BuddyPress.org

Should integration with an established bbpress install be OK?

One that’s been going a while?

Cheers

Very helpful guide, got it working at once with WPMU2.7-bleeding edge, latest buddypress and the 1.0 Alpha install from bbpress.

Thanks

I don’t believe their is such a thing as “buddypress forums”, I believe buddypress requires bbpress for it’s forum capabilities.

WordPress MU will scale without question beyond the needs of any individual providing enough server backend power.

BBpress as a stand alone should be able to scale large enough for most people. Due to a the different nature of forum database structure, it isn’t as easy to breakup among many servers as a the mu blogs are. An active forum can easily have 100k’s of posts, and I’m not aware of a way to archive older posts into backup tables. BBpress uses 1 table for all posts, it would be possible (there might even already be a plugin to do this) to move each forum to a seperate table, and therefor possibly a separate server.

My concern would be for the XML-RPC mechanism used to talk to the forums. This was designed, with good caching, but on a very large buddypress install with 100’s of active groups and 10000’s of members I wonder how much overhead the xml-rpc adds compared to a straight database lookup. It does allow for the bbpress to be moved to a secondary server, which is good, and is safe as it stores a bbpress creditials and not database creditals if the admin account happened to get compromised. The nice part is, the it was written with the bbpress_live class, which could be replaced with any other class. So someone could, if so desired actually rewrite the class to talk to a vbulletin forum or other solution. It could even do direct database lookups and inserts if desired. I’m sure we will see this in the near future, as some large vbulletin sites may want to add the social abilities of buddypress, and maintain their forums, as buddypress groups.

I have only used BBpress inside of Buddypress, so I haven’t yet had to deal with scaling issues, as I beleive mine has about 45 posts total.

Any Thoughts?

Brad

http://gorgeousgamers.com/beta/

bbPress does this by default for mods and admins, so it should be that hard to duplicate. Not sure about plugin though. Have you looked through https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ ?

I have already looked at this and think it is as simple as just creating a CSS for buddypress that works on mobile devices and using Alex King’s plugin. If you want the fancy stuff, then you create a theme for mobile device and use the iTouch plugin. I already created a bbPress mobile plugin by modifying Alex’s WP mobile plugin, so it shouldn’t be that hard to do for Buddypress.

Interested in your ideas on only showing groups forums to members on the bbPress side Burt.

Lets get the general public forum working, before we get greedy. I do like the idea, but for the general good I think you could just form your own cult group, make it private and be good.

Please post any progress you make on the privatization of group forums, I would like to do something so I don’t have to maintain 2 installs of bbpress.

Thanks,

Brad

http://gorgeousgamers.com/beta/

realfam, bp covers wpmu, bbpress and bp itself. We try to address all three environments simply because we *have to* to get bp running. That thread was a little off topic for the forums. Even though it did relate to wpmu sorta, kinda.

Then again I just get cranky at times.

I thought about doing the same thing. I setup 2 instances of bbpress. One for groups and one for ‘the community’. The groups forums were hidden. I didn’t like it too much. I wanted the public groups to be public forums but read only until users joined a group. I also wanted the private and hidden groups to have hidden forums.

See this thread: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=696

Hopefully this will make sense

I have 4 directories, which I download the svn update to, and then copy them over to the live site:

/bbpresssvn

/buddypresssvn

/wordpresssvn

/privatedevsvn

By logging into the command line, I can do this

svn up

inside each of those 4 folders and it will update them to the newest trunk release. Then I run this command (or similar for buddypress)

cp -R * ../beta

and copy the files to the dev server. So far this has worked really well.

The private dev svn is where I upload my own plugins and themes I’m doing development on. This method is extremely fast as I never have to ftp any files between the internet, my laptop and back up to the web server. It does require command line access and knowledge of svn.

Hope this helps,

Brad

http://gorgerousgamers.com/beta

I understand completely. What we got here is just the core of a wonderful thing. Some areas of bp are feature rich and some need to be fleshed out. It’s up to us to determine what the features should be based on how we want to use bp. Our problem now is that the docs for the features that do exist are kinda sparse. Like any open source product it’s up to us to create them.

This is really how wpmu, bbpress and buddypress are designed. The architecture is extensible and the extensions and features grow out of need. I’d much prefer this way of doing things than being stuck with something monolithic. Here’s what ya get. Take it or leave it.

