BuddyPress.org

Excellent point. Not all is lost but I will take this opportunity to provide some feedback to @jjj and @apeatling re 1.2 in it’s current state

1. I get the use of the Twitter @ metaphor and adding “mentions” to the filters. Cool. BUT, it introduces a potential UI snag for users. Throughout 1.2 you make nice use of Display Name which users will become accustomed to and identify with. Now, you are identifying users by their user name as well (mixing metaphors, so to speak) as in ->

John Doe

and

@jdoe

Given people’s tendencies to use whacky usernames, thee is a big risk of confusion when both start popping up around the site. Not sure what the solution is but I think it’s not a trivial point, imho.

2. Now that the wire has disappeared and along comes the concept of “Send Public Message” (I get it) let’s look at what vehicle we’re making use of and what it may mean to users. As it currently stands in 1.2, to “Send Public Message” you click that button on someone’s profile and you are taken to your own Status Update field with an @username filled in.

a. the cursor is highlighted just before the @username not after (don’t forget to include a space) – this will only cause people to write the pubic message and push the @username to the end of the message. clunky

b. You’ll probably need to include a @mentions on each person’s profile page otherwise, you’ll never be able to easily see the public message to @username you just wrote. The key point being, you want this to show up on THEIR profile.

c. Probably worth considering including a notification to @username of said public message via email (make optional)

d. Q: Will these @’s be co-mingled in your own status updates and, thus create confusion. Maybe that doesn’t matter and i am overthinking it.On the activity stream, it says John Doe posted an update, when he really sent @username a public message. In Twitter when @ leads a message as 1st character, it has different context than everywhere else in the Tweet. Perhaps -> John Doe sent @username a public message ? or something.

I know I am getting fine grained here but theses (excellent) feature adds need to be over the top intuitive when introduced or they will breed unintended usages.

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”.

The bp-default and bp-parent-themes are theme frameworks for the BuddyPress plugin. They show what can be done with the BuddyPress plugin and I appreciate that a lot.

For a current project with WPMU as CMS plus BP for an organization, I went with creating a customized child theme using the bp-sn-parent throughout the site including all blogs for a consistent look and feel.

Aware of the time I could allocate for this project and my average skillset, creating a child theme was the path of least resistance during continuous trunk upgrades of WPMU and BP since I started this project late September for a tentative launch mid to late January. And I would say the time I invested in creating customized child themes was worth it, 10x over.

At this time, all I have to watch for in my child themes are code changes in the files from upgraded parent themes – header.php, footer.php, sidebar.php, home.php, functions.php, style.css, and some new page templates I created.

When the new bp-default theme came out for BP 1.2 trunk, I made a new child theme based on that for blog_id_1 (BP install) specifically because of the new forums layout My only question for the new bp-default parent theme is:

why is it that the only way I could find to avoid getting a white screen when I activate my bp-default’s child theme (with own home.php) is by consistently copying the code of bp-default/activity/index.php over bp-default/home.php ?

WPMU 2.9 trunk-r2041 and BP 1.2 trunk-r2207

– BP on blog_ID_1 and WPMU used as CMS

Feedback: Child theme of 1.2 trunk bp-default theme

Getting white screen in front end (all sections) when creating a new Child theme based on new bp-default theme.

– If I add customized header.php and footer.php (with only additional divs), I get white screen,

– If I do not upload header.php and footer.php but add customized home.php, I get white screen.

– Note: the only way I got the child theme recognized was by copying code of activity/index.php over home.php in bp-default theme folder, but like mentioned above, other customizations except the sidebar.php, white screened on me. Too much eggnog last night?

Feedback: Child theme of 1.2 trunk bp-sn-parent theme

– custom Child themes of old bp-sn-parent theme transition well to new bp-sn-parents theme generally except Forums pages – only one group shown and nothing else

Hi everyone,

I made a mock-up of how I picture this “friend” page.. Actually a better name for it would be “My Network” or simply “Home”

The screenshot can be viewed here: http://www.bp-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/my_friendsv1.jpg

The design is my own, but the functionality could be used for the new BP theme as well:

Left: The activity stream as we all know it from the upcoming BP 1.2. Added the options to filter activity based on “Friend Categories”. This works with a vertical dropdown menu so if a user has many friend categories you won’t run out of horizontal space. It would be cool if the same could be done with Groups. So you can not only show activity from all groups but also from specific groups. This would make the activity stream even better imo! In the example I added a custom filter which could be added by a Twitter plugin. It allows the user to filter the Tweets from their friends!

