[rossagrant]

That was quite easy to grasp actually! Thanks! Is there anyway to make a default forum topic within these groups and include avatars or is that a manual job?

Thanks for your patience!

Ross

[rossagrant]

That’s great, I’ll give it a go and see if I can get my head around it. I’m only just getting used to BP and the backend. It’s opened up a whole new language to me. I have never done any web design etc EVER!

Loving the forum here though, thanks for being so helpful!

[smuda]

hey r-a-y,

thanks for your reply.

i posted my question over there.

i hope someone can help me.

[Andrea Rennick]

“It’s not any ONE fully qialified domain for me… it’s dozens of different domains all ending in .info.”

Yeah, I know, Believe me, we’ve gone around in circles over that one issue in the mu forums. I’ll have to dig up the command.

A lot of plugins like hascash are recommended because they work. I see a lot of people not try them because they think it’s just for comments. On most sites I’ve tried it on, it just works.

[rspowers]

boone,

either of your options would be awesome. at this point, i dont think the converter does phpbb3, so thats not an option for me:(

the reason i even thought about it is that i use coppermine photogallery for my phpbb forum and coppermine comes with bridges for a lot of the main forum programs, which increased its user base a lot.

[foxly]

@gregfielding I never said I was “against” BP Gallery, I said it was inappropriate to use a *commercial* plugin with only *one* contributor as a BP core plugin, which is our ultimate goal for the BP Album+ plugin.

No matter what claims are made about this and that being “free”, until Brajesh releases his plugin, properly documented, into the WordPress repository under a GPL license so others can reuse its code, it is a *commercial* plugin.

In terms of features, BP Gallery *currently* has much more functionality than BP Album+.

But over the next couple of months, we’re planning on adding a huge amount of functionality to the BP Album+ plugin, and as we get more people onboard, BP Album+ will probably quickly eclipse BP Gallery.

I’m not going to try and tell you what gallery you should use for your site, but I want to point out some key reasons why I’ve chosen to team up with another developer and write a free open source BuddyPress Photo album plugin (and give it away to the community!) versus just handing over $30 and using BP Gallery for all of my social networking sites:

1) The release date of BP Gallery has slipped six times over three months, and its status hasn’t been updated since Feb 06 2010. Brajesh announced he was releasing RC2 on March 11/12. Didn’t happen. And BP Gallery Stable on March 14/15. Didn’t happen.

2) Simultaneously with all of this, the guy’s released two themes, two other plugins, and has posted that he will be releasing a chat plugin and another BP theme by the end of March. He’s also handing out free subscription extensions to all of his members for not getting his plugins working on time.

That’s impressive. Much respect to Brajesh for sheer volume of work!

But it raises some scary questions:

a) If he’s sprinting to get fifteen different projects done simultaneously under penalty of losing all his members, how efficient, extendable, and secure is the code inside BP Gallery? Has it been checked by other programmers?

b) Brajesh makes his money by releasing several new plugins every month. What incentive does he have to keep *improving* his existing plugins versus writing new ones?

c) If a BuddyPress core update breaks his plugins (as *just happened* with Manoj Kumar’s original BP Album, prompting the development of our plugin) …how long is it going to take Brajesh to repair his dozens of plugins, and where will BP Gallery fit in that lineup?

d) What happens if Brajesh gets hired by Google and quits developing plugins? Who will keep them working with future BuddyPress updates and how will they learn such a huge codebase in time to avoid disaster?

And to the people that keep saying “Well he’s going to release BP Gallery as Open Source in a week or two”, consider this:

e) If you were a website owner that’s paid $30 a month for a site membership to get the BP Gallery plugin, and then patiently waited for 3 or 4 months for the developer to finish it (and don’t kid yourself, that’s what 90% of the site members are there for) …would YOU be happy if the developer finished the plugin, then released it for FREE to EVERYONE as open source?

I’ve been wrong before, but I’d say the odds of BP Gallery being released as free open source any time soon are slim to nil.

It’s a sad situation, because if Brajesh released BP Gallery to the plugin repository, we could continue development on it for him, integrate it with our app, and release a fantastic plugin that gives the community what they want; and he would have more time to work on his other plugins. But again, very unlikely to happen.

….

