[Henry]

For future reference, I figured out how to do this: I’m using the plugin

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/groupblog-v13-adding-members-instantly-thanks-boone

So long as people join the group associated with the main site, they’re able to add blogs to the site. I make everyone a contributor so their blogs aren’t published automatically and I can then add them to the category – Member Blogs.

[zambibo]

I don’t have days to puts around waiting.. I’m going to make a new fresh install. 4th time.

[zambibo]

I installed the facebuddy theme and now my forums link isn’t even there anymore.. I’m really confused now.

[Mike Pratt]

WHile I enjoy and learn quite a bit by reading the db design debate I cannot lend the insight that MrMaz et all do.

To @Tore’s point: As much as everyone will love doing all their activity from the activity stream, keep several things in mind. As Groups grow and become enhanced by plugins, users will find themselves also hanging out and revisiting those Groups due to the topical relevance to them. The My Groups and My friends filters on the SWA will also be huge hits but I think it’s a pretty safe bet that people will ask the question “What’s going on in Group X” and I think that highlights the need to make an action on the main activity stream eg the SWa remain a par of it’s originating Group. Indeed, such a stream may kill off the /forums aggregation but certainly not Groups themselves. This also lends credence to the much needed blog-post-like capability to be added to groups (purposely not said Blogs added… merely richer content capabilities that forum postings don’t provide for)

Great thread going on here. Hats off to all

[peterverkooijen]

Thanks. I’ll try that plugin. It doesn’t look very solid though…

Definitely not BP core, since blogging is all WPMU.

Would there be a way to make plugin settings show up somewhere on member pages? Perhaps under ‘settings’? Or even just links to the full plugin settings in the admin back end?

Can you use the code in plugins that add settings to the admin area to make them show up on the front end somewhere?

These questions are also related to something I’ll be working on here…

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

Peter’s been around these forums for a while, so he might be wanting to move to a svn checkout to make life easier

[Andrea Rennick]

” but none of the widgets are pre-set. Member blogs come up, but each new member would have to configure their own widgets.

I’d like members to be able to join and have everything set up for them. “

Asked, answered and beat to death over in the MU forums. If it’s on the user *blogs* then it has nothing to do with Buddypress.

Do you really want widgets set up for the users (a little more work), or do you want a specific sidebar that they can’t fiddle with (dead easy). Or really, sheesh, just set up the sidebar for them buy hardcoding it consistently in the themes (if there’s only one theme for users, well, piece of cake here) and then let them add widgets if you want them to.

Which, really, is how the blogs work by default.

Tip: go over to the MU forums, explain what you want in detail in a new thread.

[David Lewis]

Not where yet? Having blogs be set up with defined defaults for widgets? As has been stated, that has nothing to do with BuddyPress. As such, it won’t be “resolved” in a future version. But if you head on over to the WordPress MU forums, I’m sure you could find what you’re looking for.

[Xevo]

Install bbpress and intergrate it the old fashion way with wpmu. You can have both group forums and a standard forum this way.

[trevorscottcarpenter]

THANKS FOR THE QUICK RESPONSE!

Sorry. The initial installation is called “Forums”, by default. Nothing new here. We like that, we want to keep that.

The features of bbPress are exactly what we want, as a separate feature of our site, but titled “Prayer Requests”.

We want them to operate in unison, but separate.

[josephtravers]

So… okay… it looks like the default is to just transform typed URLs into links, like so: http://www.buddypress.org

The “test link” I posted in my original post on this thread (above) worked using an html “a” tag, but I can’t seem to make html work in my forums.

Should I be looking for a specific plugin?

Are bbPress plugins usable on buddypress to interact with the forums?

[luccame]

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/buddypress-editable-group-slugs

edit: sorry, not exactly what you need, but i’ll leave this for reference…

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

My visualisation of this discussion is to forget the concept of what A. Streams were, and instead envisage the new SWA as a kind of super-Wire; with threaded commenting, permalinks and supporting more media types than just text, whilst retaining the ability to be able to use it anywhere (you were able to use the Wire in custom components easily).

