BuddyPress.org

with my default bp installs just about everything IS public.. it’s actually not easy to make the bp pages like activity and groups and such private.

I think most of those things are fine to be public – and people can choose to make groups members only, logged in only, or public viewable.. default is all public I think..

Most profile fields the user can choose similar privacy settings for certain fields if you allow..

Sometimes I make a group non-pulbic viewable as super admin..

I also choose a lot of things to be blocked by the robot search engine spiders – as there is no need for them to go pulling 100 pages of activity feed and such – so even though most of my BP site is publicly viewable, only about half of it is (supposed to be) crawled by the big engines – most follow the robots.txt directive – but not all..

If you mean the text: “Good people […] (Plato)”- you can remove this update from the site activity, wwhen you’re logged-in, by using:

– dashboard > activities – from here only, as site admin, you can modify the text – normal user can’t modify the text, only delete it.
or
– click on “view” below the quote (actually http://medicinalplantclub.com/activity/p/182/) on members directory or profile header
or
– click on “delete” under the activity in the front-end SWA feed

Hi
in short everything you have asked can be done.

But I’m a little bias as I honestly believe regarding technology there is nothing that can’t be achieved it just comes down to how much time and budget you have to invest… 🙂

Below is a bit of a ramble…. But might provide insight. after you organize your coffee and come back.

I have nearly completed a project that sounds similar in nature (few weeks from launch in final beta testing), however it was a highly customised solution (private membership site) .
With nearly 70 plugins, 100’s hours coding integration code (lots of trial and error) between the plugins and also compatibility tests with multiples of plugins to ensure no issues, because of slow load times the project requires deploying from CDN,fast servers and customised caching solutions.
most of work load appeasr to be bbpress – so an near out of the box solution, you prob don’t need to go that far.

But not to scare you. Here are some pointers that might answer your questions, based on my understanding of the OP.

In my case I spent many months researching solutions with many platforms (open source / paid / managed premium) – buddy press was selected simply because is built on WordPress that’s already has the core abilities you need, you just need to “hook in to’em” and take advantage of this concept – you can keep working on bettering and adding separate components / features as time goes by, great for client, works out a bit cheaper in the startup phase and great for developer – land ya self a permanent support / ongoing development contract……

Is it possible to update profile content/meta? : In general yes, buddy press allows this out of the box

Either the user or the admin can update, you can have admin only fields (the user doesn’t access them – but the admin can)
if you use a membership plugin eg, s2member – you can extend this idea much further eg, only require email on signup, then all other fields are accessible from profile and can set fields on a per membership level,

In your case, you might have different profile fields for students, teachers, Parents and only require a couple of basic fields to be completed on signup and all other fields can still be “required” when they reach their profile page.
For profile field management I recommend the s2membership pro plugin (free version available) http://s2member.com/

My project has a “todo list” for each and every member – however I’m still to this day unable to find a plugin that interacts with a completed wp/bbp/buddypress site. So I had to code one. The todo list was designed / engineered in a way that interacts with “wordpress” in general, by storing a completely unique data feed much like the activity feed with time stamps and can be programmed to be linked to any site link, media download, page view, forum post, reply any activity on the site can be logged and applied to the feed which the to-do-list interacts with and auto completing (crossing of the item) each item also has dependencies, so you rattle off a list of activities before the task is crossed off and each to-do-list also has dependencies so it is not seen by a user until certain tasks are completed, eg, purchase a course from the store, or complete a previous to-do-list.

In short: Yes it can be done, however I’m not aware of any 3rd party plugin that does this successfully.

In my case I have the to-do-list shown in the sidebar so as a member goes through the tasks the list is also available to them no matter what page they are on. But possible to publish it in the profile page if required.

Regarding email notices, I recommend looking into the woo commerce sensei http://www.woothemes.com/products/sensei/ plugin for your courses that way you have management of email notices, in fact prob most of the things you require will be available via sensei – note this is a premium paid plugin with yearly ongoing licence costs.
Without a free trial version to try before you buy.

But maybe gravity forms developer licence might be fine in your case as it has, gateway plugins, qiz and survey plugins – it would be possible to build certain simple courses on the gravity framework including delivery of custom emails – if building a form based system than certainly worth a look into – but would require a developers licence to get all the plugins you would prob require.

In fact what I do is use gravity forms email chimp plugin to send the members email address to an email list (automation campaign) in mail chimp (paid account) that auto sends a welcome emails that I have customize to suit the activity they have completed, this way I can send pretty html + marketing emails + scheduled follow up emails and take the work load off WordPress other than a quick API connect on demand.

Regarding: is it possible to have multiple logins or users access the same account/profile?
In simple: Yes, but it all comes to context of the profile, will each member be able to see other members profiles or will parents be able to edit a child profile etc.

