BuddyPress.org

TLDR version: Introduce types of groups. e.g. “User group” type – it has no forum, no “Home” page, just members listing and activity stream. This group added to Activity Stream filters where relevant.

Would have to filter out custom group type “User group” out of the /groups/directory page & member profile group page.

These custom group types could be set so they are publicly visible/private to those members involved/or hidden (visible to the creator only). As per current Group privacy settings.

Could add e.g. “Friends”, “Colleagues” and “Fans” as default, empty groups for each user on user registration. Obviously revise theme to make the “Friends” page (“Connections”, maybe) look like the Friends page rather than a regular Group.

Different users might create “User group” types with the same name but with different meaning (“Fans” could be interpreted several ways for example). This is no problem as such categorisation is defined — and belongs to — the user who does it. Might need some semantic group kind/type identifier in the code to allow FOAF/SIOC RDF profiles to be able to assigned to these “User groups”.

@jjj

Just a little clarification, not meaning to nitpick. In my post I said that friendship is a one to many relationship, since each person can have one or more friends, but yes, each relationship in and of itself is a one to one mapping.

I think I have a pretty good idea of what you want to accomplish, but I still think you need to re-think how to get there.

Based on everything you have said, what is needed is to make friendship more abstract so that it can be extended. For instance so there can be more than one type of friendship. You could even have layers of friendship types without making things complicated as far as data storage goes. Once you have some abstraction then powerful filtering becomes possible.

And instead of using groups to accomplish the grouping of friends so that you can use the group component’s features, it would make a lot more sense to refactor those features out of the group component so they can be re-used elsewhere. So if there is a particular feature of groups that you want to use for something else, ask yourself how to move that functionality vertically into the core API instead of merging components horizontally to share features.

In case all of that is unclear, basically what I am trying to say is instead of moving functionality around, break it up into smaller generic bits that can be re-used. You get rid of lots of code duplication and increase the depth of the API, while not losing any features.

It does indeed work with WordPress 2.9, however none of my registered members are showing up. The only account that shows up in the member listing is the admin account.

The default members page filter is “active members”. If they haven’t logged in and been active since BuddyPress was activated they will not show. If you change the filter to “Alphabetical” or something else, they will show.

Have any of your registered members logged in since you activated BuddyPress? (i.e. log out + log in, to remake the cookie)

I had e-mailed one of the developers, and he stated that it’s designed to run on a city/state field (eg: cleveland, oh), and was unsure if a zip would work correctly. However, check out the URL when you input a zip for the search “near location”: It turns the zip into the proper lat & long values. So, assuming your users are indexed, it looks promising that a zip can be used. (For the time being, I input values for my users into the DB table myself. However, it doesn’t seem they’re properly indexed this way, as they don’t appear through searching near their location. In addition, and most importantly, this isn’t automatic as it should be.)

@shaisimchi: The developer I spoke with also said to check the JS error console when you click the “here” link. I did that, and there were no errors. However, by doing some rudimentary JS debugging, it appears the error is coming during the call to the buddyPressGeoRebuild function in Geo.js, (at least for me). In particular, it’s the jQuery.get that seems to be causing the issue. I’m just sitting back down to play around with it, so I’ll let you know if I find the issue and, hopefully, a solution. If you get the chance to look at it and happen to figure it out, please let me know as well.

We all have to remember that BuddyPress sites can use any or all of the components; what is right for one site is wrong for another (and vice-versa).

@Peter a lot of social networks could benefit from a forum for a more centralized discussion, especially larger sites.. Forums should not be the main focus but certainly not forgotten or “dropped”. Especially since it works pretty well and intuitive after you’ve grasped the concept of the group/forum connection.

… forums and groups seem commingled in a way that is pretty darned counterintuitive

My solution is to just ignore/remove forums and focus on communication between members via (micro)blogging and threaded comments.

It’s cool to have the option of BBpress integration if you want it, but I don’t understand why it is becoming a default core component of BP. I hope BP steps back from that brink…

@Mike – selected zip code with the hope that the geo plugin will know how to find member using zip code proximity. But since I am not able to run the indexing process I can’t really tell if that works or not. Once I can run the indexing process and get some search results I will know how it actually works. Till then this is pretty much useless for me.

@stwc

I agree with you on the Group-Forums being a bit confusing, for techies and even more so for non-techies.

Any suggestions / ideas of how to improve this ?