Is that where the discussion is up to, and moving on to discuss how to map forum posts and blog comments into this?

[Jeff Sayre]

Okay, as I was thinking about and writing a reply to Andy’s OP, there have been many posts. So, I will post what I have to say first before reading the rest of this thread. I’ll post again if I have anything to say with regards to other people’s comments

---

First of all, I want to say thank you for starting this thread. This type of discussion is not something that can been done effectively on IRC. Secondly, it’s clear that the trajectory of the referring thread has struck a nerve in you.

My comments were an attempt to start a healthy debate and not meant as a major criticism. Your work on the BuddyPress core is very commendable and much appreciated. So, let me reiterate, as I stated in my first post in that thread, I’m excited with the direction BuddyPress is headed. I believe that v1.2 will be a major, beneficial update to the platform.

The vision that you’ve outlined here helps frame the discussion going forward. Up until now, we, or at least I, did not have a clear idea about your vision. The roadmap is of course only a listing of features. It is not a statement of your design philosophy or design goals. All that the majority of us could discern about your vision (and here I particularly mean developers) was from what we saw in each changeset and a few morsels gleamed from IRC here and there.

With that said, I think this is the most crucial statement:

What I don’t want is for BuddyPress to be limited to high end servers with beautiful caching solutions. In reality, I want this thing to run on cheap hosts where someone can just throw it up there and it doesn’t take the server down.

This is a lofty but worthy goal! In my mind, I look at WPMU and BuddyPress as platforms best utilized on more robust setups. To that end, my ideas, my suggested approaches, have been geared toward a higher-end user. But now that this particular goal of yours has been stated, I have a very clear idea of what guides your BuddyPress design decisions.

Your ideas about the activity stream are interesting.

Rather than creating multiple new tables for each content type, why not just use the activity table but be able to denote different types of content using identifiers or types?

This will require some thought if blog posts, forum posts, and other content types are to be successfully integrated into this vision. I guess for purposes of backend discussion, it might be best to refer to this envisioned table, or set of related tables, as content tables instead of activity tables.

Activity of any type would be recorded in the appropriate content table and thought of as primary content and secondary content. Primary content is the object of the activity—a post (in a blog or forum), a picture (any piece of media), an accepted friendship, etcetera. Secondary content would be any response to the primary content—comments, retweets, etcetera.

As far as proposed schema changes, that all depends on how this vision is charted out. So, perhaps it’s best to figure that out before debating, or even professionally arguing, about DB design.

[abcde666]

@Tore,

if the page “testbp.org/forums” could be re-designed towards something like the following website, then I think the Group-Forums would get more action and discussion ongoing.

http://vancouver.en.craigslist.org/forums/?forumID=81

Just think about it: you can make a Group-Forum-post directly at the page “testbp.org/forums” without the need of many clicks to go deep into the specific Group-Forum.

[Tore]

“Rather than thinking of the activity stream as just a place where everything is aggregated, the activity stream will be the place where everything actually happens/is stored.”

Praise the lord! (sorry for the evangelic speak but I think this is a major positive change)

“small iterative improvements”: Regarding the forums

I’ve been debating to stop viewing the forums the way we’ve been. Established BP-websites using it will be less interested in this. I’m still starting out and would like to change my website to 1.2-style and ahead.

Currently (1.1) the forums are available when walking to groups and then the forums. You have to click a lot to get to the posts.

The new theme (1.2) is trying to place the activity stream as the place to _do_ it all. I’ve been using testBP.org like crazy because it’s like a mini Facebook/FriendFeed. So I like it.

So what happens to the forums? Why will anyone even bother to go all the way down to groups/forums and post something in the forum (or even at the website.com/forum/-page) with 1.2? Buddypress, out of the box, isn’t using some kind of TinyMCE or else that would allow you to enter things in a different way (most forums have some kind of quoting system). It’s just a box to write in. But still it’s a categorised box and replies to the box is shown more egalitarian with the same size (comments to posts in the stream aren’t).

