all of them show up again.

If I hack the bp-forums-templatetags.php file as described above, though, it seems to work fine. No duplicates, no matter the number of posts in a thread.

Weird. Possibly a bug?

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

@bplove I renamed most components — Forums –> Discussions, Topic —> Discussion, for example, and renamed most navigation elements to make the way that things fit together clearer. At the moment, the way things are named is awfully counterintuitive, I think, and a thread I started many months back about rethinking it didn’t get any traction, so shrug.

I trimmed down and redesigned the forums list to change the balance a little more towards useability over prettiness, used @3sixty‘s last-read plugin with some changes to save last-read time to the database so users could switch browsers and computers and not lose their last-read time, changed pagination and added pagination divs at top and bottom (just done today, here, I think), added a link to the last-post in a thread from the front, hacked BP-Like to work with Forums (changing the verbiage to ‘Thank’ rather than ‘Like’ which my users are used to), added favoriting to forum threads, used Rich’s Forums extras plugin to add a Forum index and allow activity-stream replies to forum posts to show up inline with the forum posts themselves, added oembed, attachments, and an HTML toolbar to the textareas in forums, added quoting with some changes (to allow quoting selected text only in a post — still working on that one — and to allow nested quoting) using Rich’s tools, made stickies always sticky on the forum front page rather than just the group forums, shrank avatars and rejiggered layout inthread and about a hundred other changes large and small, all either my ideas or requests and demands from my userbase.

The current implementation of BBpress is weak sauce, but it can be massaged with an awful lot of work to be adequate.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I reckon that the /support/topics page should be looking a lot more like this, for useability: http://forum.buddypress-it.it/

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Attach? As in upload? Never seen anything that could do that, yet, and don’t know why you’d want to, since activity disappears very quickly indeed off the page.

Embed, well, you can use the oembed plugin and/or the tinymce plugin (if you can get it working) or build your own toolbar above the textarea (search for ‘quicktags’ to find a thread I made for that (for forum posts, but it’d work fine for the activity update textarea too).

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I am shocked, however, that Andy left on the Activity stream Reply function for forum posts which which, by design, bifurcate the support conversations due to those users who live more in the Activity stream than Groups

I use etivite-rich’s @nuprn1 (man I wish he had an easier username to remember, display and ‘real’ username) subplugin for Activity stream replies to forum posts that show up inline (ajax-expandable) to the forum posts themselves. It’s perfect, and keeps the conversation from fracturing. Preserves hierarchy in replies, too.

Don’t expect @andy‘s going to do that here, though.

What @mikepratt said is exactly right, though. I’m looking forward to seeing some serious useability changes as a result of using the current BP here. As it stands, and much as I think BP is great stuff, I think it’s a poor fit for the purpose. I am very sympathetic to my users’ concerns and complaints during a recent alpha run with BP for an existing community, even more than I was before, about being confused about how the parts fit together (until I seriously changed things around, changed terminology with the language file, and beefed up forums functionality a lot).

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’ve just experienced this as well, but going back to double check, it seems to be fixed again. Transient problem, perhaps.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

That seems to have done the trick! Thanks again. In conjunction with ‘per_page=30’ passed to bp_has_forum_topics() in groups/forum/single/topic.php in my child theme, I’ve got stickies in the overall view and 30 threads per page and 30 posts per page in each thread.

Unless it goes weird on me. It does that sometimes.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

We have so many talented, engaged developers here. What I don’t understand is why someone with the skills doesn’t just pick this thing up and run with it. It’s clear that this new, barely-working port to BP 1.2.x isn’t what we’ve been waiting for, and not a peep from the fellow responsible (RESPECK KNUCKLES for going that far, at least) since doesn’t instill confidence.

As I’ve said so many times before, if I had the skills, I’d do it, but I don’t. Dozens if not hundreds of people here do, though, and are active in the BPDev community. Fork the code, move it forward, and you’ll be a damned hero!

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Seriously, just to repeat myself, can I suggest #158EAF or something a little darker for the color of a:links? This low contrast stuff is killing me.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Yup.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

So that’s what happened to me a couple of times!

So much frustration trying to use these forums.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Just heading to bed, but I’ll give that a shot in the morning. Thanks, Paul.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Sorry @tmort, that just went above my pay grade Not at all sure how to deal with that.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

https://buddypress.org/extend/themes/ links to individual themes are not working.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I do dev on XAMPP on Windows, no problem, but I do use http://localhost.localdomain, which (if I remember correctly) was a necessary thing for WPMU.

Not sure if that might be connected to your problem.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’ve moved BP sites around, particularly from localhost dev boxes to a live site — it’s not all that hard, but you do need to

a) edit bb-config.php and wp-config.php
b) go in to the MySQL database and edit every occurence of the old URL to the new one.
c) make sure your htaccess files aren’t borked.

What I’d do, step by step, is

1) export your entire BP MySql database.
2) search and replace URLs in the export file (but keep the original just in case)
3) Move all the files to the new location on your server
4) Make sure .htaccess, bb-config.php and wp-config.php are OK.
5) Import the SQL file with the changes.
6) Login and cross your fingers!

Honestly, though, I’m pretty sure that’s all I’ve ever done in moving from /localhost to a live server, and it’s worked fine. YMMV.

If you keep the original db export and original copies of any files you change and things do sideways, it shouldn’t be that hard to revert.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Could we get some ordering filters (alphabetic, BP version compatibility, recently updated…?) and maybe the option to Show (20/50/All) on the Plugins directory? That’d be most useful!

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Never mind about the permalink to forum post thing 3 comments up. I found the # under the Activity stream item. You’d think after using this thing so long I’d know where stuff is. (or maybe it was just added )

That said, in the /support view, ‘Latest’ (beside the link to the last poster’s profile) should be a link to the latest page/post. Clicking into the thread then having to click the last page in the pagination div is suboptimal. Also, there really ought to be a pagination div at the bottom of the page as well.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

If I understand what’s happening, the forums summaries blocks (for lack of a better description) in /support change their order based on where the most recent comments occurred. That’s kind of a useability nightmare, not knowing from visit to visit where things are going to be located on the page.

Edit: I’m not even sure what’s happening. My head’s a-spinnin’ trying to find stuff that was nearly muscle memory, having spent so much time on this site in the past.

I’m pleased that the site is using the latest BP, but man, it is really hard to find stuff you need to find. Harder — and I didn’t think this would be possible — that it was before, even. Patience, though, I know — presumably it will get better.

One thing that I think is really being pointed up here is how weak the forums component (the most useful component for us as developers/users of this site) is, and how much work can be done (through plugins, thus far, but that kind of makes the core look a bit weak if a dozen plugins are being used on the showcase site) to make the forums experience better.

That spotlight on places where there is room for improvement can’t be a bad thing, I hope, but it sure makes using the new site frustrating so far, and I’ve been working with BP for my own sites for almost a year, so I’m familiar with its quirks already. New users? I can’t help but think they’d be a little put off.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’ve ported this (in a very semi-informed and probably mistake-filled way) to work with Forums posts. Works flawlessly on my testbed install, and I’ve been trying to contact Hempsworth here and via his site(s) to send him my work if he’s interested in using it at all.

Posting this here in case he sees it and not email or PM or etc.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Hah. Answer collision, but I win for completeness.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Use the oembed plugin, the forums attachment plugin, and either the tinyMCE plugin, rich’s toolbar solution or mine.

That should cover all the bases.

[@stwc Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

(Confirming my blockquote was stripped in my reply, above)