BuddyPress.org

How about we put all of the components that allow activity to hit the stream(s) into an array. Say…

$bp->activity->actions

Then, that array (which already exists) can be altered by a potential administration panel (or future permissions later.) BuddyPress plugins can register themselves as having activity with bp_activity_set_action( ) to which there should be a bp_activity_remove_action() that would add or remove activity abilities to the array such as $bp->activity->actions->comments_enabled

The array will have everything set to true by default. Constants in bp-custom.php or a plugin that makes an admin panel can then set those values to true or false…

bp_activity_get_action()

As long as there’s proper actions in place, plugin authors can sneak in there and append data to comments/forums/posts, whatever, provided everything is available at run time, which it usually is.

Long story short, add another $arg to set if commenting is allowed or not.

Even better…

This would also be a great reason/time to implement an activitymeta table, as it would allow this type of thing to not be core, but plugin territory if someone needs it. Or, that kind of on/off switch could just be in sitemeta and a plugin could block comments on specific activity actions from within the action.bp_blogs_activity_commenting = false

There’s actually a ton of ways this could be done pretty easily.

I think a great way to solve this problem would be to have a way for the activity stream item itself to know which post it is pertaining to, and pull that stream and display it on the post either in lieu or or addition to comments. Then people could comment on the activity stream from within the blog post too. Imagine a blog post that said “Comment on this blog post, and see what people are saying about it.” They’re the same but different, and if templated correctly now you have comments about the text of my blog post, and comments about the fact that I posted it.

Same for forum topics and posts. Maybe you use topic/post activity as a way to say “This post is dumb and I think you’re stupid” without ever mucking up the actual forum topic of discussion itself. So you branch out new activity not just with new branches, but whole new ways to discuss that specific activity without interrupting that activity.

Take this forum post. If it had a link to say “Comment on this forum post” and it slid open a post box from within the forum for someone to give me feedback and say “This post is really too long and boring” then from within the forum view you can see each forum post has 3, 4, 20 activity comments on them.

That, is the future of how to integrate the activity stream fully into a website.

…in my opinion(s).

I think Andy touched on that in another thread. I’ll let him respond but I’m guessing the answer… for now anyway… is probably not.

A QUESTION CONCERNING THE WIRE

This is about the 1.2 theme update, so I’ll post it here to save a fresh topic… Will we be seeing a textarea at the top of a users activity stream allowing friends to post comments, as we had with the wire?

I see that activity/wire/status have been merged, so I was anticipating this – but cannot see it on testbp.org yet?

We do that now of course too… but our selection of elements is limited.

You could fake this offcourse, make a wp theme that looks exactly like your buddypress theme.

No, this hasn’t been tried yet, because there is no need and it’s still in it’s baby shoes.

Limitations would be no cross-browser support.

No oppurtunities, unless offcourse IE suddenly desides to fully support HTML5.

HTML5 is made to make markup more easy and more readable, therefore your actually use tags that fits it’s content. For example <header> for the header.

Depending on your audience you don’t necessarily have a choice about IE6. It’s not about you. LOL. I dislike it as much as anyone, but sometimes requirements are requirements. And personally… I’ve never had much problem supporting it. Even with some really far out designs. There are only a few big gottchas and you know that going in and code around it. Simple.

That said… I have no problem whatsoever with Andy not supporting IE6 in the new theme. That’s his choice and it’s a reasonable one. If you really need to use the new theme and you really need it to work on IE6… well… I guess it’s time to start hacking together a conditional ie6 bug fix stylesheet

I really do like the re-theme, Andy. I hate to say it, but the previous them took up so much real estate on the screen, and the way panels and columns were laid out was pretty difficult to manage with css for making changes in child themes, for example.

I’m not going to fuss right now since I already built a child them off the parent (see arxpoetica.com), but one of these days I’ll convert over.

My two cents about IE6, people *really should* be scrapping as much as possible. It’s true that there’s still a substantial amount of people on IE6, and I’m not a hater (well, that’s not entirely true, I do hate IE6, ha), but when there are so much better alternatives to IE6, why continue to support something which, in terms of technology, is 90 years old. (I’m using dog years analogy here: the lifespan of technology is much shorter than humans, so you gotta adjust accordingly).

IE6 is on its last breath, no question.

