[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

By document management I don’t mean something big and hairy like Stellent. I don’t think any Intranet would ever replace such a system not should it necessarily try. All I’m thinking is that in any kind of “Enterprise” solution, Groups should be able to do some level of collaboration on simple documents as well as offering basic downloads. How many times per day is the HR Department asked for a Benefits Claim Form for instance? So I’m just talking about commonly requested documents for employees. Not a massive database of Specs or Material Safety Data Sheets or what have you.

Another beneficial feature for enterprise would be the Jive concept of “Spaces”… which are nothing more than collections of groups. So your Head Office “Space” could have an IT Group, Service Desk Group, HR Group, etc.

But of course… depending on your needs… BuddyPress could work right now. “Enterprise” generally means decently sized corporations however… and in that space… privacy, security and some level of “document management” (as least having a small downloads area in each group) are essentials. Most of this is already in the BuddyPress roadmap. I think that in a few years… BuddyPress may well give products like Jive, Telligent, SocialText and other “Facebook for Enterprise” apps a run for their money.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Is there any reason why you made the buddypress site a subdomain rather than just being installed on the main blog?

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Yes, what is this “proprietary component”? Or is that information proprietary? LOL. I assume it centres around collaboration and / or document management perhaps?

Jive even has simple project management built in… which is pretty cool. It’s not MS Project by any means… but it would suffice for most simple projects.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

What is the thinking behind deprecating the hook and recommending a template edit? I would think that if someone is using the default theme and only wants to add a single link to the header… it might be better to do is using the hook and the functions.php file… rather than have to duplicate an entire template in the child? Just wondering.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

This would be great. I’d also prefer a simple purpose-built solution that leverages the tools already built into WordPress… but any solution would be awesome at this point.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Something along these lines

#logo {

margin: 0;

padding: 0;

}



#logo a {

text-indent: -999em;

background: url(../images/logo.gif) no-repeat;

display: block;

width: 328px;

height: 79px;

}

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

I’d say that BuddyPress is a ways away from being ready for enterprise. No privacy / security settings and no collaboration features or document management. Privacy is coming… but I imagine that collaboration features are a long way off. Altho’ there is an active thread currently about someone trying to wedge MediaWiki into BuddyPress groups. Which would help.

Yes, there are a TON of intranet solutions competing in the Enterprise space now. Basically Wiki’s and document management within a social context… rather than a document context. Much more engaging. Everyone is trying to create the winning “Facebook for Enterprise”. PB Works, Jive and SocialText are just a few. PB seems not to be in the same league. SocialText is ugly and awkward on a lot of levels. And it’s written in Perl for pete’s sake. I’m not sure how they got so much mindshare. Jive on the other hand is spectacular. Amazing application. Well worth the piles of cash they ask for it (to enterprise anyway).

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Hey Paul. Thanks for weighing in.

Yes… I wonder about that as well. If we should all be friends of not. The specific case here is that with this community, we are all friends in real life and we all know each other in real life. And it’s a very important community. We are a volunteer organization that falls under the umbrella of the Provincial Emergency Management Office. So it may make sense for us to all be “connected”.

That said, BuddyPress already shows you activity from everyone and already show you all members in the membership directory. So that’s great. And having specific “friends” (as opposed to just everyone) adds another layer to the social context which could be useful. My issue mainly is that I cannot send group invites to non-friends. So we have committees which need to have certain members in them… and I can’t invite them because we’re not friends.

But maybe that’s just an education issue. We are only in “test drive” mode right now. When we officially launch and I sign everyone up… I will need to do some education on how to add friends, make groups, join groups, etc. Especially with this group… since many are not what you would call “computer savvy”. LOL.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

@Tore: Okay. I do need it however.

@ r-a-y: Actually… maybe I wasn’t using the latest. I see the 1.5 says it includes fixes for BP1.2. Not sure when I last installed the Welcome Pack. Latest release was on Nov 24.

