BuddyPress.org

@kevin,

check out this link http://wpmu.org/daily-tip-fatal-error-exhausted-memory-size-when-upgrading-to-wordpress-3-0-heres-the-fix/

greg makes good points about groups and friends.

There is almost no benefit whatsoever of Friends within BuddyPress. As far as I can tell it only enables three things.
1. Stream filtering
2. Group invites (altho’ there is the invite anyone plugin)
3. Autocomplete help on “Messages > Compose”

That’s it. You can still message anyone who’s a non-friend and you can still see the full profile of anyone who is a non-friend. The people in my small community (all of whom actually know each other in real life) simply don’t get it. They ask me all the time – “what the heck is the friend thing for? seems stupid”

You may counter that my case is a special case. I mean, who sets up a community site with less than 200 users?! Who all know each other! I’m not so sure about that. I see BuddyPress being used A LOT for micro-communities. I think in fact that there will be a new trend towards micro-communities. People have seen the value with things like Facebook and they want to see that now in their smaller online spaces… local mountain biking groups… local surf donkeys… your knitting club… whatever!

And with regards to groups – same thing – groups don’t really do anything other than group people. Once you’re in a group all you can really do is post on the “wall”. That’s it. Groups is a great idea but they need to to a lot more. My users ask me all the time – “why can’t we create events in the groups”. All the time. It’s the number one thing people ask for. That plus documents, wiki, photos, etc. would all go a long way. I know much of that can be added with plugins. But out of the box, BuddyPress groups don’t really do much.

– topic tracking – favorite topics – some way to bucket open forum topics or add a topics menu item to my profile page with a listing of all my topics AND make that the default landing not the activity
– self forum activity search, “i remember saying something about XYZ, let me search my own activity” from my profile
– deactivate post update only’s, new group follows, in main activity stream – maybe even remove activity component all together.
– group landing pages should default on the forums not /home with the activity stream.

@ajamison5579; We’ve had some fun with themes too, and just getting used to what exactly is WP controlled, and what’s BP controlled! (Bit of a nightmare, to be honest, but it all seems to work ok in the end).

To use a standard theme you need the BP Template Pack (at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/). In the end I pulled the guts out of a BP template to give us a very simple Facebook-like look (http://lincme.co.uk) If you have a peek you’ll notice that a lot of BP stuff went under the knife, as it’s way to complicated and busy looking for many people. As some have said elsewhere, this site is too.

As to your final question above; the default BP theme has all the code templates you require (of course) and you can clone it, modify the CSS info so it doesn’t clash, and hack away. Any template files you use override the default ones, so you can pull files out and just modify the bits you want to. And the CSS, of course. Have fun!

Add; To clone the BP theme, create your own folder such as wp-content/themes/my-theme, then copy all the files from wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default into your new my-theme folder. Be sure to modify the header content of the style.css file so WP/BP recognises it as a new theme.

> What would you change on this site to help BP succeed?

• Integrate phpBB3 instead of BBpress as the default forum on all BP installations including here.

• Develop a proper, integrated, sitewide search for WP.org & BP.org and all WP & BP installations including here.

@gasparking i think you’d be looking to work with post_type or post_title(i think), i’d start here https://codex.wordpress.org/WPMU_Functions/get_blog_post – sounds like something i’d like to try too.

Did anyone ever get On Demand working with Buddypress ?

@andrea_r is right. There is a manual edit you’ll need to make to your .htaccess file after upgrading to 3.0. Wp-content/blogs.php to wp-includes/ms-sites.php I believe? Not at my computer at the moment to say for sure.

Haha

Good points both of you. I for one will make a better effort to peek around the forums more in the coming days. There are plans and ideas to “fix” BuddyPress.org to bring back the functionality you’re used to, so bear with it for now and know that things will improve.

@johnjamesjacoby see, that reply of yours right there, that could’ve been a blogpost I for one wouldn’t know where to start finding out all about your extra influx of clients, assignments, WordCamp involvement and WordPress work. Even if you are a transparent character on the world wide web, I only have time to check up on, and be active in, BuddyPress.org every so often. Thanks for all the answers, I’m pretty much content.

@jjj it’s not simply about fixing bugs though.

Commitment is also a difficult subject and I’m in total sympathy with your plight vis a vis work commitments, I would love nothing more than to be able to devote 100% of my time to really getting to grips with BP but it aint going to happen, I have a tonne of commitments and have to try and maintain a business and earn a living at coding, BP is not something that I do as a service it does not earn me money, thus sadly cannot command a disproportionate amount of my working time, thus my personal route to BP zen mastery will be, by necessity, a slow one

Regardless of commitment ability there are still many of us that can return good advice and feedback based on prior experience and general knowledge and it’s there that we need to see the community firm up and genuine dialogue start to happen (Yes I note your point about Trac as a focal point for a lot of that)

As for comments such as “other neat things”, and “WordCamp.org redesign.” not sure how to respond to that other than – not really interested, likely will never get to one and am more concerned with BP right at this moment but as I said in an earlier comment I get the fact that Andy doesn’t have the luxury of total devotion to BP and I level no criticism for the fact that he has to deal with other Automattic projects as well.

