BuddyPress.org

@alanchrishughes; What we’ve done – and it’s making sense to a few testers so far – is to ditch the forums and just use groups. So people know, for example, that they can create a cycling group, or a business group, or a flower arranging group. They understand that they can post messages in their group, and invite others to join in, accept new members, etc., and also that if they want things in the group to remain only there then they can make it private.

Apart from the varying negative reactions I see from people regarding forums and blogs, one of the things which puts people off with forums is the layout style. They don’t want to ‘go into’ a new area and then have to sub-navigate, as they frequently become lost and end up hitting the Home button and starting again. Or worse still, the browser’s Close button, because it’s just another minor stress in life they can do without. Seeing an activity stream, and then entering a group knowing that it’s much the same thing, but either publicly displayed or kept private, they can handle. (Funnily enough, one tester said today when looking at the activity stream, “This is a really great idea…a local forum”).

Personally, I’m very much pulling away from all the “Oh how cool is this?!” side of technology, as you may notice from other posts I’ve made. It’s not because I’m ready for pipe and slippers yet, nor because I don’t like it all, but simply because those who are or become site and software developers are usually far removed from those they’re developing for, yet they don’t realise it. ‘Screen blindness’, perhaps. Developers are producing highly complex helicopters, while what most people really want are bog-standard 4-gear cars. Some are even happy with a horse and cart! (Afterthought; I guess the trick is to produce the complex helicopter, but make it so simple to fly that all you need is a steering wheel and 4 gears. I know; the analogy falls down hard if stretched further!)

greg makes good points about groups and friends.

There is almost no benefit whatsoever of Friends within BuddyPress. As far as I can tell it only enables three things.
1. Stream filtering
2. Group invites (altho’ there is the invite anyone plugin)
3. Autocomplete help on “Messages > Compose”

That’s it. You can still message anyone who’s a non-friend and you can still see the full profile of anyone who is a non-friend. The people in my small community (all of whom actually know each other in real life) simply don’t get it. They ask me all the time – “what the heck is the friend thing for? seems stupid”

You may counter that my case is a special case. I mean, who sets up a community site with less than 200 users?! Who all know each other! I’m not so sure about that. I see BuddyPress being used A LOT for micro-communities. I think in fact that there will be a new trend towards micro-communities. People have seen the value with things like Facebook and they want to see that now in their smaller online spaces… local mountain biking groups… local surf donkeys… your knitting club… whatever!

And with regards to groups – same thing – groups don’t really do anything other than group people. Once you’re in a group all you can really do is post on the “wall”. That’s it. Groups is a great idea but they need to to a lot more. My users ask me all the time – “why can’t we create events in the groups”. All the time. It’s the number one thing people ask for. That plus documents, wiki, photos, etc. would all go a long way. I know much of that can be added with plugins. But out of the box, BuddyPress groups don’t really do much.

i think a really great plugin would be one to integrate BigBlueButton with WordPress, and specifically with Buddypress. Then, as mentioned above, individual users or Buddypress groups could be easily invited to sessions. The api for integration is here:
http://code.google.com/p/bigbluebutton/wiki/API

and the main site is here:

Home

If you’re speaking more about distance education and e-learning, I invite you to look at a few resources on my site:
http://thecorkboard.org/category/instructional-technology/online-learning/

PJ mentions the Scholarpress plugin, which, I agree, is a bit faulty at the moment. But keep track of the Google Summer of Code project that looks to blend Scholarpress with BuddyPress and improve its features as well:
http://thecorkboard.org/gsoc-buddypress-and-sp-courseware/

I think a lot of what you want to accomplish is inherently available within BuddyPress. Meetings could equate to groups. Conferences could be a specific BuddyPress site with some features on or off. I’ve found that looking at BuddyPress – and WordPress for that matter – with a different lens has expanded my perspective on what this software can really do.

~Kyle~

@firetag

So, you’re looking for a “crossover” between private and public groups. Private so the activity doesn’t show in the stream (but it does show in the group) yet public so folks don’t need to be invited to join.

This might help: on lines 71 to 101 is the function/action for groups_setup_globals. On line 97 is the valid_status array (public, private, hidden) where I’m thinking you could add a new status like “category”. As that new status would not be “public”, activity shouldn’t show up in the main stream, and as it wouldn’t be “private” either, neither invitations nor membership requests would be needed.

What do you think…doable?

EDIT: I guess you would need a way to keep that option out of the preselects available to users at the group creation stage though. Hmmm…

You can use something like this:
bp_core_remove_subnav_item( $bp->groups->slug, ‘send-invites’ );

I’m not sure about the plugin you’re referring to, but this plugin should do what you want: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/invite-anyone/

@moominmama Invites is a work in progress. I have part of it working but not all yet.

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/cubepoints-buddypress-integration/
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/cubepoints-buddypress-integration/

Your second, third and fourth requests can be taken care of by making sure the groups are set as Private. That means that they don’t show up in public listings, and their contents are only visible to members of the group.

