BuddyPress.org

Very nice, this is a great conversation starter.

In one sentence I would describe BuddyPress as: “Social networking in a box. An easy way to start your own niche social network”.

Lots of other social network tools try to define themselves as a do-it-all platforms that can be manipulated in all manner of ways, but then they don’t work so well out of the box or without some extensive configuration. Even though BP is also highly extensible, I’ve always thought the primary focus should be providing something that the non-techies can work with without much time investment. This is pretty much the same philosophy as WordPress.

a community shell

A tool based on WP code that enables and facilitates establishing an environment where people with common interests can share information ?

And extendable to one’s will, may I add…(if you know PHP, CSS, XHTML, coding and hacking of course…)

@erich73: did you hear about email ?

@gian-ava

i want to come back to your first question around the “marketing point of view”. I recently searched about “community manager” and found a lot of answers in the marketing sector. Not what i expected, but suddenly i realised that while we’re playing with BP, some marketers with long teeth are building complicated strategies to conquest markets with social tools. To make it brief, for these marketers, a community manager is a kind of “propaganda staffel” leader, if you understand this expression.

If not and to be clear, i asked holly Google and here is what the algorythm god said to me:

marketing & social networks 119 000 000 -> google.fr results

marketing & strategy 89 100 000

marketing & experts 74 800 000

marketing & teacher 48 800 000

marketing & mass media 41 000 000

marketing & professor 33 900 000

marketing & humor 16 300 000

and the best for the end:

marketing usability 5 640 000

and now let us compare with:

buddypress 2 680 000

buddypress and marketing 601 000

so we can finally enlarge to a more generic request as:

marketing & open source 64 400 000

which lies somewhere between “teachers” and “experts”.

This are funny examples to illustrate what you can expect for your question “in terms of marketing”.

View a brief resume here: https://radiowalker.files.wordpress.com/2007/03/buyit1.jpg

(not intended to offend anybody here)

A community is a group of people, unified around a project, a personnality, ideas and a RICH CONTENT. But it is also a forum (in sense of forum romanum) and naturally a politic placeholder, as a process by which groups of people make collective decisions.

So you don’t need our opinion about why and how to build a community. This is your intimate affair. You have the choice and what you decide, you have to assume.

Requesting the recipe does not cook the potatoes. Giving the recipe either.

The spirit of open source is not that everyone works for free, rather it is that we share code freely.

Nicely put! That this does seem like an appropriate venue to pull together strategies for getting plugins developed. Sometimes that is going to involve paying people money for their time, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

In terms of getting this one done: What’s a reasonable amount of money to cover the development cost? How do we vouch for our pledges?

@Dimensionmedia,

unfortunately, point number 4. is missing within BuddyPress.

It is not possible to invite outside people to join your Group.

I’m experiencing virtually the same problem. See waterwaywatch.org. The site is based on WP 2.92 and Buddypress 1.2.3 then Buddypress Widget Theme. I have tried various flavours of Buddypress with a variety of other themes aa well as trying to install as a sub-directory and in the root. The current trial is roo-based.

Looking at your website you will see that when you click on the links that work the url on is based on the root and the other contains a reference to /index.php/. When you click on other menu items – say members – the url is based on the root – thus /members/ . Clicking on that gives a raw 404. If you change that to /index.php/members/ you will find that you will get a page from your website that just says ‘Page not found’. (On my website I don’t get ‘page not found, I get the home page).

Now the bad news. I have shown that this is somehow related to /index.php/ but despite playing with this for the past week, I haven’t been able to figure out what is wrong – let us hope that someone here will take the clue and figure out the answer.

One other thing – if you create a new folder in the root called, say, /members/ and place a dummy index.htm in there, then as expected clicking on Members will open that page.

All this suggest to me some sort of mis-redirection – can anyone help?

Cheers

Will

Yes, done some testing. No bugs found yet, looks nice @MrMaz!

“O yeah. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/”

Its not the same thing unfortunately – and it hasn’t been updated since last year by the looks of it. (A bit of a red herring in this thread)

The one Dwenaus has built has the potential to store Karma points centrally from forum posts, blog posts and i suppose any activity could score.

Nice idea on the Rankings Table though :o) that’s a nice reward for community members.

Hopefully Dwenaus will let us know if that’s an option.

So, yes, by default, the register page only shows group 1 (the “base” group). You only retrieve one group via the profile_group_id= parameter in the bp_has_profile() call.

So, by default, this happens:

What I’m trying to accomplish is to hide groups 3 and 4 on the registration page not to overwhelm the user with a bunch of fields to fill out during sign-up, those fields can be filled out once the user has activated her/his account via “edit profile”.

There have been other threads on the forum regarding showing more than one profile group on the registration page; I found several, but take a look at https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/all-fields-for-registration. It’s probably going to be really difficult to implement unless you have a decent understanding of PHP.

“O yeah. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/”

This doesn’t work with Buddypress and wpmu, does it?

I would like to know more. I haven’t checked out your forum plugin yet, but definitely in need for a type of plugin that you are talking about.

Will I be able to display ‘rankings’ on a separate page that I can add to my template?

@ Warzan

I’m all for earning money on plugins/templates but I don’t want people offering their services on this forum, this forum is for questions about the main software, buddypress. If people want to earn for their efforts place it on your own blog for example or be like wpmu dev and ask a subscription fee.

O yeah. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-postratings/

And I did add something to the topic, that it’d be more interesting if the plugin would support rating/voting on all components.

“Not really interested there are enough plugins that allow this already.”

Erm ok Name one? -(that keeps a centralised karma score)

“but please don’t ask money on this forum”

He has put it out as an option – I asked him to :o), to see if anyone else would be interested in taking this plugin on a step or two further than he had intended.

Honestly people just don’t get OS at all any more – the end result is free but the time put into it isn’t ever free sombody is either paying for it or spending it.

You’ll have to excuse me but that felt a bit like a typical freeloader comment of thanks for all you hard work, I’m not interested in it, but how dare you try to make a living.

We all use the hard work of others for free, many of us rarely contribute time, effort or money (I’m as guilty of this as anyone) but is it really necessary to post when you have nothing to add or gain? – that’s not in the spirit as far as I’m concerned.

Cheers

Warren

are we all running it on a virtual machine?

Not really interested there are enough plugins that allow this already. Perhaps a plugin that allows to rate everything on a wordpress/buddypress site (with the option to disable certain spots). For example: actvity, comments, forum posts, blog posts, pictures (bp album+) etc etc.

And I understand that you want to be funded for your efforts, but please don’t ask money on this forum.

Ok

We are using BP on WP (not MU) and I would love to see your karma approach used in the post comments (it would also be great to allow users to accumulate Karma by just participating)

We see it as a great way for the community to self moderate where good posts shine and poor posts fade away. Community moderation is a pain in the butt and we don’t want to implement profanity filters etc as we think they are a bit condescending (and of course they filter out legitimate words too).

For me empowering the community with this is a great addition.

Pledge of $400 made, hopefully a few other members will join in to push the total up a little to see this happen :o)

Warren

Yay for magic!

For anyone else Googling this in the future, we do have a bug ticket about this issue — https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1970