Although my project does not require the need for 2 or more members to edit a single profile, I do have multiple levels of context (horizontal and vertical memberships) all with their own set of rules who profiles they can see and what buddypress features are available to them – some members don’t have activity feeds or messages, But I needed to ensure that members that do have access to these features can’t access the features of cross membership and so on.

This is 100% custom code (no plugin) but while coding this up I recall thinking I’m 100% confident it is possible to add another level of check “if current user can edit displayed user” and go from there, all you would need is a profile field / meta that links multiple accounts together –
Eg, a parent account has a profiled field “child user name” – they just enter the child username / user ID – and now we would add the profile check if a parent is viewing the child’s profile.

Regarding paying a deposit, and payment, this is my findings.

There was no single one membership / payment plugin that integrated perfectly into what I wished to achieve – I have tested many. please note I’m suggesting there are no plugins that do this stuff just none that achieved the outcomes I needed for my project.

– Tips: – start the project design based on the payment systems / gateway (the complete project and direction of development is 100% dependent on this) because the simple reason every feature you implement needs to check “is a paid member and what level (cap / role) ” – including free membership with paid features “is not a paid member” but has paid for… this includes recurring and non-recurring subscriptions with consideration of what you intend to do if a subscription expires.

Eg, a recurring subscription will either just auto subscribe and pay for the next time frame (or fail)
A non-reoccurring subscription will auto expire after a given time frame (or X cycles)

The difference between to the two –
Is generally on a recurring subscription when it expires it also linked to a member account to “do something” eg downgrade membership

A non-recurring subscription is generally used for a onetime payment you have access forever feature- eg, a course and resources, you pay once on a deposit, subscription over several weeks when the subscription expires the member still has access to the course as long as they remain at minimum a free member on the site. (anyhow that’s how I have implemented things)

These two concepts are completely different in the way they interact with the member as well at many levels although on the surface appear to be almost the same, add in a deposit feature you are also opening another level of context to play with, mostly limiting the available options regarding the payment gateway service you will need to use or more so which services have this feature on offer.

As mentioned – my suggestion is start with the gateway solutions first and reverse the design back to the front end. – this is the big lesson I took away with this project (4 rewrites in total) as it was always a block relating to the gateway limitations (and laws relating to online subscriptions in my country).

My project:
Woo commerce (free) for shopping cart system including purchase of courses, subscription to site and deposit/ subscription to courses, plus all other products, deliverable products, workshops, webinars, one on one sessions, resource downloads from pdf to videos. Anything you can think off can be sold through woo

Woo commerce quick cart – plugin (paid)– now I can add a buy now button on any page for any product including subscriptions – the membership info page has a standard 3 column price comparison chart with nothing more than a “sign up now” button – clicking the button auto adds the subscription to cart and opens the checkout popup with one click and without leaving the page (no need to send to store)

Sensei (paid)– for courses and fits well into woo commerce system (but requires a couple more plugins and custom integration code if implementing paid / subscription based courses )

Groups plugin (free) to easily manage roles and caps (as I have to teach client staff how to do this and manage the site) WordPress has this capability built in if your a coding ninja (I’m not)

Groups Woo commerce (paid plugin) to link groups to a purchase – apply a role / cap or groups of, to a user based on the purchase.

Then some custom code is required – to perform a check and if a user has a particular role or cap than apply the s2membership level – this check is done at the store level so if a member cancels or defaults on a payment – the membership level is auto adjusted depending on what role or cap is supplied to the user from the groups woo commerce automation. groups plugin manages non-recurring subscriptions so a expired subscription does not remove the users caps and roles (but a default on payment does)

S2member pro – for membership level management including profile fields management and most importantly complete site access management – I can apply access to each and every competent of the site this includes , forums, topics, replies, posts, pages, media, courses, and content within pages eg, home page displays different content based on the membership level / logged in or general public. s2member pro is also used to override default bbpress / buddy visibility settings eg, hidden forums only available to certain member levels – but requires custom code to apply or traverse access levels on submitting topics / replies to ensure widgets and other snippets don’t display private areas to members that don’t have access. (it allows you to write custom queries with zero concern or consideration to access levels)

For subscriptions (paid)– I use woo commerce Subscriptions plugin – this manages on its own site access based on paid recurring subscriptions (or in simple turns on or off user account based on payment) – pay x amount monthly to access certain site features, courses and resources, forums, pages, blog articles etc.

However – woo commerce subscriptions does not manage deposit / time based subscriptions (non-recurring subscriptions) eg, pay a deposit for a course and gain instant access then pay off on a subscription for x amount of weeks / months –
I was not able to find any plugin (free or paid) that does this, so I had to write a plugin currently under experimental concept stage.