The other thing is that BuddyPress *is* cutting edge, and I imagine people (maybe not the core team, but plugins developers) are going to start folding in HTML5 technology soon to what’s going down here. I know I plan on using such for my site in the not-too-distant future, and while IE is not HTML5 friendly period, and many browsers still have problems, IE6 is just out right the bane.

People need to realize that its support for IE6 is no longer a normal request. It *should* be a thing of the past, IMHO.

</rant>

@Andy Peatling

Please revert your three column change for the group homepages. It was so much better with two columns. One of the major improvements with the new theme was the way the layout didn’t change everytime you clicked somewhere.

I can understand people’s frustrations but I’m personally very happy with the lack of IE6 support. It means I can have a clean conscience when I don’t support it in any plugins/themes/etc. Luckily at the university here our ITS guys have managed to push through an IE upgrade on the campus computers. It’s only IE7, but it’s still a million miles better than 6 (and the students also get access to firefox and opera).

Does the bp-classic theme work with IE6?

@jivany: That is the case in a lot of corporate environments. Maybe that’s what happens when you don’t upgrade your OS for 7 years? Most corporate environments never “upgraded” from XP. And who can blame them!

The company I work at is 3,000 people and everyone is on XP. The only supported browser is IE6. You’re not even allowed to run 7 or 8. Being a designer… I’m on a Mac. One of only two in the entire place LOL. I have every browser under the sun installed. For testing.

I installed the original and it didn’t work. Haven’t tried the ported version mentioned in this thread.

I’m with David Lewis. More than reasonable for Andy to skip IE6 for now. As for dropping IE6 completely, my employer’s only “supported” browser is IE6. That’s a 200k+ employee, $30B+ company. Nuts!

@Erich,

This plugin doesn’t remove the /groups/ base from the permalink.

It allows the group admin to change the group slug (which is autogenerated at the moment) to something a bit more palatable.

Eg.

domain.com/groups/teenage-mutant-ninja-turtles-fan-group

could be changed to something shorter like:

domain.com/groups/tmnt-fan-group

or whatever!

is it possible to change the following URL at my own website from e.g.:

domain.com/groups/group-name

towards

domain.com/group-name

I would like to have this plugin if this is possible to achieve.

Many thanks !

There are a few older posts talking about the dangers of using one-click install scripts to install WPMU and/or BuddyPress. IMO, if you are going to create a community site, you should take the time to carefully set it up. Toward that end, I place manually installing WPMU and BP as an important first step. You have more control over the process and gain a much better understanding of how your site is configured.

@KevinHeath

I’m glad that you’re up and running now after a clean, manual reinstall.

@Midwestbonsai

Why don’t you use the original version of the plugin for bbPress?

https://bbpress.org/plugins/topic/bb-attachments/

Will this work with an external install of bbpress?

jjj: just add an empty method in your group extension for widget_display()

Haven’t seen the damge on IE6 yet, but I’ll look into it when I have some time.

Btw, for IE6 users you could also use google chrome frame.

IE6 is quite broken. Comments aren’t showing for example.

Not great for my intended crowd. They’re a bit older and have got old computers and in those companies.

I’ve talked with Arx but s/he’s not interested in supporting it either. I’m no CSS-guru but would really like to have some simple compatability with IE6 and BP 1.2.

Anyone out there?

Originally posted by Andy:

It may be worth considering disabling comments on these items and instead providing a link to be able to comment at the location of the original content.

I would like to see a BuddyPress admin option to disable activity commenting for components we deem not worthy of having it. I would use this option for blog comments and forum posts.

Although the “live” aspect wouldn’t be fostered, we should only have one focused stream for blog comments and forum posts, rather than the original stream (blog comment, forum replies) and a multiple activity comment stream.

To Bowe, Mike and whoever else is reading, I put up a ticket with this issue awhile ago – https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1419

Feel free to chime in.

—

The other issue raised by Mike of auto-joining a group on a forum reply is interesting. On testbp.org, I made a reply to a group forum post and thus, joined the group.

Then I visited my group activity stream and noticed these new group activity posts in my stream and said to myself “I don’t really want these items in my group stream!”.

So the issue is if you make a ton of group forum replies to groups that you’re not a member of, your personal group stream will become littered!

Mike, how do you plan on handling this on your BP site?