Do the user accounts come from the regular user registration process (i.e. not Facebook Connect) and can you please remind me where in the wp-admin you can set user moderation on new accounts?

@gerikg, did u get the fb avatar to show up in bbpress?

I used the deep integration + extremely crude FB connect integration from newbie’s tutorial that suits me at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/Facebook_Connect_Tutorial1

I then added a filter for bp_core_get_avatar to call the fbconnect_replace_avatar function which was already in the buddypress-fbconnect plugin; of course i put this code as a plugin under my-plugin. Since all my bb profile edit / login re rerouted to bp, i dont really worry abt the extra fbconnect login stuffs. So far, the fb avatar works ok in bbpress in addition to normal user avatar set in bp. If someone could put this as a plugin for bb, would be great.

That’s how BP works. There is almost no security, privacy and member management built into BP. The focus is on expanding features.

There are various efforts underway to bolt better management on via plugins etc. This plugin for example offers new member moderation.

Jeff Sayre is working on a privacy component, but apparently has decided he needs to be compensated – and rightly so!

@Mrmaz well spoken

@mike

I agree with both you and stwc. I think you are both correct. It all comes down to the audience and who you are developing the site for. In my limited experience of exposing BP to uninitiated and/or Average Joe type users, the 1.1 branch’s default theme is not very “dummy proof,” and at times downright confusing. It will be interesting to see how the 1.2 default theme does in the real world.

Modeling real world social interactions which are very organic and three dimensional in a software application which is by nature “flat” is not easy, and probably impossible to get perfect. This is why I am always advocating a flexible API type of approach, over a rigid feature set type of approach. Developers need the freedom to tune the app to their audience, because no two sites will have the same requirements. I am not talking just about the interface, I am also talking about how the app behaves and responds to differing requirements.

There is also CometChat.. paid but supposed to be very good. might tell them you’re interested in this topic, so they start working on BP Integration.. it should not be very hard to make according to them:

http://www.cometchat.com/support/topic/269-buddypress-integration/

Hi Magganpice,

I tested all of the chat plugins.

I feel, non of them are ready to use, or have ads.

Toksta is a service where you give away all your user data. Also it has ads.

Buddypress Ajax Chat is actually the open source chat from: https://blueimp.net/ajax/ and I think it’s overloaded. If I want something like this I use irc.

What I saw at M Website http://simplercomputing.net/bp/ is really impressing, and exactly what I’m looking fore.

Hope to get M back to the project.

@stwc I think you make an eloquent, objective point. While I think there’s some merit in it, I respectfully disagree. Yes, people are used to (in many respects) to the old b-board way of doing forums, so from that perspective, BP will be a tad foreign. Looking at it another way though – that old method shoe-horned users into combing though a giant list of things looking for what they were interested. As a tech dude myself, I can tell you I never “browse” forums because they are just not browsable. You have to search for what you want and then pour over unrelated threads. It’s too much work.

BP Groups is a new way of looking at things, for sure. BUt it allows you to “group” content, of which forums are merely a part, in a way that makes sense for people that want to associate with that content.

The model breaks down in some use cases but I have something like a 90 “love this new way” hit rate on the concept. Only a few have stated they want the old way (and BP’s forum listing solves that problem for them.

my .02

I am also of the opinion that if you design something with a supremely intuitive interface that just “works” in a very logical manner, it doesn’t matter how much you change the model (assuming it’s a step forward)

For whoever is looking desperately for a chat for BuddyPress – here is one more I just found and it seems to be finished and working. It is not a small Facebook-like-chat though (and the free version has ads in it), so there is still some waiting to be done for this plugin here to be finished…

– http://dynamicendeavorsllc.com/premium/

– see screenshot here: http://dynamicendeavorsllc.com/premium/bp_chat_no_adsense/

Maybe this can help someone.

@shaisimchi So given the field issue I described in my last post, which ones do you choose and how does it possibly work? City? Zip Code? Do you input the ENTIRE address as a field? Curious to how you make this work.

In the codex:

https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/modifying-the-buddypress-admin-bar/

It says:

Any custom code that we create can be placed in a file called bp-custom.php. It gets loaded with all the rest of bp automatically by bp during each page load. If you don’t have one already then create one in /wp-content/plugins/. So we’ll pretend that we have done just that and that our three new functions are going to be loaded with the rest of bp.

but i needed to put the modified buddypress-admin-bar in the functions.php to work.

Is there any reason?