The right side is filled with boxes which display useful information for the user. It shows:

– Quick Links: Links to pages which might get used a lot. Users can add their own links to pages they visit often.

– Friend Categories: Show the 5 most recent friends from every category

– Groups: The groups a member is part of and an options to show all their groups

– Custom boxes: these are boxes that are added by the users or by plugins. See it as widgets but then for an individual user. In my example I’ve made two widgets:

A quick tweet widget: Allows a user to send a tweet to twitter easily

An RSS widget: The user fills in one (or more) RSS feeds which get displayed in the widget.

Personally I think this would be a great step forward for BuddyPress profiles. If there would be a “Profile API” similar to the current group API, which allows developers to easily integrate widgets or activity stream filters for their plugins, it would be really great! Some other examples could be:

Quick Photo uploads (quickly add photos to your album from your “Home”)

Submit link (BP-Links widget to quickly submit a link)

It would be even better if users could also drag and drop the widgets to their liking. I’m interested in what others think of my mock-up, and the way I think the Stream/Friend Categories should be handled.

you should all check out the bleeding edge trunk 2161. It’s pretty stable and likely addresses all your SWA filtering and grouping needs, with the ability to be tweaked further.

SWA customization really boils down to the ability for a user to choose any combination of “who’s” and “what’s” which is what 1.2 does exactly. so, for ex. you can combine My Friends (who) and Forum Posts Only (what) You can create custom “who”s eg a particular group and add that button or combinations of “what’s’ if it suits your site’s m.o. Combine this with 1.2’s inline commenting and people will never leave your home page

You can see an example on my dev site -> http://mjpratt.com

All of the content that is output with bp_activity_content() is stored in the database. This is mostly for performance reasons. If this data had to be recreated on each page load, you’d be looking at hundreds and hundreds of queries.

You can modify it with a filter though, but you’re limited to string replacement and css modifications:

function my_function( $content ) {

return $content; // do something with the content first

}

add_filter( 'bp_get_activity_content', 'my_function' );

You can put this in your own plugin, or in bp-custom.php.

@tonyaccardo – We have spent the past 5 or 6 months now working on a new vb/wpmu/bp system and it’s getting close to completion. I have no plans of releasing the software, but I can give you a little insight into why no-one has responded to your request.

Bottom line:

It’s a HUGE job. It has taken the coders hundreds of hours of work to complete the project. The amount of code is actually rivaling the core of bp itself. You REALLY have to have a specific reason for wanting to take on wpmu-bp-vb.

What we’ve built:

Well I also run a number of very large vb communities, and while vb has ‘blogs’ they suck, and many members asked to have blogs and social networking. The ‘easiest’ solution would have been to simply dump vb for bbpress, and migrate all of the data over to bbpress.

However bbpress is nowhere near what vb is, not even close. Yeah it’s nice code, but vb has years and years of development behind it and bbpress is just beginning. So for us dumping vb was not an option.

So we needed a real plan and decided to bridge the programs together, but the bridge is the smallest part of the equation. Not only did I want one registration/session setting for the users, I also wanted auto vb forum creation upon group creation within bp. I also wanted automatic vb forum creation upon new blog creation within wpmu.

Simply put, if you signup and create a blog, a new vb forum is created behind the scenes that belongs to that blog. The same thing goes if you create a group within bp.

Well that’s all and good, but as vb is commercial software, there is no way I wanted to have to install new copies of vb for each blog. I wanted to run only one copy of vb, just like bbpress does. That is where the HUGE amount of work came into play.

Not only did I want each blog to have their own vb forum, but we also had to deal with member roles and forum creation. So we built the system so that ‘technically’ each blog is able to manage every single aspect of vb from styles, to membership, to permissions, heck you name it. As far as the blog owner is concerned, they are running their own full blown copy of vb, fully integrated.

There are many other things to consider as well. Many of the function names within the programs are the same, so you can’t just call functions from bp within vb. Even including things as simple as your wordpress header within a vb template took a bit of work. You see, wordpress header navigation is dynamic, add a page/category, and you have a new link. Obviously you do not want to have to manually change your header in vb to match wp everytime a navigation button is added, so you have to automate that part. Well the function names are the same in both, so now you have to create your own header nav functions so it stays dynamic. Not hard but still more work.

