BuddyPress.org

It’s not any one plugin that does the job. Here’s how I do it.

Create a new blog (let’s call it Test) and set the privacy (more privacy options needed here and bp-mpo-activity-filter to keep it’s content out of the stream) to “only blog admins can see this blog” (this is necessary, but keeps things clean since nothing should get added to this blog).

Use new-blog-defaults to set the blog defaults including menus that the users cannot use.

Members is used to set capabilities of the admin (I don’t change the role of the new blog just the admin’s capabilities) so the admin is “like” an editor or author, but I can still let them change their themes (theme changing is very important to young users).

Wpmu-plugin-manager lets you set which plugins to allow users to use and which ones are automatically turned on (I always turn on Ozh’s Admin Menus for example). Turn on any plugins you want to use and tweek their settings and any other blog settings.

Then Adminimize to further hide menus the users don’t need (it only hides menus, but most users will never find them anyway). Adminimize is great for simplifying the write panels for posts and pages too. Any plugins I don’t want users to change settings on I can make sure they don’t have access to by making sure the menus are hidden.

Now use new-blog-options under the site admin menu and give it the blog id of Test and check off any of the database fields you want new blogs to have (make sure the Members and Adminimize ones are checked). Maybe this isn’t exactly what you want, but it is probably the best overall way to simplify blogs for younger users.

Also since I use these with classes, I just import my whole list from a spreadsheet using DD Import Users as subscribers on the main blog. I use limit-blogs-per-user and set the site-admin/options to 2. Now users can create their own blog, but can only create one blog of their own. This saves me a lot of time, but still gives the users a fair amount of freedom with their blogs.

It isn’t a perfect solution. I would like to see some of the overlapping capabilities put into one plugin for cloning blogs. I would especially like to see the ability to have different templates (ie base blogs to clone from) so that I could have one setup for say grade 1 students and another setup for grade 5 students.

Hope this is useful to someone.

@intimez

is_site_admin() is the function but will probably be deprecated soon when WP 3.0 comes out.

Try this out:

<?php if ( is_user_logged_in() && !bp_is_my_profile() && function_exists( 'bp_send_private_message_link' ) && ( my_bp_is_friend() || is_site_admin() ) ) : ?>

—

re: direct url to private message… you’ll have to modify the /bp-themes/bp-default/members/single/messages/compose.php file in your child theme to do a check for the username and if the logged-in user is friends with that username.

If the username is friends with the logged-in user, show the form to complete the message; if not a friend, don’t show the form.

There is a function that checks if a user is a site admin (can’t remember the name now but if you can’t find it let me know). you can use it to exclude the admin this allowing him to do send the message.

Thanks,

Shai

@r-a-y

I did what you mentioned but the code in bp-custom.php is now showing up at the top of the page visible to all. Maybe I missed something else?

edit: ooops, my mistake. It’s working now but I can PM by going direct URL.

edit2: how to enable so admin can still PM w/o being friends?

He means either a) install Buddypress with regular, non WPU version of WordPress, possible since BP1.2 or b) go into your Site Admin–>Admin–>Allow new registrations and disable it in the WPMU dashboard.

1. problem with blog creation

My wpbp installation is in the folder http://mydomain.com/mywpbp.

When someone wants to create a blog the url he gets is http://hisblog/mydomain.com/mywpbp, which of course won’t work. Any solution? Can I use the present installation with some changes, or have I to start from scratch with a new installation?

2. Just one blog

This may sound funny because wpmu is meant for creating many blogs.

However, my main attraction is in the social network miraculously made possible by buddypress.

For my needs, I only want a single blog (for the admin to put contents) and a social network for users (which includes groups and forums, with the blog-creation option invisible to them).

Is there a way to handle this?

Go to the Site Admin menu -> Themes and disable them there.

It does not deactivate the themes, it removes them from the Appearances tab.

All in all, here’s my approach that I use on MU/BP sites ~

1) modify the register/register.php wp-signup.php hardcoded default text and url slugs.

2) enable xprofile and require additional fields upon registration.

2) use a captcha ~ i’m fond of ReCatcha

3) make sure you and check the NO setting under “Allow blog administrators to add new users to their blog via the Users->Add New page. ” in wp-admin/wpmu-options.php “Admin > Site Options”

4) I ban or limit the registration domains (also in Admin > Site Options) so that the commonly used spammer domains are blocked from registration and then I add an email contact for owners of these addresses to manually request registration. I hide the email address from bots with HiveLogic EnKoder

5) I then firewall off entire blocks of IP’s from my servers from commonly used spammer IP ranges you can find at sources like spamhaus.org .. and considering that these are one language sites, the need for access for the IP blocks on the pan asia network or eastern europe are unlikely. If you have a multilingual site, this might cause issues to very few users. Cpanel, Plesk, BSD, etc have tools to do this.. if you’re on a shared server, ask your hosting provider if they can do it for you, and they may be likely doing it already.

