BuddyPress.org

@greghyatt

My advice would be to use this plugin instead for a wall:

BuddyBoss Wall

There’s nothing in this for me, it’s purely a recommendation. But the guys at BuddyBoss are very good.

Hey guys, this is Michael from BuddyBoss.

@style960 Thanks for the kind words 🙂

@ronia

Can you please share a link?

The next theme will be available later this month, so check back at buddyboss.com every so often and you’ll see it advertised there. It is an entirely new concept.

If you really want to play with it now, send an email to support at buddyboss dot com asking to be a beta tester, and I’ll let you in.

@disha76

do you know how to contact the Buddyboss people for pre-sales queries?

Here I am, ask away 🙂

They seem to have no open forum

True, we used to have an open forum, but we had too many spam signups and closed it to customers only.

I submitted some queries via their contact form – and got no reply from them – its 4 days.

Sorry to hear. We are usually faster, but may have been slower due to the holiday season. What email did you send from? (you can PM me this if you prefer)

I visited the Buddyboss demo but it does not show how standard Blog post…

Here is a sample blog post:
http://www.buddyboss.com/demo/buddyboss/an-argument-for-simplicity/

Front-end posting…

We are going to build a plugin for front-end blog posting. In general we prefer to put big features in plugins rather than themes, so they can work with any theme. Then we style that functionality in our themes so it looks really nice.

Do the Buddyboss people frequent this forum ? If they do and answered such queries it would be a good sign indeed.

I check out buddypress.org forums pretty frequently and answer questions 🙂

@djsteveb

I found that most buddypress responsive themes are based on bootstrap – and since rtmedia loads a lot of bootstrap, and font awesome stuff, things would break when I put them together..

Agreed, bootstrap bloats stuff and causes problems. BuddyBoss themes (current and future) are just CSS and media queries. We’re not using bootstrap.

@disha76 Did the BuddyBoss guys get back to you?

Hi style960, do you know how to contact the Buddyboss people for pre-sales queries? They seem to have no open forum for this and probably has closed the Q-A page in FAQ.

I submitted some queries via their contact form – and got no reply from them – its 4 days. But the Rtcamp guys seem to be prompt at least in this respect- they reply very fast.

I will be interested in such a theme if they can solve the “Like” problem of WP-BP. I visited the Buddyboss demo but it does not show how standard Blog post or Gallery blog posts of a standard WP 4.1 would look – blog post submission pages are missing too.

Do the Buddyboss people frequent this forum ? If they do and answered such queries it would be a good sign indeed.

@ronia I can only speak from my own experience of using BuddyBoss and I can’t speak highly enough with regards the quality of their products and the support they offer (which is truly exceptional).

My advice would be to sit tight for short while – the BuddyBoss team are beta testing a new theme which I know addresses some of the issues you’ve raised above, specifically the profile cover photo. These are available on Profile and Group pages, and be can turned on/off in the Customizer.

I can’t speak for the Media side of it as I don’t use photos on my site. But BuddyMedia 2.0 has just been released on the BuddyBoss site which includes the option to tag friends.

In terms of mobile responsiveness BuddyBoss blows everything else out of the water. Open their site on your mobile, or sign up and try the demo. RTCamp doesn’t come close.

Like I say, they have a new theme coming, I have it setup for testing myself. I’d wait for that.

This could maybe help them feel more comfortable http://www.buddyboss.com/plugins/

However it isn’t a Direct mobile solution but it does bridge the gap to a Facebook-esk feel.

hi @ahd904,

behind your tech question, two things need some clarification at least.

First:

I just want to hide some of the group creation steps as these might make the users think too complicated to join the community.

Register process doesn’t include group creation, nore joigning a group, so i guess you are thinking about a problem that doesn’t exist at this stage.

If you allow your users to create groups, they have to follow the 3 creation steps, because it is intended so in BuddyPress. Thinking that this might be to complicated, implies that you think that your users are not able to do this. Mabe you’re right, but maybe not. Anyway in this case, simply deactivate group creation for users and create users groups yourself.
Assuming that you don’t think it’s too complicated for the user to click on “join group” ! 🙄

As @bphelp said with reason, what your question implies needs some extra coding and much more as a simple snippet. You can do many things with BuddyPress, but not everithing or anything. 😉

Second:
Core simplification is a hard work (see Trac), so don’t expect that your goal could be reached easily, as BP will never be a “one click” tool. IMO this plugin is already very easy to use as is.

That said, you could imagine your project differently and perhaps apply another strategy.
For example, the ability for users to join automatically a group at registration. 2 plugins can do that actually.

• This one allows a new BuddyPress user to select groups to join during the registration process. You create the group, user choose his group.
• This one create a new Group when a new user sign up. But what will happen when you have 50 registration by day, spammers included ?

In both case, pros and cons have to be considered.

if you love the snippets and sweat on your site, here are two other options.

• Snippet: automatically add new user to a group
• Snippet: allow new user to be auto joined to groups you select from the admin (from core dev @imath). Explanation in french, coded in english – of course ! 🙂 )

@r-a-y Yes mate, you have summarized it correctly.

May i add one other important note though, this has NOT just started happening, this has been happening in buddypress since i started using it in 1.9!

