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.