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Of course… if you have a million pages it will wrap anyway. That’s horizontal nav for ya. But yah… the default width on #nav is pretty narrow. I think they’re trying to allow a lot of space for the site name on the left.
Looking forward to the new plugin. I’ve applied your theme tweaks using the “extras” plugin but I don’t get a “view activity replies” link.
I agree. This is a usability issue. You have to navigate the fly out menus with perfect right angles. People naturally mouse in direct diagonal lines… not right angles. The problem is that the BP menus are very lightweight (which is a good thing). They are almost pure CSS. To add in a mouse out delay or allow for diagonal mousing or whatever would require a lot of Javascript I imagine.
Magento has a really interesting solution to this however. They make the fly out menus physically overlap the parent menu by about 50%. Not sure exactly how it works and what JS might be involved… but it works great!
I guess I could answer my own question about compatibility by setting up a test site with 2.9.2 and 1.2.4.1. Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.
I don’t imagine it would be related to the WordPress version… but you never know. One thing I find confusing is the instruction to replace the “activitycomments” folder in the default theme. BuddyPress 1.2.4.1 does not have such a folder in it’s default theme.
I tried both plugins. I couldn’t get either one to work. What I’m looking for is, when a forum post shows up in the activity stream and someone comments on it in the activity stream (using the reply button)… I want that reply to show up in the original forum thread. The fact that this doesn’t happen by default is, to me, a huge usability issue with BuddyPress. But that’s another issue. Is either of the plugins in this thread meant to accomplish that? Neither one did. I’m using BP 1.2.4.1 with WP 3.0 RC2 in single mode (not network mode) with a child theme. The parent theme is bp-default. I copied the included theme files (the “activitycomments” directory) into my child theme folder. Unfortunately, the documentation wasn’t much help. What was your process @thekmen?
Thanks guys. Tried the plugin. Activated. Modified the theme. No dice here. Is it as simple as activating that plugin and adding that one single line to the groups/forum/topic.php file?
Actually… Terry is correct. SPAMers are in fact hiring people from India to fill our registration forms and CAPTCHA’s by hand. They get paid next to nothing and just sit there for hours and hours a day filling out CAPTCHA’s. I’m sure the majority of SPAM comes from Bots… but it’s not all bots. And there is no way to stop a human short of banning entire countries.
Known bug I believe.
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2419
With the “Friends” component disabled, autocomplete on the “Send To” field in “Messages > Compose” should work for all members. Otherwise there’s no way to choose a recipient. You can write a message but you can’t send it. The only way to send a message is to visit the recipient’s profile and click “Send Private Message”. If you can message anyone by visiting their profile, why not be able to message anyone by visiting “Messages > Compose”? With “Friends” turned on, autocomplete could go back to using just friends. But with “Friends” turned off, autocomplete should work for all members.
Essentially, turning off “Friends” should be like saying that everyone is a friend… rather than like saying that no one is a friend. You can see all members in the member directory anyway.
My only fall back right now (I refuse to enable friending) is to simply hide the autocomplete box completely. So you’ll only be able to message one person at a time by going to their profile and clicking “send private message”
We have a small community of only 160 people. We all know each other in real life. So the friend feature makes no sense for us. We can all see each others profiles anyway. And I’d added the invite all plugin so you can invite anyone to a group. But autocomplete when writing a message doesn’t work. I think it confusing to users that you SHOW them everyone’s profile in the member directory and yet don’t allow them to auto-complete their names when creating a message. I really don’t want to have to enable friending (and force everyone on the site to friend everyone else on the site) just so autocomplete works. This to me is broken. If you show all users, then auto-complete all users. Or at least give us the option to auto-complete all users when friending is turned off.
Wow. 7 months ago. Still not working.
I agree… events should be in the core. Maybe some day.
I think I’ll create a ticket as an ‘enhancement’ suggestion… that activity feed comments made on blog posts and forum posts go to both the activity feed / permalink “view” page AND the original “canonical” version of the conversation (said blog or forum post). Seems very confusing as it works now.