There is a solution to all of the above problems: build ONE application that is FREE OPEN SOURCE, maintained by MULTIPLE developers, and can be EASILY EXTENDED. It’s how Linux is developed. It’s how WordPress is developed. It’s How BuddyPress is developed.

And it’s how the BP Album+ plugin needs to be developed.

….

As for “Community Support” …. we’ve had 600 downloads in 48 hours and will probably hit 1,000 downloads before most people even see this.

Unless Brajesh is pulling $30,000 a month from his site (=1000 members) I’d say we’ve already beat BP Gallery in terms of installed user base.

=====================================

@Modemlooper I’m going to turn this around on you and say “What if WordPress had no text editor, no file upload capability, no admin menu, and no comment functionality”. All of these are required elements to make a blog platform run, and that’s why they ship with WordPress. Twitter functionality, on the hand, is not a required element, and that’s why it’s implemented as a plugin. Likewise with BuddyPress, Forums, Profiles, User Activity, and… photo albums … are required elements of almost every social networking community. That’s why I want to stop screwing around with third-party plugins and help build something that’s good enough to ship with the core.

So there’s my thoughts!

^F^

[pcwriter]

@kriskl

That’s Giovanni’s plugin. See his post above

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/invite-friends-from-profile#post-42273

[Boone Gorges]

andrea_r – there is a way to hook BP up to an existing bbPress install, but I think rspowers is talking about phpbb. If you’ve got a lot of activity in an existing phpbb forum community, you really have two options:

1) Build a bridge between phpbb and bp (which will make them share users, group info, and activity data) and skin them to look alike

2) Find a script that will translate phpbb threads into bbpress compatible ones (like https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/a-phpbb-to-bbpress-database-converter) and then do a normal bbpress install inside of BP

(2) seems way, way easier, especially in the long run. The only downside is that the BP-native version of bbPress isn’t as feature-rich as dedicated forum software like phpbb.

[r-a-y]

@smuda

Read what Andy wrote here:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/using-bp_blogs_get_latest_posts-returns-an-error#post-42478

[Andrea Rennick]

“as far as the forum, many people have well established forums with 1000s of posts and members so they cant just ditch them. “

Isn’t there a way in the backend of BP to hitch it up to an exisiting forum? I’ve always set up a new one, but the choice is definitely there to use an existing bbpress install.

[r-a-y]

@putnum01

Read this:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/faq-how-to-code-snippets-and-solutions#post-37123

[Anonymous User 96400]

@Peterverkooijen

as has been said to you many times before. if you don’t want to use forums, then turn them off. and please don’t spam the forums every chance you get with your comments about forums and bbpress. by now we’re all well aware of your opinion. cheers!

[Anonymous User 96400]

ah ok, strange. the only thing i did was install the forums, but the profile links shouldn’t be affected by that. never had any problems on my local installation to be forwarded to the profile.

[rspowers]

I get that there are plugins for this stuff but it would be awesome if it were already built in. i know BP is very new but down the road these types of features would be nice. i am not a fan of installing too many plugins or relying on them because the software upgrades dont always coincide with them and many times plugin support/development is not continued. ive had this experience with phpbb mods for many years.

as far as the forum, many people have well established forums with 1000s of posts and members so they cant just ditch them. also having the buddypress community system is an awesome feature for forums. they work together really well. some software, such as coppermine includes bridges to forums, which increases its user base a lot.

[peterverkooijen]

2. there’s already integration with BBpress

Why does everybody want to use Buddypress as a forum? What’s the point of having a blogs and groups-based social network if you’re still going to put an old-fashioned forum at the center?

Can someone (Auttommatttic?) please write a basic social networking plugin for BBpress, expanding the user account pages in BBpress a bit, so people don’t have to come over here asking to turn Buddypress into something lame?

[rsutaria]

I kinda feel stupid for starting this forum topic- but the fact is I’m very new to WordPress and Buddypress.

Since there was this “famous 5 min install” mentioned all over the website, I figure it would take me max 10 mins to get up and running with buddypress.

Since there was no mention of Configuring SMTP, I didn’t realize that it is a mandatory step in getting Buddypress working.

It would be nice if the Buddypress install guide can have steps for those who are not familiar with wordpress.

[Anonymous User 96400]

oh, yeah, forgot to set up the forums… d’oh!

what do you mean with the location maps, mate?

[francescolaffi]

There have been some confusion between bp-album, bp-gallery and bppicture-album.

