BuddyPress.org

@Simon, I guess my question is how you deal with upgrades to BP or your WP theme (if it wasn’t purely homegrown)? It sounds like you were modifying HTML of the parent which I thought was a no-no for upgradeability??

That site is so beautifully, I’m sure many inquiring minds want to know.

Could someone explain the difference between buddymatic and the built-in buddypress parent them in /themes/bp-sn-theme? It seems like they’re both theme frameworks. Is the benefit to buddymatic that it can support all of the themeatic child themes out there?

I’m in the process of selecting a buddypress theme framework and it seems like using the built-in framework buddypress provides would make the most sense?

I’m sure I’m missing something obvious though. Thanks for the replies in advance

@designody

you might be talking about something like the “Group-Blog-Plugin” is offering ?

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/groupblog-v13-adding-members-instantly-thanks-boone

Hi Jean,

h-mag.com was initially setup as a wordpress template. After setting up and installing BuddyPress, I imported each of the components one by one and began modifying the parent theme’s CSS and restructuring the HTML to match the functionality of the original wordpress theme. There are not shortcuts, just a lot of tedious work and trial and error.

I agree. Just turn off blogs. I don’t necessarily see BuddyPress as a social network for bloggers.

Original question:

… deprecating the friends component entirely, and using the groups API to mimic the behavior of “friending” people, which is basically just grouping people together anyhow

Removing the friends component would be great from a KISS perspective. Could you do Twitter-style following with the groups API?

I’m not sure if this is the best way but what you could do is put your html/script in a seperate file called “flickrscript.php” and put it in your active theme folder.

then include it in your template by calling it directly:

<?php include( TEMPLATEPATH . ‘/flickrscript.php’ ); ?>

That should work I think! If you want to entirely new BuddyPress page you can follow this guide:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/make-your-own-custom-buddypress-page

Good luck!

I would like the twitter list style with two communication.. maybe create special friend/group hidden from other people/friends..

Please this is my first experience with WordPress and buddypress. I have installed wordpress Mu/buddypress successfully, I want to have a site where the main page will be used as an introduction to my social networking site, as well as the platform for login, and the second page to be the main social networking page… i have installed some customed made theme for the purpose of the Social.n/w.. but the whole thing is confusing me. PLEASE… i will be grateful if any one can give me step by step hint on how to go about this…….

….placing one theme as main page in subdomain and the other in main domain is…? Please Help…

well

let me clarify

My Intention was You do not need to modify the core.

To change the dropdown box, I have used the filter “bp_search_form_type_select”

and since buddypress traps the search url and makes a redirect accordingly, so “bp_core_search_site” works with that and redirects correctly.

@henrybaum, what Is appearing in your drop down box(Is it members, groups, forums, Blog), select blog and try the search. Is buddypress on your root domain.

PS:Please Note if you have put the code correctly, The ‘Blogs’ will be replaced by ‘Blog’

Re: #1:

if you do not want to have User-Blogs, just turn this feature off.

You will then have Groups, Group-Forums and a Social-Network without “User-Blogs”.

@Bowe,

well said.

I guess what we do NOT need is “twittering” and “tweets” with 140 letters.

But what we do need is a feature to “FOLLOW” somebody we are interested in, like “follow” somebody because we like the way he is writing his Blog or we do like someones opinion on something. Following somebody does not relate to the “quality and somewhat lenghy” content of that specific person.

In fact we could “FOLLOW” a “Person” as well as a “Group” – and after a while get to the point to invite this person for a “Friendship” or decide to “Join” a specific Group.

Hm well……

reading what I have just wrote myself – not really sure whether we really do need a “FOLLOW”-feature after all. Because if you like somebody, you can directly request a “Friendship” without following him for a year

So at the end: do we really need all this TWITTER-FOLLOWING-stuff ?

Probably just having something like “subscribe to this Forum-Thread” or “subscribe to this Blog” and receive an e-mail when there are any updates would be what we REALLY need ?

KISS

Keep It Simple & Stupid

@peter certainly not offensive. seemed out of place. no worries

@erich73 the friend group setting could easily be done in the context of merely “grouping” your friends. No need to make them part of a “friend” group. ok, i will stop duping that word. I will call it a friend list!

@bowe I think the functionality is there to filter in the way you suggest. Of course, you are talking something different when you discuss allowing people to create their own Home pages.

@Travel-Junkie – thanks for the code.

That works for a sub item of profile. What if I want to have it be under the member name slug. So to use your example, what if I wanted to load my custom template with /members/[username]/update-location instead of /members/[username]/profile/update-location?