@rich! @ etiviti Seems like a good solution to have the reply show up in both places (i.e. so activity stream comments to a forum posting go to the permalink page but also to the original thread). I looked at your test group however and didn’t find any info. Could you perhaps post some code? Or if the testing is successful, maybe even put it out there as a simple plugin?
I’m going to take a look at the entry.php file now.
@3sixty: Yes… it already exists… but it’s confusing, unintuitive and inconsistent. Users don’t understand the difference between updates and forum postings in the activity stream. They don’t understand the difference between replying in the activity stream and replying in the thread. Any why should they? Reply means reply. Period. The way it works now is just plain broken. You end up with people replying to thread in the stream then wondering what the heck happened when they visit the thread later and don’t see their contribution. So the only alternative is to turn off activity stream replies for forum postings. But that’s even worse. Now you have bits of conversation in the stream that you CAN reply to (updates) and bits of conversation in the stream that you CANNOT reply to. Well you can… but you have to know enough to click “view” to take you to some other place and reply there. Very inconsistent. Too much friction. And not at all intuitive. I think that in the case of forum postings, replies made within the activity stream go to the THREAD… NOT to a permalink comment page. Think like a user. Like a human. Not like a programmer.
If there a ticket for this serious usability issue? There should be.
Well the tickets for 1.3 are only 17% done and according to trac 1.2.5 is still a month away. So I’m just basing it on that. I’m not complaining either. Just saying… it looks like WP3 and BP1.3 are not going to “sync up” at all as far as release dates go.
Well… I’m running WP3.0 beta and BP1.2.4 on a test site and have seen no issues whatsoever. But the official mention of “WordPress 3.0 compatibility” in the roadmap for BuddyPress 1.3 gives me pause. Given the pace of development of the two systems… there could be a very long time gap between WP3.0 and BP1.3. I’m guessing that BP1.3 is still many months away… while WordPress 3.0 could go release candidate any day now.
Thanks. I hope they don’t get rid of the forums. I think conversations would get lost if they were just organized by time and thrown into the stream with everything else. Altho’ I guess you can view the single page version from the stream. So maybe it would work. But I’d hate to lose the directory view. I guess the “directory view” could just be a filtered stream… but the stream filtering right now is pretty ugly and unintuitive… hidden as it is in a LONG drop down list with no icons or anything.
Anyway… as it is be default… reply in the stream OR reply in original thread… that’s just confusing. I’ll try turning that setting off and seeing if I prefer it that way. Thanks guys.
I figured this was something that has been previously discussed. Haven’t been that active here in the past couple of months.
Apparently it’s a known bug.
Ahh… thanks @r-a-y. I see that this is a known issue. Good to know! Thx.
@rich! This is with BP 1.2.4.1 and WP 3.0 beta-2 r14896. My server time is set correctly in WHM and it is also set correctly (and identically) in the WordPress options. Not sure where else I could check? PHP config?
On a related note, one thing Facebook does really well is filtering and post type identification. In BuddyPress… all updates look about the same. A small icon for each type of event (friend add, new forum post, etc.) would go a LONG way to making the stream easier to understand at a glance.
Also… the filter menu is kind of a mess. I would get rid of the “Show Show Show” text… makes is much harder to scan. And I also think I would not hide the filters in a drop down where they are much less likely to ever be used. Facebook has a linked list with icons for filtering. Much nice interface than a drop down.
I know some of the icon stuff might be possible via theme development. I’ll look into that. But it would be nice if the default theme itself included more default visual cues. It’s pretty much 100% text-based right now.
The Group Activity Subscription plugin has an option to send a notice to all group members regardless of their notification settings. You might use this in combination with the BP Group Management plugin. You could use that plugin to add all members to an “Announcements” group. Just make sure you keep on top of it so that everyone is always a member of the “Announcements” group. People can still leave the group… so this isn’t great. But it’s an idea anyway.
