BuddyPress.org

Well…. the P2 Theme has already solved the “posting from the front end” issue.

I honestly have no idea why people haven’t been ripping that out and using it.

BuddyPress is still very much a WP(MU) plugin. What it does best is create an instant social network around a community of bloggers … I don’t think this is a negative, but a positive.

I agree. That’s why I believe Buddypress has a lot of potential. It’s a social network, but with a strong content publishing angle.

I just wish that shift in focus from blog posts to “member management” would get more attention. Personally I don’t need any more new features. Adding forums for example only adds to the structural confusion. I’m still struggling with the basics, creating a user-friendly registration and profile settings interface.

The Dashboard of WordPress has gotten two complete overhauls within about the last year. The current version is awesome.

The WordPress admin interface is pretty good for what it has to do, but it is not what people expect when they sign up with a social network and it clashes with the front end interface.

Edit in response to Andrea_r:

P2 looks interesting. It’s an example of responding to user expectations and evolving interface “standards” on the web.

The Dashboard of WordPress has gotten two complete overhauls within about the last year. The current version is awesome. Extremely user-friendly and easy to use. It’s just jarring to go from BuddyPress to WordPress’ Dashboard. But there are no usability issues with it as far as I’m concerned. Would be nice if you could turn off most of the screen options by default though.

yeah, the Admin-Dashboard of WP / WPMU looks very complicated to people who have never used WordPress or really are not some sort of Publishers.

So an average person “writing his blog” will surely need a few days to understand the Dashboard and most likely would not need all the features it is offering.

An average user probably only wants to write some text and post an image or a video.

I am thinking of the Community I am trying to target which are people at the age of 50 and above. So I decided to de-activate “User-Blogs” from my installation, because I am sure my users will be confused with the backend-Dashboard.

I do hope that the Dashboard of WP will get a design-overhaul to make it easier to understand.

Gonna see how the “quick blog post form via the theme” from the “BP-Roadmap” will work out ? If this will be easy to use (without going into the Dashboard), then I might integrate the Blog-functionality back-in into my installation.

I think in its current form, BuddyPress is still very much a WP(MU) plugin. What it does best is create an instant social network around a community of bloggers. Since there are so few good looking options out there for out-of-the-box social network software, I think some people want BuddyPress to be more than it is. I don’t think this is a negative, but a positive. This means that BP is lighting a fuse in people’s brains about the possibilities.

If you look at it from the other angle like I first did, where I wanted social network software, that supported blogs, its hard to embrace the fact that blogs are the heart of the app. I found peace with it by remembering that publishing content is what drives the Internet, so basically you are building onto one of the most popular free publishing platforms available.

I know Andy is working really hard to move a lot of the back-end admin into the public interface, for instance the awesome work with forums, but it is a huge job. I don’t think there is any way to make the admin dashboard simple to use for every Joe Shmoe out there just by skinning it differently. Over time bits and pieces will need to be exposed in the public interface in a way that is intuitive for noobs and gurus alike.

Thank you!

Here is a modified re-Captcha to work with BuddyPress.

Hope this will help

http://team.pookeo.net/2009/12/22/re-captcha-for-buddypress/

This might be your lucky day:

http://www.bp-tricks.com/design/member-blog-themes-to-match-your-buddypress-theme/

For your error: you should probably make your folder link-avatars folder writable on your server by CHMODing it to 777. Almost every FTP program should do this without a problem!

also:

im getting this error:

Upload Failed! Error was: Unable to create directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars/3. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Hey there guys!

WPMU 2.8.6 + BP 1.1.2

1) Its breaking the formatting on my site

2) Can I specify a different directory to upload the avatars?

@PH (webguy),

Look into this one built on simplelife…

Features

All the features provided with version 1.1 of Simplelife (the point of the fork) and I will also attempt to merge any new future changes as well

Support for as many and as obscure services as possible. I have already included stuff that no one else does like PMOG, Atheist Nexus, Cocomments, Getboo etc.

Longer history via utilizing google reader.

Comment tracking from everywhere. That is, each time you leave a comment in the blogosphere or in a forum, it will show in your lifestream (AFAIK, no other lifestreaming service does this)

Pie Charts.

FYI: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/complexlife

It’s not as simple as that. One thing you will need to tackle is getting bbPress and BuddyPress sharing the same cookies for user authentication. You need to select the ‘use existing install’ option on the BuddyPress admin to configure BuddyPress; if you have previously selected the new install option, I don’t know what the impact will be if you then tell it to use an existing install.

What you need to do is find a tutorial or guide for how to install BuddyPress forums (previous to version 1.1, you had to do it manually and it was very complicated). You could start by reading backwards on https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/forum-install-some-helping-hints-2

I’m marking this as not an issue as there’s never a guarantee that the trunk code is going to be stable. As Andy says, report bugs in development versions on https://trac.buddypress.org/

i’m all with that…

edit: i mean before Andy’s answer.. rofl

Just add the profile fields in the backend.

I agree. Buddypress is of course built on blog software WordPress, which has a totally different focus; managing blog posts instead of people/members. So BP is still a bit schizophrenic at the moment.

People do sign up on my network (aimed at web entrepreneurs…), because I’ve integrated event registration. They also sign up for groups and sometime leave messages. Nobody creates blogs or groups unless I ask them with detailed instructions.

Imho the WordPress backend should be entirely closed to regular end users. Any admin settings that they need should be integrated in the front end user interface, under Settings on the profile page etc.

My pet peeve is related to this; Buddypress has no build-in way to store full, real name, location and other regular personal profile data you’d expect from a social network. It’s still too close to the blog software base, with the focus on username/password and managing blog posts.

simplelife looks like an easy one to work on… ugh.. this sucks…

advice: if you’re that early in the process, scrap working on that old 1.1 orange theme and tinker with 1.2

You’ll get a better answer from others, but look into the posts about using the BP Theme Framework. Specifically, using a parent theme based on a WP theme with templates for Buddypress functionality added to a child theme.

Take a look at h-mag.com. Although this is more customization than most will attempt, this is what I’m looking at doing and really seems like it can be accomplished by making heavy modifications of the template files and lots of CSS work. The developer of that site can be found in the showcase thread.

Good luck.

You could try our Buddypress Ads Plugin available at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-ads/

This plugin will allow you to publish ads through your buddypress site(with wordpress mu) Supports multiple ad networks including adsense , adbrite and many more. Just replace the ad code in the file bp-custom.php with your own ad code.

More details at http://www.pingsense.com/2009/11/buddypress-ads-plugin/