1. Revive the wire function?

2. Build an extra if to check role in the blog creation function.

3. The theme framework is great, if you want buddypress on an existing wp theme, than rebuild the theme to work with buddypress. You don’t have to use the parent/child setup, if you just copy the parent theme and recall it to your own theme, your making your own buddypress theme.

@ Mike:

As an example, a place to tweet from my site won’t turn many on. Not because they aren’t on Twitter, but they don’t come to the site to do it, don’t usually want to tweet about what they are doing on the site and the added convenience of tweeting from within the site isn’t worth the real estate. Still – it’s a great idea for other sites.”

This is exactly what makes these kind of decisions so hard to make for the development team. Basically there are so many different needs for different usergroups, that decisions about core functionality are always very hard to make. I apreciate the amount of interaction between us (end users) and the developers (core + plugin developer) on the forum and the trac, and I do think we’ll get there in the end. Since I am not a programmer I can’t say what is technically the best way to do something, but I do know a thing or two about social networking and online communities in general.

The thing which makes BuddyPress really stand out is, is that it actually crosses a bridge between blogging/publishing of content and micro-blogging/meaningles social networking. There has always been a clash between those two types of users and some usersgroups are way more focused on quality (and somewhat lenghy!) content then others. Your example about real estates agents looking for totally different ways to interact then a typical social networks user is spot on. You do not need twitter integration on your site, and you do not want to have those functions overcomplicating your site. My users on the other hand are EXTREMELY mixed on so many levels. The only thing they have in common is the fact that they all have the same disease. This makes creating my network a really big challenge and it means that there are many factors I need to think about. Many of my users are used to blogging and discussions forums, and a younger generation is used to facebook and twitter. Currently the more traditional users have more then enough to do on my site with the amazing Blog + Group functionality. These components can be tweaked to my liking by WordPress (user blogs) and the Group API.

Since the introduction of the Group API you have seen that there are plugins coming out which let us (the site owners) decide what we want to add to our social network. Plugin developers can easily hook into the Group API and add functionality to it, which might be specifically written for a specific usergroup. We’ve seen Groupblogs, External Blogs but also Twitter integration plugins, and it made the Group component by far the most powerful and promising BP component as of yet.

The mock-up I’ve made is basically saying that this kind of functionality should also be extended to regular profiles, so we get much more flexibility to create the social network we see fit. This does not only mean adding new functions but also disabling unneeded ones.

If the Friends functionality was extensible trough the Profile API it would mean that it could be customized into something that would fit different needs for different sites. Maybe some sites would like to allow individual users to add Twitter Widgets to their profile page, and allow groups of Friends to discuss on a seperate forum. I could imagine that a “family oriented” community could greatly benefit from such a feature, but your real estate community would not! With a Profile API it would mean that it could be added as a plugin on top of the basic friend functionality which everyone could use as a base to work from.

So basically I’m saying that it might be smart to work on making all the components as flexible and easy to extend as the Groups component, then it won’t take long before before there are so many options available to do thing they way you want, we will all be happy! There are more and more people discovering BuddyPress as a “general” Social Network solution instead of a “social network for bloggers” and there are even a lot of users who want to get rid of the blogging functionality and make it a normal social network. If WPMU and WP merge there will be even more need for individual/profile related functionality and a good API is the first step to achieve this!

@MrMaz

It would be a NICE feature if theres a general “Landing Page” to add links and it automatically detects if they are logged on and it ask them to log on if they are not.

also.. a BookMarklet that people can use.

I guess the “Group-settings” (public, private, hidden) would give an additional level of Privacy-Options for “Friends” if we go with the idea of Andy and JJJ.

So I can set a certain “Group of Friends” to be hidden from all my other friends.

That would be a very needed feature !

For example you are running a website for a niche-company-directory:

so the user will have friends at his suppliers and at his customers. But I am sure he does not want his customers to know who his suppliers are and vice-versa. This would be also the case at other niche-websites, like dating-websites, etc.

@Peter Why would you ask that question in this thread? I’m sure Bowe can tell you how many are in the Dutch BP community in a less non-sequitor thread, no?

His screenshot was full of Dutch and said Brajesh is in the Netherlands as well. Just thought it was surprising/funny. Apologies for any offense.

Yes, Facebook burned “friending” into the lexicon and made a mess of things as far as that definition goes. But it’s here and it’s what we have to work with. … We should start with what a “friend” means/should mean in the BP environment.

Just because Facebook has it doesn’t mean Buddypress has to have it. Imho Buddypress should concentrate on profiles, (micro)blogging and groups. I’m certainly not in favor of turning levels of friending into Buddypress’ center piece as Bowe’s screenshot basically proposes.

