BuddyPress.org

@r-a-y

I brought up this issue a long time ago when BP 1.2 was being built. Easier said than done I’m afraid. That’s why there’s a “disable activity commenting for blog posts and forum threads” in the BP admin area. If it was easy, I’m sure it would have been implemented.

This is what I was commenting on. I remember reading how difficult it would be, but I also remember some developers defending the Activity Stream as a separate thing. I don’t know how the conversation ended because it was locked and moved to some special dev forum. I hope this is something they are working towards.

BTW: For those looking for a plugin that gets you a little closer to a integrated Activity Stream (plus other great features) you should check out @nuprn1 ‘s BuddyPress Forums Extras Plugin:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-group-forum-extras/

Somewhere recently someone posted “IS BP dieing a slow death?” No. It’s going through growing pains. One of the things needed is more child themes. Not just to make it easier for everyone to have a cool looking site, they are needed to open up ideas on how BP can be used, and that will lead to a better user experience.

We went from a WP and phpbb powered site to BP about 3 months ago and made several mistakes. First, we used a “premium” BP theme (highly modified). Because premium themes need to be designed to work on any site they are filled with extra bloat (with almost all premium WP themes the bloat has got way out of hand, but that’s another rant). This killed our sever. The point being it lead us to develop a new theme from scratch, which was very eye opening and lead us to think outside the normal default theme. You would be surprised how much you can do by just rethinking the navigation and never touch the core. (I’ll post a link when it goes live in about a week.)

The second mistake we made was throwing every feature and extension at them all at once. We wanted to give them every tool we could. This of course lead to even more confusion. Having to do it over again I would have slowly rolled out each new feature one at a time so members could get a better understanding of what it was and how it was different from other features.

The good news is after a couple months the regulars caught on and slowly lead the newcomers. Since launch 3 months ago we added around 4,000 registered members are are currently adding more than a thousand per month.

There is a lot of discussion about symptoms. I believe the core problem is the pile-up of similar features that all get their own database tables – blog posts AND forum posts etc.

You really only need three basic building blocks; users, posts, comments. Less is more. Most of the issues discussed in this thread are just different ways of displaying data from those three building blocks.

Because the confusion starts in the core, you can’t really fix it in custom themes. If Buddypress was more coherently architected it would be a lot easier to provide a forum view or a blog view or a group view etc.

@paulhastings0 –
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1419

I closed this myself after the “Disable activity stream commenting on blog and forum posts” setting was created in the BP admin area.

Feel free to reopen it.

@r-a-y, @takeo

And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places.

I totally agree about this. Forum posts, blog posts, blog comments, activity streams, etc… It should all integrate with each other and show up in the same place. Was this ever submitted as a trac ticket?

You can either create a shortcode plugin that uses the BP activities loop, or create a PHP page template with the activities loop with the group parameters passed into it:
https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/the-activity-stream-loop/

You should upload it to the BP Plugin repository so that others will be able to find it in the future by searching the repository. Just make sure to include “Buddypress” in the tags.

@rossagrant I have WP 3.0 and BP 1.2.4.1 and clicking on another member’s avatar or display name goes to their profile not mine. Maybe a factor or not, but my WP 3.0 install was and upgrade from WPMU 2.9.2 subdomain structure.

EDIT – thanks @r-a-y, curious now if that happened to new WP 3.0 installs and/or to child themes which don’t already have own header.php and sidebar.php files.

I also hate buddypress.org since they started to “eat their own dog food”. Ironic. I find is very difficult to find past postings.

bp.org needs a tab with forum topics started similar to the “My Topics” tab on the forums tab available on a stock BP install.

The whole “eat your own dog food” logic doesn’t really apply well on a site like bp.org because bp.org is not supposed to be like a social site. It’s more of a developer community that isn’t activity stream centric. Even Facebook uses an older version of PunBB for their developer community, FB doesn’t eat their own dog food.

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And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places.

I brought up this issue a long time ago when BP 1.2 was being built. Easier said than done I’m afraid. That’s why there’s a “disable activity commenting for blog posts and forum threads” in the BP admin area. If it was easy, I’m sure it would have been implemented.

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It also drives me crazy how you can message anyone by typing their username in “Compose > Sent To” but only your friends show up in auto-complete. Makes no sense

Actualy, it does make sense. You’d most likely message your friends for the most part. This also helps prevent PM spam. If you really wanted to message someone, you could go to their profile page and message them. Or if you intend to message them more than once, become their friend.

Your request could be extended via a plugin (which doesn’t exist yet!).

I also hate buddypress.org since they started to “eat their own dog food”. Ironic. I find is very difficult to find past postings. And the whole “comment on a forum post in the stream *OR* in the original thread” is absolutely insane. When a user makes a comment… don’t make them THINK about where to make it. They should just make the comment and it should show up in *BOTH* places. I think that is by far the biggest usability problem with BP right now. It also drives me crazy how you can message anyone by typing their username in “Compose > Sent To” but only your friends show up in auto-complete. Makes no sense. So you get the proper feedback for friends… but not for other people who are equally legitimate recipients.

@rossagrant – This is fixed in the upcoming release of BP 1.2.5:
https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/2409

@olizilla Just to confirm that your solution seems to work, and I am yet to experience any side effects to removing the & from $members_template and treating it as a input variable and not a reference. However it would be nice if @johnjamesjacoby could provide some feedback on that.

An interesting minor bug that I have come across with drop down variables. Drop down lists are not analysed by whether option1, 2, 3… x is selected but rather by looking searching for the text string associated with the value. For the most part this is irrelevant, in some cases this may even be fortuitous, there is one particular case where this causes a problem though.

Say I have a field called gender that allows members to specify their sex with options Male and Female. If I set filter to female, all works as expected and those that are male or rather not answer are filtered out. However, if I select male, as the word female also contains the string “male”, the female results still come up, all be it with less priority at the end (I think).

Does /home/content/68/6318668/html/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core.php exist? (Just checking the obvious)

@rickisteigerwald The pastebin link hasn’t actualy expierd, it’s just broken because it sticks a “)” at the end of the URL. Try this one: http://pastebin.com/bw0suXwe .

I agree with @thelandman OOB Buddypress is the whole kitchen sink but you can cut a ton out via custom themes.

BP groups are basically a facebbook fan page. It has the exact same features. So if people are on FB then they clearly can understand the UI of BP. Maybe changing forums to discussions? It’s the site wide activity feed that in my opinion creates the most confusion.

I have the same problem… is not checkbox, i checked.

@rossagrant, have you edited the profile template page by any chance? When I created a theme for my site I placed the wrong template tag in the profile template page file and it resulted in what is happening to you.

Hello,
I’ve using the buddypress template pack and I still have this message:

BuddyPress is ready. You’ll need to activate a BuddyPress compatible theme to take advantage of all of the features. We’ve bundled a default theme, but you can always install some other compatible themes or upgrade your existing WordPress theme.

What changes do I need to make to get rid of this message.

Thanks in advance.

I whole heartedly agree with @dennis_h about the forums being the group default tab/group landing page. I honestly don’t even understand the point of having both group forums and group activity streams. It’s very confusing. On my site, I’ve done the little hack found here in the support forums to make groups open directly onto the group’s forum, and put a conditional around the group activity stream post box so that only group admins can even see it.