Other tips: often it’s better to find compatible, well supported and pay for premium plugins that have overlapping features and disengage these features you don’t want to achieve your goals and do as little integration code as possible, but anything you do needs to be well planned and though out as to not to touch core code in any platform, framework or plugin.
At the end of the day you want the ability to upgrade all systems as time go by.

Eg, s2member plugin has its build in membership system that is “required to be active” for the plugin to work. – all I did was setup a single paid (never to be used membership) on a paypal sandbox store this includes setting up all the s2membership registration pages etc – then put a simple redirect in the .htaccess on any of these pages. Now to purchase membership you must go to the store (woo commerce) and purchase a subscription via woo – s2member has now has nothing to do with membership registration / payment systems.

And of course I have “force account creation” turned on at the store – you cannot make a purchase without signup at a minimum free site membership.
by disengaging the buddy, bbp, Wp, and all other means of registering (by redirect) but only leaving the woo commerce customer account registration available – The pop up registration form I use for free members is just a woocommerce customer account registration form (with no products attached) with a fallback to the s2membership cut down reg form (in case ajax / jquery etc not working on client side)

And now all purchases, subscriptions, shop account, courses etc are now available from the buddy press profile page also via a “woo to buddypress” plugin (or in my case built into the theme)

May sound complicated but as mentioned I would really suggest starting with payment solutions and nut out this part of the project first as this will most likely force development direction,

one of my project goals was a solution that can cater for anything…. so,

Regarding variable deposit / costs amounts based on user input – if using similar approach as I did – you would just setup woo commerce discount codes per variable outcome / result and would just reveal the correct coupon code to the user on the checkout page. they just cut and paste this code into the discount field and click apply.

or setup up multi products – one product per price base. – have the user input their details first and the result would be – apply a groups cap / role then only offer the courses products in the store with the associated price base based on user caps / role –

woo discount coupons can be setup on multiple bases – eg, deposit amount / on going subscription amount or total amount or per product or per cart total etc.

for me was plenty of research into this including concept builds of other community platforms and as above is only a bit of a sample of features used relating to the OP.
I was under very strict key point goals and achievements requiring very specific outcomes many of these affected development direction how / why I implemented the above.

There may be better simpler ways to suit your specific project, but thought it might be worth a mention for some direction. or at least insight into some of the plugins I use / ideas and concepts.

my usual disclaimer – if there is something in there for you, that’s great! if not that’s fine too!

enjoy!

Take a look at this code, I think it may be helpful for you…

I created a function vp_add_group_activity_comments() that hooks to the ‘post_comment’ action, so when a user posts a comment an activity stream item is created and added to their group’s feed.. (on my site users can only be in one group at a time)

It’s all about what you set for the $args array….

function vp_add_group_activity_comments($comment_id){

$comment = get_comment( $comment_id );
GLOBAL $wpdb;
$user_id = get_current_user_id();
$user_info = get_userdata( $user_id );

$current_user_group_id = $wpdb->get_var("SELECT group_id FROM ".$wpdb->prefix."bp_groups_members WHERE user_id = '".(int)$user_id."'");

$comment_action = "<a href='".site_url()."/members/".$user_info->user_login."'>".$user_info->first_name." ".$user_info->last_name."</a> posted a comment on <a href='".get_permalink($comment->comment_post_ID )."'>".get_the_title($comment->comment_post_ID)."</a>";

// arguments to pass to the bp_activity_add() function
$args = array(
'action'            => $comment_action,                     // The activity action - e.g. "Jon Doe posted an update"
'content'           => $comment->comment_content,                     // Optional: The content of the activity item e.g. "BuddyPress is awesome guys!"
'component'         => 'groups',                  // The name/ID of the component e.g. groups, profile, mycomponent
'type'              => 'activity_update',                  // The activity type e.g. activity_update, profile_updated
'primary_link'      => get_permalink($comment->comment_post_ID ),                     // Optional: The primary URL for this item in RSS feeds (defaults to activity permalink)
'user_id'           => $user_id,  // Optional: The user to record the activity for, can be false if this activity is not for a user.
'item_id'           => $current_user_group_id,                  // Optional: The ID of the specific item being recorded, e.g. a blog_id
'secondary_item_id' => $comment->comment_ID,                  // Optional: A second ID used to further filter e.g. a comment_id
'recorded_time'     => bp_core_current_time(), // The GMT time that this activity was recorded
'hide_sitewide'     => 0,                  // Should this be hidden on the sitewide activity stream?
'is_spam'           => 0,                  // Is this activity item to be marked as spam?
);

$add_activity = bp_activity_add($args);

// Update the group's last activity
groups_update_last_activity( $current_user_group_id );

return true;
}  
add_action('comment_post', 'vp_add_group_activity_comments' );

Activity feed for Members only or Friends only ?

