BuddyPress.org

What is all this extending people want to do with forums (is bbPress) I am having trouble wrapping my head around what was deemed “weak forum functionality” What is it supposed to do that it already isn’t?

From my perspective only: I’m working on migrating a busy community of about 1000 users from Vanilla. Now Vanilla itself is just that — basic, but nice and solid forum structure. Unfortunately, Mark, the guy behind it, fractured the vibrant development community around extensions when he jumped the gun on the 2.0 release, reworked the extension repository, badly, in my opinion, and now things are in disarray, sadly, and the 2.0 version, nice as it looks, just isn’t coming very fast, while the 1.x versions, still apparently being maintained and moved forward, have a floundering and disjointed developer community kind of wondering what’s going on. It’s a bit sad to see, as it’s a great little app. It’s just that I think there was a big mistake made in the way that the community website around it (like this one here) was changed, and lost focus on users. It’s gotten better since, the developer site, but I think momentum might have been lost.

So, anyway. My users have come to expect some basic functionality from a forum, most of which ihas been added through extensions to Vanilla. Things like:

• Attaching inline images to posts
• Easy quoting of posts in replies
• Minor, standard forum structural stuff like new comments since last visit, links to last reply/replier and so on
• Inline PMs (which, in my case, will be moved to BP private messages when I do the jump)
• Individual hread pagination/navigation in the forum view
• Ways to thank (ie vote up, ‘like’, whatever) posts
• Buttons on textareas for basic tinyMCE-like functionality

And lots of other little niceties like that. I am determined to make the transition from Vanilla to BP as smooth and seamless as possible for my users (many of whom are developers and sophisticated web users, many of whom aren’t), and so the little things have been much on my mind. I want to provide them with a core forum experience that replicates as closely as possible what they’ve been used to for the past few years, but with all the other BP goodness and blog hosting with WPMU and all the rest extending it.

Pretty much all of that is now covered by plugins (or even core BP stuff) from etiviti (rich!) and Boone and others, thank goodness. But until literally the last couple of weeks, a lot of the plugin functionality to fill in those gaps, available on standalone bbPress installs through plugins written for bbPress, wasn’t available in Buddypress’s integrated version. So I am deeply thankful to folks working on that stuff and porting it to work natively in BP.

So, for me, it’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with BP’s forum functionality as provided by bbPress, but there are just a whole bunch of nice little things that people don’t think about much until they’re no longer there that I want to make sure my userbase doesn’t miss if we make the move.

Again — that’s just my own personal story with the site I’m currently working on. And yes, I am well aware that Buddypress isn’t about replicating or extending the kind of bog-standard forum style we’re all used to, it’s kneedeep in the MyFace-y Spacebook-y Twitteriffic social networking hoohah that is so au courant these days. All good.

In my case, it’s not a matter of everything looking like a nail because I have a hammer in my hand, honestly. If all my work with BP to tweak it towards something that will please my users doesn’t pan out, I won’t end up using it for this particular project I’m working on right now — but I’m so close I can taste it. Learning BP is an end in itself, as well.

@aekeron @D Cartwright I’ve found the cause of the “You do not currently have access to view any of the wiki pages of this group” problem. It is the WPML plugin. Any ideas on how to make both plugins compatible?

Thanks.

You have to add that line of code in wp-config.php otherwise how are you going to access your external bbPress folder if BuddyPress uses the same /forums/ slug as well?

I just want to say that by using the dual forum route, there are a few issues you should know:

– You’ll have to create a bbPress theme to match your WP/BP site

– Your users will be confused from a UI perspective – two points of entry for forums?

–> you’ll also run into other issues that I won’t list here for the sake of trying to simplify things

HELP! I installed the BuddyPress plugin and got this fatal error. So, I removed the files from my server using Filezilla and now I cannot access my admin panel. I am really disappointed and upset there was not a warning this would happen.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

I too am getting this error, not on my main blog, but just one of my user blogs. I thought it could have been the theme, but my personal blog uses the same theme as this user.

I have ust moved my site over to a new domain, everthing is working great on the main blog. but on my user blogs I am running into a problem with comments – they have an error…

Warning: Missing argument 5 for bp_core_fetch_avatar_filter() in senilityguild.com/public_html/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-avatars.php on line 345

The user blog with comment post is: http://senilityguild.com/ledsoul/2010/03/14/new-senilily-banner/

And my personal blog is(using same theme): http://senilityguild.com/kiwipearls/2010/03/maggotyanne/

And the main blog is http://senilityguild.com

So what has broken on this users theme? And what can I do to fix this? Wondering if I should just import that users db over again? (as i had to import the 3 user blogs separately to the main blog, as I think the main blog was a little bit corrupted as the old site had lots of problems)

Using most recent Buddypress 1.2.3 ?(get my numbers mixed up)and MU 2.9.2

Back track.