In order to make sure that people can only be part of a single group, you’ll want to hide the Send Invite screen for all users, or at least for non-admins. You could either do this through CSS, or by modifying/reproducing the functionality defined at bp-groups.php groups_setup_nav().

As for the first question, there are WP plugins that allow you to restrict membership to invited members. A ten-second Google search turned up this: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-invites/, for example. I imagine that this would work fine for BP as well. The most straightforward way to populate groups would then be for the admin to use a plugin like BP Group Management http://teleogistic.net/code/buddypress/bp-group-management/, which allows admins to place people manually in groups, bypassing the invitation process.

@3sixty: I experienced exactly the same misbehaviour in my blog = invitation sent, membership requested by the blog member, confirmed twice somehow and… boing, 2 memberships of the same member in a single group.
Is it still there in your blog or could you fix it?

I wonder if it was sufficient to simply delete the doubled/second group-member-relation entry from the MySQL wp_bp_groups_members table? Or does this have any negative side effects?
A more gentle alternative could be to set the group_id field of this entry to a non-existing group 999 or so. Shouldn’t do any harm unless the 999th group is created and an uninvited member pops out of nowhere…

Cheers,
Hans

If anyone is having problems, like I was, Sarah Gooding’s solution worked for me. To be specific, do the following:

~ click on Groups
~ click on a Group – you should then see “Home – Admin – Forum -Members (4) – Send Invites” in its’ menu
~ click on Admin
~ click on Group Setting
~ check the box for “Enable discussion forum”
~ save changes

Now when you go to Forums in the menu, you should be able to click on New Topic and save it. Thanks SARAH GOODING – you’re the best!

Why not call a ‘group’ a ‘section’?

I would still see the need for multiple fora/ subfora.

Section is commonly used in daily life, and people might understand this concept easier.

So for example a ‘section’ could be named ‘faculties’. Then you could give each forum in the section ‘faculties’ a faculty name. If you post in a faculty you automatically become a member of that faculty, as well as the section ‘faculties’.

So how would one differentiate between for example faculty staff and students? Is there a possibility for categorizing members into ‘member groups’?

So to recap

Section:
Fora
Members:
Member groups

Now any section and fora can have a blog. So a Campus BBQ post to which all the faculties are invited would then go in the section blog. Whereas a open day for the biology faculty post would go under a forum blog, in this case the ‘biology faculty’. Automatically all people that are members would get a notice. On the other hand if you had a Campus BBQ for all the staff of all the faculties and you posted this, you would need some kind of selection in the blog screen if you wanted to notify only the faculty staff. You could chose to design it so that everybody can still be able to read the post in the section ‘faculties’ blog, or have only faculty see this.

There might be a better word for ‘fora’ though (in some cases)(?).

ok, i looked on the frontend of the site and have the buddypress menu on the top.
” My account, notifications, Chat “

Under ” my account ” i have “groups”>>my groups and invites

If i go to “groups” i cant find a way to create any group either.
See picture: http://yfrog.com/3zwpprobl2j

But where can i create groups?

thanx in advance

In the trunk, the invitation stuff is a little bit broken because of some updates to how component checks are working. In short, the trunk version is making a few errors about whether or not the friends component is active, and if the friends component is deactivated, you won’t see the Send Invites tab. It’s working in the stable 1.2.3.

Master feed doesn’t really replace the recent posts list, it’s an rss feed and formatted depending on your browser, in Opera that isn’t usable for me as a replacement.

I am very conscious of how changes of the magnitude do take time to settle down with from experiences with another forum that went through a similar conceptual change from original Vbulletin trad forum to a far more community orientated site using Drupal. One thing the regulars and mod agreed on was that to a man/woman we all entered the site via the Tracker page labeled ‘Recent Posts’ that simply kept a single list of all posts made across the sites subforums/groups for those of us that checked all posts this was and remains an absolutely fundamental and vital page to enable fast tracking of new or updated posts along with the ability to filter to our own responded or started topics/posts – something that I feel is going to be missed here?

@boone I guess now that your original thread on the Send Invites plugin should be considered closed? otherwise you end up having two separate areas to track and the attendant confusion that brings, but it feels slightly odd that I now have to find that plugin group, join and remember to keep track of it.

I mean it’s not possible to have totally separate BP networks running on separate subdomains but using the same installation of BuddyPress.

If you take my suggestion, you can make groups either Private or Hidden. If a group is private, the only people who are able to read or contribute to the group are those who have either had a membership request accepted, or those who have been invited. Hidden groups are the same, but they don’t show up in group directories, and thus it’s impossible to request membership to them – you can only join by being invited.

In this way, the activity that happens in a hidden group is only viewable by members of that group. Users of the site, however, could be members of multiple groups, and could interact with each other outside of those groups, through the profile pages and private messaging (assuming that you enable these features). From my point of view, this is the best of both worlds.