If the db needs upgrading it will auto do so when you visit the admin backend of wpmu. I don’t know how other keep up to date but I have a local copy of the SVN image of bp, mu and bbpress. I also have a test server running locally and I update that manually from my SVN working copy of all three. I used to just work off the SVN image as my dev server but that got confusing for SVN and me.

When I’m ready I update the live server. I’m in the process of creating a dev server on the same box as the live server. I did run across this little thing and thought I might try it out: http://dentedreality.com.au/2008/12/managing-wordpress-with-subversion/

Perhaps I shouldn’t have so gleefully stolen sambauer’s magic clickable url function. I just remembered that I have to go over to bbpress forums and ask his help with some xmlrpc stuff in bbpress.

Maybe he won’t notice (shhhh…)

The above instructions on how to ‘solve’ the whacky chars and format stripping that is going on is just a stopgap solution really. We need to filter the text that goes into a post and that comes out of a post. We need to filter the text coming over and going to bbpress.

We need that. This stuff is in core and we shouldn’t be screwing with it like this. I’m gonna just create a ticket that outlines the problems with text i/o in and around bp, mu and bbpress.

The bbpress side of things needs some additional filtering. When stuff comes thru xmlrpc lots of things are escaped out and they are going directly to the db like that. Bad. Then when they come back out and get sent to bp, bp un-escapes them on this side. That leaves those of us who use bbpress as bbpress with trash in the db from the xmlrpc transport.

Gotta fix that too.

Oh ya. In my travels for the above, I found the magic little function in bbpress for magic links:

bb-includes/functions.wp-core.php

function make_clickable()

line 274

I gladly stole it, copied it over to my favorite php file today ‘bp-forums-filters.php’ renamed it my_damn_make_clickable() and hooked it up to the bp universe with this underneath it:

add_filter( ‘bp_the_topic_post_content’, ‘my_damn_make_clickable’);

We got bbpress magic urls in posts!

You of course would want to put that fn in a little utility plugin that runs in mu-plugins.

Hey Mike. bp does a whole bunch of filtering before the post is sent to bbpress. About 1/2 dozen wp filters, then some bp filtering then it gets sent to bbpress. There is the bp helper plugin over on the bbpress side that does some more filtering, bbpress gets it finally and stores it. Evidently xmlrpc doesn’t want normal <> type tags so they get stripped out, replaced with [] tags instead for the trip to bbpress. To be replaced on the bbpress side with normal <> tags. Evidently we can’t have special chars such as single quotes, double quotes, ampersands and other things making the trip so bp escapes or converts them to something else for the xmlrpc trip.

When these whacky little escaped and converted chars get to bbpress they are just stored.

Viewing a bp created post in bbpress is ugly.

But we’re not in bbpress were in bp where when we send our post from bp to bbpress it gets the post from bbpress unconverts, unfilters and unescapes all that stuff to display as the post we just sent.

During this process the html markup that should be allowed like paragraphs and bold are stripped out somewhere along the line for display in bp even if they have successfully made this round trip unscathed.

Now we’re gonna talk about excerpts which have another filtering process applied to them. No we’re not. No I’m not. If you really care, which I don’t anymore, after 4 hrs of tracking this wp action, filter insanity across two pieces of software and several transport mechanisms then you could:

Comment out line: 741 in bp-core.php bp_create_excerpt()

‘strip_tags()’

Comment out line: 41 in bp-forums-filters.php bp_forums_filter_decode()

‘wp_filter_kses()’

You get excerpts in group forums and posts in group forums that look normal. You could probably copy these fns and do the approved action/filter thing. You could. I personally take great pleasure in deleting the offending lines at this point.

There’s no admin bar in the login form no.

I’m not sure what email link you are referring to. After signing up a user gets an email with an activation link and then a password and then logs in with a temp password to their blog.

To get to the admin backend (dashboard) of any blog you use: myblog.mysite.com/wp-admin/ or after logging in, the user has the option of using the menu bar’s ‘my blogs’ > ‘my new blog’ ><flyout menu> ‘dashboard’

That’s also the admin area of the blog.

There isn’t a ‘bbpress bar’ that I’m aware of. There’s a buddypress bar that has a ‘my account’ menu where you can visit your profile and other options.

I’m kinda guessing you are talking about getting bbpress and mu configured to share user tables and sessions.

https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/

https://bbpress.org/forums/

EDIT: the above was also posted in what seemed to be a topic at random on the bbpress forums.