I have been mentioning this issue for a while , i have tested this on 3 different live servers and a home setup using desktopserver, all with fresh installs of wordpress and buddypress alone (NO OTHER PLUGINS EVERYTIME), How many times have i tested since 1.9? well lets say its gotta be at least 100 fresh installs of wordpress all with default themes since wordpress 3.7 ish.

if you want to go look for yourself there is a perfect example of this happening at buddyboss demo theme if you log in and hit the load more button then add over 5 comments to a test status then refresh it and scroll down and hit load more again, you can do this here where you will then notice they are not collapsed .

http://www.buddyboss.com/demo/buddyboss/

I suspect a theme issue.
[ I cannot recreate this issue with WP 4, BP 2.1, standard WP theme ]

You’re using BuddyBoss theme – your issue is best addressed to them.

Some hints:
Looking at the page source you provided, several things are missing.
No ul tags, li is opened but not closed, etc.
The form appears but the fields do not.

This is how the first step form fields should appear – compare it to yours.

<div class="item-list-tabs no-ajax" id="group-create-tabs" role="navigation">
		
	<ul>
			
	<li class="current"><a href=".../groups/create/step/group-details/">1. Details</a></li>
	<li><span>2. Settings</span></li>
	<li><span>3. Photo</span></li>
	<li><span>4. Invites</span></li>
	
	</ul>
</div>

plugins I would recommend:

buddypress-activity-plus
This adds images/video/links to your activity wall, which is a facebook-ish function.
There is another plugin in the making which should be an improved version called BP-attachments

GD-bbpress-attachments
Allows people to upload images to the forum, easier then the existing system.

And ofcourse the facebook plugin.

These plugins and some playing around with my templates allowed me to make a facebook-ish site.
BBFacelook

I also suggest to look into a theme called BuddyBoss, it is a change but this is a very facebook inspired theme.

Good luck
P.H.

I’ve tested this against all my other plugins and themes and it seems to just be happening on this theme (called buddyboss).

@jono_39 Sorry to learn that you’re having that issue. It’s great that you took the initiative to troubleshoot and identify the cause. I can only say at this point that the best place to find resolution would be at the premium theme author’s forums because we do not have access to the theme.

S O L V E D.

Hi! i just created an account and loged to say SPEACIAL THANKS to the @buddyboss.
i was worked hard on a theme and found this bug after all works… i was sooo mad/sad.

hey guy you are a BOSS!
ty

@essam12 Wall posts are BuddyBoss theme-specific features. I would suggest that you also post at the premium theme’s forums.

I’m advised by Buddyboss support to call the sidebar on this page: /buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/registration/register.php … I am editing the right file?

@style960 No idea why their support is advising you to call the sidebar on the bp-default theme instead of using BP theme compatibility as we have no access to the premium theme. Perhaps you just need to clarify what they really meant by asking them to provide you with an example. Surely, you are not the only on who wants a sidebar in that theme.

Fragment caching would be ideal, but that really needs to be built into BP core. You can do it on your own but you’ll be hacking up template files right and left and it will be hard to update later. A lot of effort if you don’t NEED it. I would suggest Object Caching as Paul Gibbs said.

Ideally you will use APC object caching as it’s really fast (stores cached values in RAM). If you use W3TC with file caching (default) it will not be as fast as it has to read from files.

Here’s a tutorial I wrote about how to enable Object Caching on BuddyPress:

Caching BuddyPress

Briefly:

If you are hosting with a VPS or other setup where you have server admin access, you can contact your web host and request that they install APC on your server (it’s free) and then it will be available to you as a very fast method for Object Caching. Generally you cannot install APC on a shared hosting environment. APC stores the cached values in RAM, which is why I recommend at least 2GB of RAM for ideal server performance.

Once your web host has confirmed that APC is installed and working, you will then need to enable it for WordPress with a plugin. My recommended method is with the APC Object Cache Backend plugin (as Paul Gibbs suggested). This is not a true plugin, but rather a “drop-in” file. As such, you do not actually activate the plugin. You just need to copy the object-cache.php file into your /wp-content/ directory. You don’t even need to upload the actual plugin. That’s it! As long as you have APC installed on your server and have placed the file correctly, APC-powered Object Caching should now be enabled and you should begin seeing performance improvements. To confirm that it’s working, you can type this into your browser while logged in as an admin: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=dropins (change yourdomain.com!). It should show APC Object Cache as a drop-in, and if so, you now have a good caching method enabled.

And here’s a tutorial for setting up a CDN with WordPress/BuddyPress. This makes such a big difference and is really easy and cheap to set up. A no brainer.

Content Delivery Network

Here’s a tutorial I wrote about how to enable Object Caching on BuddyPress:

Caching BuddyPress

Briefly:

If you are hosting with a VPS or other setup where you have server admin access, you can contact your web host and request that they install APC on your server (it’s free) and then it will be available to you as a very fast method for Object Caching. Generally you cannot install APC on a shared hosting environment. APC stores the cached values in RAM, which is why I recommend at least 2GB of RAM for ideal server performance.

Once your web host has confirmed that APC is installed and working, you will then need to enable it for WordPress with a plugin. My recommended method is with the APC Object Cache Backend plugin (as Paul Gibbs suggested). This is not a true plugin, but rather a “drop-in” file. As such, you do not actually activate the plugin. You just need to copy the object-cache.php file into your /wp-content/ directory. You don’t even need to upload the actual plugin. That’s it! As long as you have APC installed on your server and have placed the file correctly, APC-powered Object Caching should now be enabled and you should begin seeing performance improvements. To confirm that it’s working, you can type this into your browser while logged in as an admin: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-admin/plugins.php?plugin_status=dropins (change yourdomain.com!). It should show APC Object Cache as a drop-in, and if so, you now have a good caching method enabled.