For those of you that want to directly influence the future of BuddyPress, http://trac.buddypress.org. Make it your friend. Learn it. Love it. Live it. Give it a hug everyday and patch a bug.

The Trac is where you can post code snippets, or giant mega patches of code that you think should be integrated into BuddyPress. You can see the timeline of when people have done what, and see the outstanding bugs that need squashing before we can safely release the next version. The more bugs you fix, the more code you contribute, the more you are directly involved not only in the community, but directly in the future of the platform as a whole.

As incentive to help out, if your goal is to be a developer and make a career out of BuddyPress, consider walking into a meeting with a possible client, and when they ask what your level of involvement is with WordPress or BuddyPress, and you can respond with “I make it,” your chances of securing that client are pretty good. In order to help make BuddyPress, you have to actually help us make it, and you do that via the Trac. I can say this, because that’s how I did it with both WordPress and BuddyPress, and I’m down to help you guys do it too.

There are plenty of people that are highly active in the Trac that aren’t so much so in the forums, and vice versa. Since we moved BuddyPress.org over to 1.2, both Andy and myself have been busy with our own assignments that yes, do involve BuddyPress, but also involve other neat things like the WordPress.com “Like” feature and planning some neat things for a WordCamp.org redesign.

Truth be told, if /anyone/ is concerned about where I am or what I’m doing in regards to BuddyPress or the future of the project, there are at least 10 methods to contact me directly and I am totally happy and not annoyed by anything that has to do with BuddyPress. Drop me a line, let’s chat http://en.gravatar.com/johnjamesjacoby

To answer a few of the questions/comments/statements in this topic: Private Messages are turned off because spam bots have started targeting BuddyPress installations and we were getting hit pretty hard after we upgraded the site. Raise your hand if you got a PM from someone claiming to love you enough to help you with male enhancement. Regarding my absence in the forums, I’ve really just taken on too many clients and haven’t had the time to look backwards at support AND forwards at development at the same time. It won’t always be that way, but it has been lately and I like it about as much as you all seem to too. I love being in the forums and helping people out, and I’m sad I haven’t been able too recently.

Andy is the figure head of BuddyPress and serves as the guiding light of the project similar to how Matt does for WordPress and bbPress, but there is no shortage of capable people in the BuddyPress community that could take this project by the horns and make it their own at any point. I know I’m not Andy, but if I can pretend to be to help anyone when he’s not around, ping me.

Along the lines of what @matt said, I love using @nacin as an example. He stormed into the WordPress Trac and started contributing code and patching bugs. Some were great, and some were rubbish, but he learned as he contributed and within 1 calendar year he has merited his way into being a core committer for WordPress, and contributed something insane; like 60% or more of the commits on the WP3.0 branch are his doing or somehow as a result of his hard work and commitment to the project. While there is only one @nacin, there is plenty of room for any one of you to be very @nacin like.

By the way, if there is an election and I’m voted out, I’m not leaving without a fight. You’ll have to chase me out of town with torches and pitchforks.

Someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but when you’re deleting the /activity/index.php file I wonder if BP then automatically grabs the /activity/index.php file included in the default theme that comes preinstalled with BP?

yourdomain.com/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/activity/index.php

Hi Matt
Thanks for posting here; it’s appreciated. The election idea was just a suggestion someone had, and it never/wasn’t intended to address the main crux of the thread, which is around communication, project leadership and where BuddyPress goes from here.

Just tried:
add_filter( ‘wp_title’, ‘bp_get_page_title’, 10, 2 );
in your functions.php

Hope this help..

Ok, so I have another follow up. Apologies to anyone who thinks I’m spamming but I feel like this could be valuable to anyone trying to edit the php files after running buddypress template pack, if you disagree please advise.

So, I’ve determined that editing the /activity/index.php file does not mean that the “activity” page will be affected. My question is, what IS affected when I edit the /activity/index.php file? How can I check my work to see if the edits are working? Do I have to edit all the index.php files before anything changes?

Or do what @LPH2005 did

@LPH2005
I’ve updated my post. Take a look again, because bbPress strips out php tags, and like the code you tried to post, it gets stripped beyond recognition and usability.

@fabloool

I do apologize. You didn’t present this as being at all related. Let me see if I understand what you are saying, as you have yet to clearly define your problem. Are you saying that when you add something like define( ‘BP_ROOT_BLOG’, 2 ); to your wp-config.php/bp-custom.php all BP pages show the members list?