Also… looking at the code… it looks quite simple. And I’m thinking… off the top of my head… at first glance… that I may simply be able to modify the SQL query on line 98 to select everyone rather than everyone within the $friend array. Hmm. I’ll report back later

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

I’m using the latest version on BP 1.2-bleeding. In my experience, the new user still has to confirm you. Reason #1 is still a problem however. The Welcome Pack is great… but it’s not really meant to do what I’m proposing. Might be able to hack it to do what I want however.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Two reasons:

1) With Paul’s plugin, you manually select which members should become friends. It doesn’t friend everyone automatically. So your list of which members should become friends would never be up to date (plus I’d have to check off a couple hundred check boxes).

2) The Welcome pack simply makes friend requests. You still have to rely on the new member to accept the request. And you can’t rely on people to do that. Trust me

What I really need is a way to automatically make every single member an automatically confirmed friend of every other member.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

I agree that it’s a big step forward from a usability point of view. The two column side navigation confuses everyone at first (and second) glance. And constancy is critical in user interface design. Floating the admin bar is a great usability idea too. And the “New Post” and “New Group” buttons on those directory pages is absolutely brilliant. That’s a huge leap in usability. People are always very confused with the current Forums directory page. So that’s all great! Very good work.

What I’m really missing though is all the beautiful little details from the previous design. Those ‘speech bubble’ arrows on the title backgrounds (although they were somewhat overused). The nice gradients on the title backgrounds. The beautiful (and useful) little icons in the navigation. The beautiful rounded buttons with their little arrows, icons, checkmarks and busy cursors. And just the overall brand feel of the yellow orange and grey. It really was (and still is) a beautiful design. But generic makes more sense for a default theme. Like the Kubrik theme for WordPress. And easier theme development is always good. I also recognize the the new theme is a work in progress.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Shopp looks interesting too. It’s no Shopify… but if you need to have a full integrated solution… it could work. Looks much better than WP eCommerce… which I’ve never been a fan of. Personally.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Also try updating your permalink structure.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Two options… look into the Kaltura plugin:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-kaltura-media-component/

Or just search for a regular (non-BuddyPress) WordPress plugin and host the video contest on the main blog (as opposed to living within the social context of BuddyPress).

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Would you mind sharing this function?

This could be very useful in cases where the community is not just online… but also a real community… i.e… local volunteer organizations where everyone knows everyone in real life. In that case… it may make sense for everyone to be a friend of everyone. I love that BuddyPress shows you activity for all members (not just friends… like twitter)… but really dislike the fact that you can’t send out group invites to non-friends. In the example above (a real community where everyone knows everyone in real life)… it makes sense to be able to invite anyone.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

All of which comes back to my question above… can anyone recommend a GUI po/mo editor for Mac that works? Or is poedit the only option out there?

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Yes. I’d be very interested to know as well.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Can anyone recommend a GUI po/mo editor for Mac that works?

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Shopify is beyond amazing. I love it so much. Best eCommerce solution hands down. No script or plugin in the world can even come close. Great choice.

The solution would simply be to make two sites that look exactly alike and have them link back and forth to each other… as you are suggesting. There’s no way to have them “live” together though as they are two completely different beasts. Plus Shopify is hosted (no FTP access). Not ideal really since your logins won’t be integrated. Not sure if there’s a solution to that.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

On my server I go from zero to buddypress in minutes. Easily under 9 minutes. Not sure what issues you were having but I’d be interested to know.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Hate to say this… although I’m sure I will find little details that are much nicer… overall… I much prefer the original theme. The new one looks bland. But I guess it’s just a default theme. Maybe it’s better for it to look more generic.

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

Well you could create a site notice. Just go to your profile’s message area and click “Compose Message” and check the “This is a notice to all users.” checkbox. I also bubble these notices to the homepage by adding a simple template tag to my home.php template:

<?php bp_message_get_notices(); ?>

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

I think there are a few plugins that do that. Here’s one that I found in a quick Google search:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/email-users/

[@takeo Participant 16 years, 10 months ago]

eAccelerator made a HUGE difference on my low end dedicated server (Celeron w/512MB RAM)