6) I also recommend using Askimet.

At the moment, the classes are added to individual posts in a topic, by javascript. This results in extra server load, because wordpress has to do two whole startups for each such page. The trade-off is adding another apply_filter and a do_action to the theme, but as this plugin already benefits from one such proposed theme change, we can get two for the price of one.

Proposed change to buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/groups/single/forum/topic.php, from line 26:

<ul id="topic-post-list" class="item-list">

<?php while ( bp_forum_topic_posts() ) : bp_the_forum_topic_post();  ?>

<li <?php

$topic_post_id = bp_get_the_topic_post_id();

echo "id='post-$topic_post_id' class='",

apply_filters('bp_single_forum_topic_post_css',array('class'=>'', 'post_id'=>$topic_post_id)),

"'";

?> >

<div class="poster-meta">

<a href="<?php bp_the_topic_post_poster_link() ?>">

<?php bp_the_topic_post_poster_avatar( 'width=40&height=40' ) ?>

</a>

<?php echo sprintf( __( '%s said %s ago:', 'buddypress' ), bp_get_the_topic_post_poster_name(), bp_get_the_topic_post_time_since() ) ?>

</div>



<div class="post-content">

<?php bp_the_topic_post_content() ?>

</div>



<div class="admin-links">

<?php

if ( bp_group_is_admin() || bp_group_is_mod() || bp_get_the_topic_post_is_mine() ) :

bp_the_topic_post_admin_links();

endif;

do_action( 'bp_single_forum_topic_links' , $topic_post_id );

?>

<a href="#post-<?php echo $topic_post_id; ?>" title="<?php _e( 'Permanent link to this post', 'buddypress' ) ?>">#</a>

</div>

</li>

<?php endwhile; ?>

</ul>

Proposed change to buddypress-rate-forum-posts/bp-rate-forum-posts.php, insert:

// modifies the css class for topics to highlight popular posts, and hide very unpopular ones

function rfp_css_class_for_post($args) {

global $rfp;

$class = $args['class'];

$post_rating = rfp_get_post_rating( $args['post_id'] );

$rfpclass = '';

error_log('rfp='.print_r($rfp,true));

if ( $post_rating == NULL )

$rfpclass = '';

else if ( $post_rating >= $rfp->superboost )

$rfpclass = 'rfp-superboost';

elseif ( $post_rating >= $rfp->boost )

$rfpclass = 'rfp-boost';

elseif ( $post_rating <= $rfp->hide )

$rfpclass = 'rfp-hide';

elseif ( $post_rating <= $rfp->diminish )

$rfpclass = 'rfp-diminish';

//error_log("in rfp_css_class_for_post rating '$post_rating' adding class '$rfpclass' to '$class' with args ".print_r($args,true));

return $class.($class?' ''').$rfpclass;

}

add_filter( 'bp_single_forum_topic_post_css', 'rfp_css_class_for_post', 3);



function rfp_echo_hidden_post_link($post_id) {

global $rfp;

$post_rating = rfp_get_post_rating( $post_id );

if ( $post_rating && $post_rating <= $rfp->hide )

echo "<span class='rfp-show' onclick='jQuery(this).remove();jQuery("#post-$post_id").removeClass( "rfp-hide" );'>Click to show this hidden post</span>";

}

add_action( 'bp_single_forum_topic_links', 'rfp_echo_hidden_post_link', 3);

And then the javascript section starting jQuery(document).ready( function() can be removed from buddypress-rate-forum-posts/js, and the corresponding section can be removed from the end of buddypress-rate-forum-posts/rate.php

webby, it will be in the memberlist, but nobody will know, that this member is the admin.

To move the search try adding this to your CSS:

#search-form {margin-right:30px;}

You can also hide the ‘Visit’ menu item with the following CSS:

#bp-adminbar-visitrandom-menu{display:none}

If you don’t want to get into the database, the simplest way would be to create another administrator account, logging in as the new admin, and deleting the user named admin.

PS: @hnla Buddypress now works with regular WP, too.

I would be careful about confusing plain single user WP with WPMU they are not exactly the same beast and that list – which is written with single user WP in mind – suggests things that would perhaps be inadvisable such as renaming DB tables.

As for hiding the admin account not really sure it’s that huge a concern? but others may suggest a means.

I noticed this topic is marked as resolved. How can I enable this?