Wow!! I wish this post had a different title because it hits on some really core issues that I hope everyone chimes in on. I was searching on how to let users “post” without giving them a full-blown blog/website and all the hassles that comes with. Mr. Maz crystallized it for me:

Hammer meet nail!!! I’m one of those people.

However, with the merge coming, BP will be exposed to greater millions who have NO interest in creating a community of bloggers, but just a community for a new or pre-existing site. The pre-existing site is primary and the community is secondary. As software officially “adopted” by Automattic and arguably best of breed, Automattic will have to deal with this.

I chose WP/BP for a niche site where I want to build significant user interaction functionality because:

• I believe WP is growing and development in core and plugins will surpass others for some time
• Its ease of use for the developer with some php/mysql background (me)
• I found BP later, but it is still has a brighter future than the competitors I’ve seen and the merge will only multiply that (but, there are alternatives https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mingle/ , https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/alkivia/)
• There are so many people trying to solve the same problems, I trust they’ll get it fixed – eventually

All that said, I think I’ll start another post on how to make BP work for sites that just want to use BP as a foundation for social interaction and not as a blogging network.

a bit more food for thought… http://daggle.com/facebooks-microsoft-moment-1556

@Boone I understand, but think about how much you just described to merely add some meta information to a user’s friends. I’m not convinced it reduces and simplifies.

@Peter Why would you ask that question in this thread? I’m sure Bowe can tell you how many are in the Dutch BP community in a less non-sequitor thread, no?

@Bowe Nice 1st attempt. t has many elements Andy is trying to capture in 1.2 default theme. I appreciate everyone’ kinds words. My objective is to try and force myself to view this from the perspective of he user. I have a userbase that has a few quirky characteristics: ages 17-90, usually very bright but many find this whole area unintuitive. lastly, they all want to engage with each other. So…every element on the site has to promote that re-connection and engagement…intuitively. As an example, a place to tweet from my site won’t turn many on. Not because they aren’t on Twitter, but they don’t come to the site to do it, don’t usually want to tweet about what they are doing on the site and the added convenience of tweeting from within the site isn’t worth the real estate. Still – it’s a great idea for other sites.

Back to our issue: in a nod to @jjj’s original point, we have a set of groups (graduating class groups) in which users are auto joined upon sign up (having been required to input class year) Now, this is a group that everyone already is “friends” with. There is merit to some sort of auto-friending action which is being proxied by joining the group. Most users on the site seek out their year group and friend them. Maybe we should keep it that way (let’s you keep your distance from the jerks in your class) but we could also do more in making the process easier.

As we start from scratch and redesign the sight with the new parent/chile & 1.2 functionality we will focus on the following questions: What’s going on in the things I care about? e.g groups and friends and What is going on in the site that I might care about? Focus on too much of the former and users miss out on a lot. Too much of the latter and it doesn’t feel like a personal experience of connection and engagement.

The last thing we need o NOT lose sight of: As we connect, sync and add inter-operability to all of our components, how we present all this activity to the user will make or break the success of the site. Actions and activity need to be where the user expects them to be. Not cause we just threw it in there. It can’t appear out of place or cobbled together. Many a site has blown off this aspect and wondered why the user behaviors on their site are erratic. Example (minor but critical) On testbp.org a user made a post onto a topic in the BP testers group. That topic has 3 pages of replies. When you click View Thread you are taken to the topic’s 1st page. There are pros and cons to this. Pro: you get to start from the beginning and go thru all replies Con: you have to start from the beginning and goes thru all replies….or make your way to the end . Now you can reply from the bottom of the 1st page but you will actually never see the reply whose View Thread link you clicked on, so the user is often mis-oriented. I know I digress, but my users have written me to emphasize that it was often the person who made the reply that prompted them to click View Thread and then they never see that reply again.

The point is, it’s the user and his relationship to other users (friend or not) that often drives behavior and expectations. That’s why adding avatars to all activity completely changes a feel of a site and makes it seem personal.

Just speaking strictly from a software design standpoint, calling someone’s friends a group does not make sense.

A friendship is a direct relationship between two people. It is a one to many relationship which is handled by using a lookup table that points back to the user table. It is just about the fastest possible relationship that you can have in RDBMS because both keys point back to the users table and the optimization of that query is killer if you have the right indexing. The only faster one would be a self join, for instance Bob is Jane’s spouse, which requires no lookup table.

A group however, is a one to many relationship, which is handled with a lookup table that acts as a bridge to a third table that holds the groups data. This is much different when it comes to querying. If friends are just Bob’s private group, it is going to make querying for relationships between two people very convoluted in many situations, especially where a fourth, fifth table or more is involved. There will be round tripping for data and/or nasty DISTINCT queries in many cases where it would not otherwise be necessary.