As far as I know only bp-album and bp-gallery are compatible with bp 1.2 , if you wanna compare them there’s a topic about it, please write there: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/bp-album-vs-bp-gallery

@tosh defaults are 600px middle, 150px thumb

[m@rk]

I totally agree with foxly. As I pronounced in another thread –

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/bp-12-bppicture-album-plugin#post-36038

I understand developers want/ need their infrastructure and efforts paid. But it’s also in opposition to the open source idea founded with BP. A “small” webmaster like me, caring exclusively for private websites not about earning any monetary benefits, has to think twice about if he can afford a “premium membership”. Furthermore, which provider should be chosen? buddydev.com? premium.wpmudev.org? etc.

[foxly]

Paid or “membership based” plugins are fine, but NOT for a core component of BuddyPress.

Core components are: Activity Streams, Blogs, Forums, Friends, Groups, Private Messaging, Profiles, and… Photos.

These components are the key elements of *any* social networking site and have to be *tightly* integrated with the core to deliver a quality user experience. That means that the component doesn’t just “plug in” to Buddypress… it’s part of BuddyPress and changes are made to the BuddyPress core if necessary to make it work better with the plugin.

You *cannot* have a core component based on a commercial plugin. In has to be free as in freedom *and* free as in beer, *and* open source. And you definitely can’t have development run by a “one man band” …because time and time again the developer goes away, an update breaks the plugin, and we’re all screwed.

This is not from me. This is from Automattic.

What I’m trying to get going between myself, @francescolaffi, and hopefully a few other contributors (once we’ve got a solid framework implemented) is a canonical photo plugin that will eventually be merged into BuddyPress. It will have to be dependable, extendable, and secure, and give BuddyPress users the functionality they want. In a nutshell: Facebook Photos.

If others want to *extend* the canonical plugin, it will have a wide range of hooks and be exceptionally well documented -making their job much easier. So if somebody wants to make a commercial add-on that gives it image editing capabilities, automatic face recognition, streaming video, or something beyond what the average user needs, then they can do that, find customers, and be paid for their efforts.

I’m not trying to build a plugin that does everything. I want to build a high quality gallery plugin that satisfies 95% of the users out there and becomes the standard.

^F^

[bpisimone]

Now I get it why you needed that group script

No, looking good. A few links don’t seem to work like forums (gives you a blank page) in the groups and location maps (shows blog posts)?

[rsutaria]

I have just installed buddypress on a production site and created a few groups on it. Now a member had an issue with the group name so I had to change the name. But the URL group-slug is still the old name.

I would really like the slug to reflect the new name.

I can go into phpmyadmin and change it from the DB tables. I noticed wp_bb_forums and wp_bp_groups has the slug. Is there anywhere else where I should go and change the slug value?

Thanks for creating such a cool software!

[gregfielding]

@Symm2112

Thanks for the input.

So far, i think BP Gallery works well. The only complaints I’ve heard have to do with the fact that you have to by a $30 membership to get it.

At this point, it seems like BP Gallery has a lot more features and functions working properly. But, if the community will be working to support BP Album+, more than Brajesh, then maybe I should jump ship before it’s too late.

This seems worth of its own discussion, so I started one:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/bp-album-vs-bp-gallery

[3sixty]

I also tried M’s “hidden installation” method and can’t get plugins to work.

I was able to open the new installation without a problem, but I cannot figure out how to activate plugins. I uploaded plugins to both the buddypress bbpress directory and the new “hidden installation” plugin directory. They obviously work fine on the hidden installation pages, but I just get “function not found” errors in the buddypress forum pages. Any ideas?

[3sixty]

Has anyone actually got M’s backdoor admin method (copy bb-config.php to the buddypress/bbpress directory to work and activate plugins?

I copied my bb-config.php file from the WPMU root dir into the /wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-forums/bbpress directory. Then I tried opening this page:

http://mysite.com/beta/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-forums/bbpress/bb-admin/

Warning: include() [function.include]: Failed opening ” for inclusion (include_path=’.:/usr/lib/php:/usr/local/lib/php’) in /home/mysite/public_html/beta/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-forums/bbpress/bb-includes/functions.bb-template.php on line 45

I also tried opening this page and got the same error:

http://mysite.com/beta/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-forums/bbpress/