[Jean-Pierre Michaud]

@Brajesh… never feel sorry for someone who can’t read properly… just point the fact, period. If you start feeling sorry each time someone whine about the price of your memberships, you will work hard time on that, and you loose interests…

i have the same situation on my site… i have “freebies”… accessible when people are subscribing a membership… lol… the freebies are available freely, but you need to pay for support. i never charged for the scripts themselves, but people continue to whine about that even on other public forums, that they know i lied by charging for scripts that are supposed to be free… people think we owe them all our lives and they want free things only.

personally, i would pay 500$ for a complete buddypress with “all you can eat”…

[@mercime]

There are two sides of the coin here

– MultiSite does not apply when the owner of a single WP install chooses not to enable the multi-blog feature in WP 3.0 and many won’t. Some would prefer to keep their hosting plan as well. Can’t imagine WP 3.0 multiblog in Yahoo hosting like what I see in WP forums for instance.

[Brajesh Singh]

you are most welcome

For code highlighting in forum posts use backtick character.

It is written just below the form you used to post, just see below the post button text

[Brajesh Singh]

checkout this one

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/how-to-turn-confirm-email-off#post-28123

[danbpfr]

Thank you Ray, the link helped !

[r-a-y]

Hey Chouf1,

You’ll need to override the BP forum filter.

By default, only the breakline and paragraph tags are supported.

To override the filter, you’ll need to write your own.

Some examples can be found in this thread:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/allow-image-plugin-in-forums#post-27201

[Boone Gorges]

It looks like $bp->bp_options_nav[groups] is populated differently when you’re inside of the group loop than when you’re not. That’s probably at least in part because the optionsbar items are different for different groups (some don’t have the forum activated, for example) and even for different users (admins vs mods vs regular members). In any case, if you put your code inside of a group loop

if ( bp_has_groups() ) : while ( bp_groups() ) : bp_the_group();

you might get what you’re looking for for each individual group.

[Anonymous User 96400]

I installed BP on a single install of WP a few days ago and it worked pretty well, except for a few smaller problems. The profile field setup menu item didn’t show up, which turned out to be a wrongly named permission (so nothing to do actually with single WP) and for some reason the forums tables didn’t get installed at all, so I just imported them from a WPMU-BP install. All seems to work fine now…

[Bowe]

Very good suggestions.. I would like to have a few of those myself.. For instance a forum/group for Help and Support which is active as a group but not listed in the user’s group page.. This to keep global/sitewide forums/groups seperate from groups the users joins out of interest (for example: Baseball)

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

The standard support questions which mercime linked to help us help you. Despite the fact that FB Connect is not BuddyPress and as such is a third-party plugin, there are plenty of existing threads in these forums about issues with FB Connect

[@mercime]

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/when-asking-for-support

[Anton]

anyone?

[stwc]

Let me concretize what I’m getting at a bit — I just had a sudden thought.

Taking what is probably the largest active Buddypress install — this one right here — as a test case, I just realized that I don’t really use any of the Buddypress social-networky stuff here (realizing it’s an oldish version of Buddypress and a unique case in some ways), other than the occasional personal message functionality. I don’t look at Groups or anything else, much: every time I visit, I head straight here, to the forum, which isn’t really all that featureful when it comes to forum implementations, but still does the job admirably.

I’m not sure if the way I use this site reflects the way that most people do, but that’s my experience. Sure, I’m an old fart, and am more interested in finding and sharing useful information than I am in just hanging out and socializing, to some extent, and that’s the major part of why this install of Buddypress exists, but hopefully you see my point.

I have a feeling that traditional, threaded forum structure might be an important centerpiece, as it is here, for many sites that will use Buddypress, if, of course, not all of them.

Nothing we’re talking about — and I admit this is getting a little off-topic, but it’s germane, I think — is going to destroy that. I’m just raising it as a consideration in moving forward.

Maximum flexibility, as Bowe and JJJ and others talk about above, is probably always the best thing to aim for.

[stwc]

I’m pretty much good with all of this.

Back to what Mike was saying in response to my woolgathering: I do tend to think that there is a good intersection between traditional forum/thread/comment structure and the kind of social-networky way of (not) organizing things, and that Buddypress is heading in that direction, particularly with the new activity/threadedness stuff.

But traditional forum-like structure, to some degree, is still what most un- or semi-sophisticated users who haven’t grown up with social networking kind of expect, I think. That doesn’t in any way mean that it’s the best way of doing things, though, as you say.

The optimum path, as you suggest, I think is to continue to rethink things a bit (as Andy and everyone else who’s contributed to Buddypress has been doing) so that we can leverage the best of both worlds — the structured, heirarchical, predictable (if hard to search) architecture of the traditional forum along with the interconnected, non-heirarchical, loose-coupled, folksonomical, social, person- and activity-focussed interconnected peopleweb New Way.

Hit that point just right in terms of architecture and UI design, and we’re not just reinventing Facebook or PHPBB or mashing them up, we’re doing something that’s made of awesome and sauce.

[r-a-y]

I’m not the author of that plugin, but I’ve rewritten the code for it, it’s available here:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/buddypress-analytics-kills-dashboard#post-31962

[peterverkooijen]

Last post from me on this thread, just for the record and to summarize, I support John James Jacoby’s vision 100%.