If all you are after is bridging wp/vb together, there is a basic bridge script you can use from vb.org. It does not work with wpmu, but can be modded to work. We started out with this route and after making the changes it worked perfectly.

However, it is designed to use vb for reg/sessions, and this caused some major issues that we had not thought of in the beginning. Think about hosting ‘paid’ blogs on your network, and telling them that their members have to go to another site forum to register, yeah that went over real well. LOL.

So that is where we are at now. We are rewriting the bridge code to use wpmu reg/sess so that users signup on whatever wpmu blog they come across and they are registered into the entire system (even having the ability for a visitor to signup directly from a sub-blog in wpmu took a bit of custom code which is done). I expect the coders to have this part finished shortly.

Once that code is finished then we begin work on bringing in the vb posts into the wire and activity streams of bp. There seems to be little to no documentation on doing this within bp so I can imagine it’s gonna be an interesting project.

We will then begin work on filtering out the pm system within bp and replacing it with the pm system from vb. (I’d rather use bp pm system, but it’s a kiddy toy compared to vb right now, and I don’t care to wait years for bp to catch up).

We are not touching the core code of either wp, bp, or vb so future upgrades are not going to be a problem. That is another thing you have to really consider.

Bottom line is, it was a massive job that took months of work, but we’ve mu’d vbulletin and should have the perfect deep integration replacement for bbpress shortly.

I hope now you can see why you are not getting any responses. Even in it’s ‘simplest’ form, what you are asking is going to take someone hundreds of hours to build, and that’s only if your coders know vb/wpmu/bp code inside and out.

anyhow, hope it helps.

@david lewis

it’s not hard: the plugin still exist.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bbpress-latest-discussion/

And works with 1.1 new forum integration. Even if not necessary because latest post appearing in the side wide activity. So the plugin is only interesting if you don’t use SWA or if you use a custom homepage or an external bbpress install…

If you use it, don’t forget to set the right DB table prefix in the plugin option (default is bb_, but now it’s wp_bb_)

select the forum you want to exclude, enter connection infos and that’s it !

Have fun !

WOW – great!!! That was what I was searching for!

Can you tell me, how to implement that in my Custom-Friends-Activity?

(I am using this to get the friends activity for logged in users to the start-page)

<?php if ( bp_has_activities('type=friends&user_id='.$user_ID.'&per_page=10&max=10&timeframe=-4 Weeks') ) : ?>



<div class="activity-list">

<ul id="activity-list">

<?php while ( bp_activities() ) : bp_the_activity(); ?>



<li class="<?php bp_activity_css_class() ?>">

<?php bp_activity_content() ?>

</li>



<?php endwhile; ?>

</ul>

</div>

Would be great – thanks!

The way that bp_has_activities is now, you won’t be able to show your friends activity on your own profile page. There’s a few checks to change the type to “personal” if you are viewing your own page or if the current action is “just-me”.

You could, however, duplicate the function (located in bp-activity-templatetags.php) inside your own functions.php file, remove those checks, and call your custom function instead of this one?

There are other platforms and have tried a few myself. As new as the bp platform is, it is by far the quickest out of the box that enables much of what you need already (together with wpmu). However other platform might offer more fine grained control, but it comes with a hefty learning curve as the platform is simply more complex. The upside to bp’s less complex architecture makes it also easier to develop for.

I’ll see if I can give some input on your requirements.

The main feature is an easy and somewhat restrictive way to post content. The only thing girls can publish is pictures of outfits, and then tag the clothes (describe, tag, categorize…).

It looks like you need a custom content type that omits the post message. Flutter allows you to create a specific post type. I haven’t tried it with wpmu. There is also a wpmu plugin called ‘toggle_meta_boxes’ which allows you to hide unneeded post boxes to make it super easy for your users to just upload content.

We want to have some level of control here. BTW not all users can upload content.

Since you only have one subject users post on I would recommend NOT giving every user a blog at sign up, but just let them post to the main blog. Keeps you in control over categories, tags, etc. Plus it lets you control the user level. I however you do want to give users a blog there are wpmu plugins which allow you to set blog defaults like categories, predefined pages and posts and such. Also you can make new blog users have an editor role rather than an admin role if you want to control what they can or can not do.

The content published by everyone goes to the main page, same of today.

This is done by buddypress through widgets or even custom loops if you are adventurous.

No problem there.

People con vote their fabs.