Activity Loop

and pay attention to scope. As of BP 2.2.0, you can now use multiple scope.

if ( bp_has_activities( bp_ajax_querystring( 'activity' ) . '&scope=friends,groups' ) ) :

You could also use bp_parse_args in a custom function or
search on forum for similar to your question, like this one.

My Questions:
1. Has anyone experienced a similar issue?
> probably, with 2,208,785 downloads !

2. Does it appear to be a bug or am I mis-interpreting a functionality?
> probably 2 nd option

3. Any workarounds?
> next tree 3 steps back, enter the forest and run 500 yards and check under the oak.

When a group is setup, you choose to make it public, private or hidden. Depending on this status, the activity will be shown or not. Details of this are explained on the group creation page.

• For a public group, all activities are public. Group is listed on group directory.
• For a private group, all activities are private and only be visible to members of the group. Group is listed on group directory.
• For a hidden group, any thing is masked except for the group members. Group is not listed on group directory.

If you create a private group the 3 of may 2014, his activities are registered to the bp-activities tab from this date with a status of “private”.

The 17 august 2014 you decide to modify the group status from private to public.
From now on, the group is considered as public and any activity generated in the group after this date will be considered as public.

In a few words, private activities are/and stay always private and public activities are always public, independantly of the group status.
And the activity feeds don’t look back in the past.

Hope to be clear. 😉

– Can you see the groups in question in the Dashboard? Dashboard > Groups
Yes I can

– Are you logged in as an administrator or a normal user?
Administrator

– Is the logged-in user a member of the groups in question?
Yes I am

– Can you see the groups when you go to example.com/members/yourmembername/groups?
No

But I can see on my activity feed that I joined the hidden group and can access the group link from there. eg. example.com/groups/hiddengroupname, but that’s the only way I can access it.

Hi @suysal @mileskimberley & @macpresss

We have accomplished a similar task, and what a pain in the ass of a task it was…. We made it so that it’s not possible to see all members posts, you must first be friends with them. We also made ours so that you would only see the feed of groups if you joined the group as well, just like fb and all other mainstream networks, it just makes sense to do it this way, more personalised feed, less junk. Its a detailed code of a few hundred lines that we include in our functions.php file.

We paid for the solution to be custom developed via external teams because it was slightly outside of our inhouse development skillset… If you want to chip in for the code I am more than happy to send it to you. If I coded this myself and it costed me nothing to create I would just paste the code here but it’s not the case in this scenario.

Alternatively (and our preferred option), if Buddypress core developers want to build it into BP and create a setting for it in the core plugin backend to allow this option then I am happy to send it to them for free so that we don’t need to support this custom piece of code through the upgrades (which we have been supporting this custom code for a year now). I know this setting/option is not for everyone using BP but there are many out there who would love this feature included and it could be as simple as a checkbox in the backend saying should users only see friends activity, maybe a second one as well should users only see groups activity they have previously joined. We haven’t built such a setting because we use this by default.

Anyways feel free to drop me a line here or at info@fem-productions.com

Cheers

Aside from this, it’s unfortunately the sort of thing that can only be fixed if it can be reproduced

Yes – i can reproduce this though fully accept that blame probably lies with my customisations either with plugins or functions though these live happily with bp 1.9.2

So i have put this up on an online test site – (slow)
at test site http://ballynagran.isourplace.ie/ – (slow) wp 3.8 bp trunk 8227
login username ben4 password ben4
And i believe i’ve reproduced the errors reported.

Very much appreciate any feedback when time permits.

1) see http://ballynagran.isourplace.ie/members/ben4/friends/requests/ where a friendship request from ben8 has been repeated over 50 times

2) the item-meta in activity “active 3 months ago” is not being updated – login as anne anne or nils nils to reproduce

3) a very recent comment in the blog http://bep.ballyngran.isourplace.ie (at http://bep.ballynagran.isourplace.ie/2013/08/29/solid-fuel-heating-resources/) is not replicated in activity of http://ballyngran.isourplace.ie/activity

If bp 2 beta is replaced by 1.9.2 normal service is returned.

bp 1.9.2 can also be seen on a dot com version of this test site on a different server

Have installed a debug plugin – results can be seen on http://isourplace.ie/wp-content/debug.log

On a local install tried deactivating cat / tag plugin — no change.

@tduschei
That really is not what the unlbocked pages are meant to display. It is not meant for pages that need to generate the unique id of a a logged in user. That would defeat the purpose of the plugin. You can allow logged out visitors to view the members though by entering: members
in one of the unblocked page fields. I hope you understand that is the logic behind the plugin. It would not make sense to use a plugin for privacy only to divulge the most sensitive content on the site which is users profiles to logged out visitors. Its not a bug, it was developed this way purposely. Good luck!