Restructering friending around groups and microblogging/activity stream is a next step in where social web is going. Groups would become extremely useful for all kinds of use cases. It would really set Buddypress apart.

Buddypress can’t be all things to all people imho. Development should focus on a conceptually coherent core, with APIs that make it easy to plug in other more linear functionality, like classic friending and forums.

Do we need to re-invent the wheel ?

Buddypress shouldn’t just copy Facebook – apart from perhaps the registration process… BP has the opportunity to do things different, better, move things forward.

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

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”.

[John James Jacoby]

Saying that friends would be “deprecated” maybe was a bad idea.

The friends component is basically done, and doesn’t need much more development, because it’s a means to an end, and a dead one in my opinion. You add someone as a friend, they accept, now you’re friends. But that doesn’t actually mean you’re really friends, nor does it make BuddyPress function differently when viewing other users. Not to say you can’t build custom functions around the “if we’re friends do this, if not do this” way of doing things, but that involves template switches and chopping up code for 1 specific type of relationship with no depth or scope or ability to reuse or repurpose.

It will come to a point where we either build out the friends component with an API that lets “friends” tag each other, categorize each other, and plugin to it (like groups already has, think “friends calendar” functionality,) or we use what’s already here, eliminate duplicate code and functionality, and add a few extra brain cells to the groups component.

The best way to explain why I think this is a good idea (from all perspectives) is that it gives the group component more or less flexibility, by giving it a range that it can reach based on what the site admin allows, and what the user allows, from within an API that already exists.

Real world example: Go to testbp.org and create a group. A group about what? Well, BuddyPress obviously, since that’s what the website is about. What if I don’t want the people in that group to talk to each other, but I just want to group users together that I’ve met in real life? Or at WordCamps? I can’t… They’re not my friends, they’re not colleagues or really even acquaintances, but I met them and want to stay connected somehow. I make a group called “Met at WordCamp”, I check the “User Group” option, I don’t create a forum because they don’t need to talk to each other through me, I add the people I met, and I made a group of people. Now, if I want to talk to all of them at once, I use the activity stream and since they’re all in that group, they get it on their feed and they can all reply to that stream item.

It’s a way to isolate people you already know, and put them in a box for later. BuddyPress already does a wonderful job of making sure you have access to all sorts of information, from people, blogs, groups, and friends. What about when I want to start narrowing down all that information and isolating it into what I think I want to see, and who I want to talk to? That’s what this would/could/should do.

And if your site needs the friends functionality exactly the way it is, it would still be available in exactly the same way it is now, with the same database structure and code and filters and everything else. Only you would need to install it as a separate BuddyPress “add in” like what will happen with the wire component for 1.2.

Maz, I get that “friends” is a very simple 1 to 1 relationship that makes data management easy, but it’s also severely limited in the functionality that it provides. If we grow out the friends component, it would only be to include more group like functionality anyway, right?

At the end of the day my feelings won’t be hurt if the idea gets voted down, so keep pouring on the feedback and brainstorming. It’s been a really great discussion so far and I’m pumped that everyone’s this interested and passionate about the idea.

[Bowe]

@Peter a lot of social networks could benefit from a forum for a more centralized discussion, especially larger sites.. Forums should not be the main focus but certainly not forgotten or “dropped”. Especially since it works pretty well and intuitive after you’ve grasped the concept of the group/forum connection.

[peterverkooijen]

… forums and groups seem commingled in a way that is pretty darned counterintuitive

My solution is to just ignore/remove forums and focus on communication between members via (micro)blogging and threaded comments.

It’s cool to have the option of BBpress integration if you want it, but I don’t understand why it is becoming a default core component of BP. I hope BP steps back from that brink…

[mmcomber]

Sorry. I searched yesterday but didn’t find this related and unresolved issues. Sounds similar to mine. Any thoughts?

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/autocomplete-not-functioning-when-composing-message#post-27460

[abcde666]

@stwc

I agree with you on the Group-Forums being a bit confusing, for techies and even more so for non-techies.

Any suggestions / ideas of how to improve this ?

[Mike Pratt]

@stwc I think you make an eloquent, objective point. While I think there’s some merit in it, I respectfully disagree. Yes, people are used to (in many respects) to the old b-board way of doing forums, so from that perspective, BP will be a tad foreign. Looking at it another way though – that old method shoe-horned users into combing though a giant list of things looking for what they were interested. As a tech dude myself, I can tell you I never “browse” forums because they are just not browsable. You have to search for what you want and then pour over unrelated threads. It’s too much work.

BP Groups is a new way of looking at things, for sure. BUt it allows you to “group” content, of which forums are merely a part, in a way that makes sense for people that want to associate with that content.

The model breaks down in some use cases but I have something like a 90 “love this new way” hit rate on the concept. Only a few have stated they want the old way (and BP’s forum listing solves that problem for them.

my .02

I am also of the opinion that if you design something with a supremely intuitive interface that just “works” in a very logical manner, it doesn’t matter how much you change the model (assuming it’s a step forward)

[bbrian017]

I got the answer.

https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/topic/16175?replies=3

Thanks

[idotter]

I was thinking about a simple search about the activity stream but when they get linked to tags in blogs or forum-posts that would be really great!