My guess is that communities with very active forums will still be used. But newcome BP-installations will not use them that much unless they’re really big communities (+5000).

This does change the way that we interact and talk. Nothing in the activity stream (1.2) will be important enough to be put at the top of the list. It’s just the stream with the latest new activity at the top. This is another change away from the old forum style. In a regular forum, the latest post with a new comment will trigger the topic to move to the top of the forum topic list (the old activity stream).This is where BP will be very different. There’s no retriggering of topics to the top if you aren’t using the forums the old way (which people will probably do less and less).

Facebook is nice but you loose the use of forums since they aren’t presented in the stream. The stream rules… This way BP will be focused on social relationships that mainly are filled with activity updates consisting of bits and fragments instead of intense debate of old topics. Why? Because there’s no retriggering of topics to the top.

Am I alone to prophecy the death of the forum? …and the need of some kind of solution to this merge of everything into the status update, which I also aplaud…

[Andy Peatling]

I’m closing this thread since the conversation has moved on. Please continue over here:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/activity-db-design-discussion

[Brajesh Singh]

please provide more details.

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

[Tore]

I’ll say this from a user’s perspective. Not programmer.

I want everything as a stream on one page. It’s great if things are categorised as forums, groups, wire and all. But still, I just want to write something in a box in a simple way. This either goes in reply to something or not. I want to encourage my users to engage. I’ve found this to be true with “activity streaming” but not so much with forums or blogs.

I’ve got a small community. Like it will max out at 1000 members. And about 10-20% active ones. To us it will be useful with one stream and to use that mostly. You guys with 10.000 members will probably not have an efficient activity stream.

Let’s make it moddable. It is not a one size fits all.

[abcde666]

sorry, but it was not possible to post in your other thread.

Could you please give an example of what you are talking in your initial post ?

Thanks !

[Anton]

Yes thanks. I wiped everything and did a clean install and it’s working now. Thanks for the help John.

[Mike Pratt]

join in the fray at https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/new-12-swa-and-blogforum-syncing-feedback-needed

[MrMaz]

After reading the entire thread, I am going to have to say that Jeff has nailed this one. All of the solutions being offered are trying to work around a design flaw, instead of correct the flaw.

To fix this issue, or rather to re-design the threaded activity comment feature so that it will be extensible, there has to be a serious change to the thought process of how this component, and eventually how all components are designed in general.

WP seems to be built around this “buckets of data” concept, where you just kind of create a container for data, label it, and go get it later. All of these buckets of data are sometimes associated with lookup tables, and sometimes associated with meta data entries acting as a lookup key, and sometimes not even associated at all; they are COPIED. This type of design is also prevalent in BP.

It is such a bad idea to copy data, and then begin associating other records with the copy, I can’t hardly stop myself from smashing my monitor to bits over the thought of it.

At the point you begin to do this, you might as well stop using an RDBMS and go back to text files, because that is how it is being used, as a directory of files, not for normalized relational data.

I understand there is short time here, but the problem must be solved with a clever design to associate all of the records in the proper way so there is a strong foundation to build on. I’m sure it will still be necessary to cache the data WHEN QUERIED, and there is nothing wrong with caching data (or careful de-normalization) for optimizing. It is a huge mistake, however, to pre-cache associations and treat those “virtual” associations as a new record.

Think about it this way. If you are afraid to delete records from a cache table because it will cause permanent data loss, then you really messed up somewhere.

I am willing to help out with this, if there is a willingness to do the right thing, and not what is needed to git’r done yesterday.

[abcde666]

Thanks Jeff !

posting is not working on a specific thread only.

this one:

New 1.2 SWA and Blog/Forum syncing: Feedback Needed

Anyway, never mind.

BTW: where is the word “bozo” coming from ?

[Jeff Sayre]

It seems that you are more than likely using an older theme, one that is not compatible with the version of BP that you’re running.

Please answer these questions so that we can better understand your setup:

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