[Tore]

@ Boone Gorges: That would be fantastic.

[Boone Gorges]

JJJ – I really like your modular way of thinking about how the forums could work with other parts of BP. It’s just hard to envision how, say, forums could be attached to an event, given the current dependence of forums on groups. Ideally (at least from this viewpoint) forums would be more of an independent, top-level component of BP, in the same way that a wire is (and in the same way that a wire can be placed on profiles, group pages, and so on).

[Tore]

Another way of looking at this is community size. A lot of us won’t have mega huge communities like Facebook. Not even 50.000 members. So then it comes down to fragmentation of user activity. Do we need a lot of venues and ways for users to interact?

I’m quite content with P2 for status updates, a forum and wire on personal pages. This is already a lot and groups on top of that will only confuse and fragment discussions.

Groups will probably be great with tons of functionality but where’s KISS?

Anyways, I’ll have a go at it. Probably hackish but perhaps good enough for me.

[allenweiss]

Thanks Andy

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

Default settings for new blogs for WPMU plugins DO exist. Again, this is nothing to do with BuddyPress. Look on the WPMU forum.

[John James Jacoby]

Think of something like Usenet, which was basically just a group of people talking back and forth inside their own little forum. Since BuddyPress is a community centric, user centric plugin for WordPress, the focus is on the interaction between people inside their respective groups. Forums are currently a feature of groups, but forums could be a feature of other things later too if plugins choose to support them, since bbPress is included and a great example of an API exists within BuddyPress.

Events could have their own discussion forums, blogs, users, activity feed items could be topics, etc…

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

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

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

Bug reports go in our bug tracker, I’ve added it this time for you – https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1213.

At a minimum, we also need you to complete the details on https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/when-asking-for-support

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

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

Secondly: I am assuming you are using the default BP 1.1 theme for the moment – are you? If not, use the default theme until you have it all working. Make sure it is in /wp-content/themes/. Activate the theme in the normal way and select it; this warning message should go away.

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

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

[r-a-y]

I already have the topic implemented in the title of the email on my custom version of Boone’s plugin, as well as changing the email address to “noreply”.

Looking forward to your changes, Mike!

[proceon]

Greetings –

Just need a little help here…I simply want to run BP 1.1 in compatibility mode

and use a WP theme for my root blog and and a BP theme for BP activities.

I do NOT want to merge the two. I have tried that, and my WP theme (Magicblue)

is not suited for all the things that BP needs. Therefore would like to run things

exactly like under BP1.0. I have this working on another system (WP 2.71/BP1.0).

I am not clear as to which template files to move to my WP theme from the new

version of BP. In the MERGE process I would move over “optionsbar.php”, “userbar.php”, and “plugin-template.php” and then move over all the subdirs from bp-sn-parent. What

do I move over to run in campatibility mode? PLEASE some help…I have posted several

times in these forums and do not seem to be getting any input.

Thank you once again for your time.

[Andy Peatling]

I will fix this for the next version.

[Andy Peatling]

Well said Boone.

[Boone Gorges]

@wordpressfan I think you might be right for some kinds of communities, but as the groups functionality of BP becomes richer (as it does with, for example, Andy’s new External Group Blogs plugin), the groups/forums distinction won’t seem so arbitrary. Forums then become just one of the ways that group members (ie people who share a common interest or purpose) can collaborate and communicate. But you’re right that right now there is little difference between a group and a forum, at least functionally speaking.

[wordpressfan]

The key to streamlining the forums = groups = forums path is to remove the groups metaphor, at least for users. There are two BP metaphors that get the most user attention: profiles and forums. From profiles, people can interact with other users: friending and joining groups. From forums, people can interact with other users: reading and writing topical posts. Having groups as a separate metaphor, which is sort of like forums and sort of like profiles creates confusion.

A quick solution would be creating a separate bbpress installation, integrating it with the bp forums and deactivating the bp groups.

[Paul Wong-Gibbs]

Please usehttps://buddypress.org/forums/topic/how-to-create-a-forum-that-isnt-associated-with-a-group/ to continue this

discussion

[zageek]

Precisely. What I am needing is a standalone forum with a little bit of integration with groups. There should be better configuration options for the forums that allow you to choose how you want to use it. The one click set up is a bit too simplistic.

[Mike Pratt]

@Boone – We’ll have it ready NLY this weekend and send the patch your way. It’s nothing ground breaking but does focus on making the email look as simple, easy to consume as possible and with clear actions (for ex. changing “To view this message” (recipient already is!) to “To reply to this message” kind of thing. Prior to doing that, i can’t tell you how many users tried replying by actually replying to the email . We’ll also be adding the Topic as a ref (missing) to put the message into better context.

[Boone Gorges]

Excellent, Mike. Not only am I not offended, but I would love to see the improvements that you make to the email notification itself. It was (funnily enough!) one of the last things I did when I put together the plugin, so I didn’t feel like putting a lot of time into it. If you come up with something more flexible and/or better for a wider audience, I would love to have it, and with your permission patch the plugin.

Boone

[Boone Gorges]

Another idea is to have all non-group-specific forums belong to a sort of invisible, public group that everyone on the site is a member of. That way, anyone could post to the forum, and its topics would show up in the forum directory as you’d expect.

The trick would be to get that group not to appear on group directories, both public and individual, since the group would be nothing more than a shell for public forums and thus wouldn’t have any other content worth listing on people’s group and activity pages. It’d be easy enough to add a piece of metadata to each group that determined whether it should be listed in directories (independently of the public/private/hidden distinction). The problem is that groups are listed in lots of different places in BP, and you’d have to hijack each one of them in order to filter for this metadata. Such a plugin would be a pain to build and to maintain, I expect, as group lists are posted in more and different places throughout BP.

[Tore]

This all depends on what you want your website to be about.

I’m guessing that you can modify the groups heavily so that they’re believed to be forum categories instead. Strip everything but the forums from the groups (members, admin, all) and change the way they look. The forums should be more prominent and have larger fonts, etc.

The downside is that all the groups-features will be unusable. At this time I’ll probably try to make this change and see what happens. It will be a modified groups child theme oriented at forums.

I’m all for integrated solutions and don’t want to have a bridge. They tend to collapse from time to time (at least back in the phpBB2 days).

[zageek]

Yeah I agree, the whole groups and forums things is a little counterintuitive considering the way most internet users have come to expect forums to behave.

I am having the same problem with groups and forums and the one click install. I might even switch to another forum script if I have time to build a bridge.

[takuya]

Starting with group slug problem:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/group-slugs-when-i18n-environment

BuddyPress should offer options to set group url (slug) to be %postname% or %post_id%. Otherwise they should add a new text field to edit group slug upon creation of groups.

Next is activity excerpts bug:

https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/654

Once it was fixed with 1.0 series, now it happens again on 1.1

If you have technical skills to submit patches on these, please do so. I may be able to help you find bits of code, but I can’t write anything from scratch.

[oracleappscommunity]

enforcing to create groups to create a forum doesn’t seem to be right. We should have flexibility to create forums, groups, separately or together. That makes it ideal for different needs.