I haven’t looked at this, but I imagine there would be a wp plugin which would let users vote on posts. If you can find a vote plugin that serves an RSS feed you could pull that into the bp user profile. EVen link it to the activity stream with a small custom plugin.

When user is logged in, she sees the content of the girls she is following (not pictures of everyone, just pictures of the ones that inspire the user).

In bp through making friends with other users you can follow the activity of your friends only. At the moment the activity stream is text only, afaik, but I think images in the activity stream is in the pipeline?

User profile is built by the outfits she publishes

The profile page shows the latest activity, blog posts, wire messages, etc. of the profiles user.

and the outfits she favorites.

This is the most dificult part, since I haven’t looked into it. Assuming you can find a good vote/favorite plugin it should be doable.

You can search for/discover/subscribe to trends, types of clothes, styles, colors, people…

This is where bp shines as the search is very well done. Combine it with bp_contents plugin which allows your users to tag themselve, groups, blog and add categories…your archiving possibilities are endless.

Some pitfalls (already mentioned):

Privacy controls, inappropriate content flagging (is coming in 1.1 though), it is still not an out of the box solution (however for you requirements there is none that I can think of).

There are still even other approaches when I think about it, I would recommend wp and bp in a heartbeat. Especially since the backend of both are really solid. Plugins are installed and upgraded easily. It is a widely supported and growing platform and would not hesitate to recommend it to you.

I hope this helps a little bit.

I Love the Dashboard Andy! Been waiting for something like that which gives a complete overview of the site that i’m involved in and activity.

Maybe it could even be the first page you see (instead of the profile page) when you click your own username… Making it more visible and easy to customize (Maybe widgetize it in future versions).

I hope the Dashboard can be implemented in the next/future version of the member theme as a standard.

Dennyhalim-

I just took a quick visit to the Hoard Hunter plugin page. This is what is says about:

Hoard Hunter is an online treasure map game designed and developed for people who would like an easy (and fun) method of fund raising online. The system comprises of a custom plugin and integrated theme. The Hoard Hunter site is powered by WordPress MU (though the system will also run on standard WordPress) and uses a number of WordPress plugins to provide additional functionality.

My First thought is that I would not even attempt to use this with BuddyPress. This looks like a complicated plugin that relies on many other plugins and its own custom theme to do some complex stuff. It is ripe with problems waiting to happen.

Also, it is not clear if this plugin suite, as it really should be considered, works with WPMU 2.7.1. You need to contact the developer and ask. There does not seem to be an activity on that plugin’s thread for almost 6 months and the images do not load on the website. This is never a good sign.

As is stated above, Hoard Hunter is a “system [comprised] of a custom plugin and integrated theme” and it relies on “a number of WordPress plugins to provide additional functionality”. You are dealing with a potentially large mess here in figuring out what is going on.

As John and I both suggested, you need to deactivate the Hoard Hunter plugin and all other plugins that Hoard Hunter is using. Furthermore, you need to switch back to the default BuddyPress themes. In other words, to troubleshoot this issue, you need to strip down your install to the lowest common denominator and see if the problem goes away.

So, just using the BuddyPress plugins and no other WPMU plugins, and just using the standard, default BP themes, does the problem go away. If so, you then start working your way backwards, adding a plugin at a time until either everything works or you find the problem.

It could also be an issue with Hoard Hunter’s “integrated theme”.

I hope this is just a development install and not an ongoing WPMU community to which your trying to add BP. If it is an ongoing community, perhaps you should stick with what you have and forget using BP.

If you wish to continue troubleshooting, and you have important data to protect, please make sure you know what you are doing, that you are comfortable with troubleshooting this issue. You’ll need to make backups of your database, your themes, upload directories, plugins–in other words everything. Why? Because there are no guarantees.

KitWit-

Okay, I’ve made a mistake. I did not even notice that you had linked to the members’ theme, not the home theme.

My widget is for the home them. What you’re asking about is not a widget. It is a coded into the /directories/members/index.php file in the bphome theme.

You can make your own custom theme, edit this out, and get what you want:

<div class="item-meta"><span class="activity"><?php bp_the_site_member_last_active() ?></span></div>



<div class="field-data">

<div class="field-name"><?php bp_the_site_member_total_friend_count() ?></div>

<div class="field-name xprofile-data"><?php bp_the_site_member_random_profile_data() ?></div>

</div>

Just make sure to place your custom theme in the proper place and then select it in WPMU’s backend via “BuddyPress > General Settings > Select theme to use for BuddyPress generated pages”