Do you intend to use group forums? If not, login to the WP backend, navigate to “BuddyPress > Component Setup” and disable forums.

Then go back to your bbPress URL and install bbPress.

—

If the answer is “Yes”, then add the following to wp-config.php:

define ( 'BP_FORUMS_SLUG', 'group-forums' );

Change ‘group-forums’ to anything you like, then proceed to yoursite.com/forums to install bbPress.

Keep in mind with this this approach, you’ll have two points of entry for forums.

The /group-forums/ URL (for BP group forums) and the /forums/ URL (for the bbPress forums).

If you want to keep things simple, just deactivate the forums component for BP.

I can’t even load the plugin on my site because it fails to activate due to a “fatal error” The dev asked for me to go to debug on the plugin but since I can’t even activate it, of course that’s not an option

I have all my site files going to Amazon s3. Have pretty much everything activated and works good. One plugin that I installed was javascript in footer and it made the pages load twice as fast.

BuddyPress isn’t sending out emails (eg. activation emails, email notifications)

This appears to be a problem with certain web hosts (Bluehost primarily).

Members of the BP community have had success using the “Mail From” plugin:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mail-from/

Try this and reply in the following forum thread if it doesn’t work:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/email-notification-not-working

Closing this thread as it appears we have two threads talking about the same thing.

Please add to the discussion here:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/group-default-avatar

@etiviti (rich!)

I think that code would override uploaded group avatars as well.

What I think Jim and Suzette want is to define a default group avatar if an uploaded one doesn’t exist.

Updated code:

http://buddypress.pastebin.com/QSWtCJMb (updated July 16, 2010 – fix for group avatar on forum directory)

Thanks for this r-a-y.

Would you suggested tutorial also apply also for single WP installs?

–>http://theeasybutton.com/blog/2009/07/17/integrating-buddypress-wordpress-mu-and-bbpress/

or is there a better one?

and

Is there a way you know that would allow me to limit forums to roles beyond just the default “member”…

I have additional roles setup and would like to limit specific forums to those roles.

Last night I ran through a setup and successfully installed Buddypress 1,2,3 on WordPress 2.9.2 without hitch. Nothing inside WP-Wishlist member stopped working.

So for me it works with WP-Wishlist as Armand above says.

My next problem is to get the Thesis 1.6 Child theme (called Genealogies) to play nice with Buddypress

BuddyPress stand-alone per blog/subdomain is not possible at this time. BuddyPress roadmap https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/ does not show that possibility in near future.

I just installed W3 Total Cache with the default settings on a single buddypress install.

Anyone figured out the best settings. I’m asking cause this thread is a week old so new insights may be at hand

Not planning on doing that, would be useless, I’m just planning to add a function that triggers when placing a post/topic and send that into buddypress’ tables, replacing the standard group forum entries.

This would mean that you won’t be able to use buddypress group forums anymore, but personally.. I don’t need them.

Good one Xevo. For external bbpress in one install, I use https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-latest-discussion/ with template tags you could use for home page and/or sidebar. Works well also with another install with internal bbpress enabled via BuddyPress.

Excellent little treat this one, I use it all the time on traditional forums. The ((bbpress)buddypress)) discussion is important, I’ll have my say.

Working on this already, got avatars and some other things inside bbpress already, working on getting bbpress into buddypress’ activity stream.

but what I could not figure out is what code is necessary for the bbPress install to be viewed as configured in the backend within BuddyPress.

Nothing to configure on internal bbPress – it does nothing since BuddyPress just wraps it for group forum functionality.

@MrMaz

Whats the diddy daddy?

Im gaggin for links 0.4 and pro

go go go go!

You know maybe the problem is us lowly users. If we didn’t depend on plug in developers so much to keep their projects functioning then it wouldn’t be an issue.

I never saw this as an issue with Single user WP plug ins so this is all new to me.

What I don’t understand is, I always assumed that plug in developers had other services that were paid services and creating plug ins was a way to not only contribute to the platform, but to show their expertise and make their names known in the community.

If a plug in goes unfixed and crashes a users or a company’s website, and support for it goes unanswered..how does that help you as a professional ?

And when you do release a premium paid plug in in the future, why would I take a chance that you won’t go missing in action again when it comes to support?

And why would I contribute to a plugin that doesn’t work and hasn’t been updated or answered support questions since late 2009?

Unfortunately some of what could have been/would have been some of the most used plug ins are on that list with no sign of the original developer updating them.

So now, instead of contributing to that developer for their hard work, I have to hire someone else to make it function correctly or build me a new one.

That really sucks.

I’m with Magganpice. I’d be more than happy to make a contribution to Buddypress Registration Options and Ahjira Recent Sitewide Articles, if they would just update them so they actually work.