BuddyPress.org

What is all this extending people want to do with forums (is bbPress) I am having trouble wrapping my head around what was deemed “weak forum functionality” What is it supposed to do that it already isn’t?

From my perspective only: I’m working on migrating a busy community of about 1000 users from Vanilla. Now Vanilla itself is just that — basic, but nice and solid forum structure. Unfortunately, Mark, the guy behind it, fractured the vibrant development community around extensions when he jumped the gun on the 2.0 release, reworked the extension repository, badly, in my opinion, and now things are in disarray, sadly, and the 2.0 version, nice as it looks, just isn’t coming very fast, while the 1.x versions, still apparently being maintained and moved forward, have a floundering and disjointed developer community kind of wondering what’s going on. It’s a bit sad to see, as it’s a great little app. It’s just that I think there was a big mistake made in the way that the community website around it (like this one here) was changed, and lost focus on users. It’s gotten better since, the developer site, but I think momentum might have been lost.

So, anyway. My users have come to expect some basic functionality from a forum, most of which ihas been added through extensions to Vanilla. Things like:

• Attaching inline images to posts
• Easy quoting of posts in replies
• Minor, standard forum structural stuff like new comments since last visit, links to last reply/replier and so on
• Inline PMs (which, in my case, will be moved to BP private messages when I do the jump)
• Individual hread pagination/navigation in the forum view
• Ways to thank (ie vote up, ‘like’, whatever) posts
• Buttons on textareas for basic tinyMCE-like functionality

And lots of other little niceties like that. I am determined to make the transition from Vanilla to BP as smooth and seamless as possible for my users (many of whom are developers and sophisticated web users, many of whom aren’t), and so the little things have been much on my mind. I want to provide them with a core forum experience that replicates as closely as possible what they’ve been used to for the past few years, but with all the other BP goodness and blog hosting with WPMU and all the rest extending it.

Pretty much all of that is now covered by plugins (or even core BP stuff) from etiviti (rich!) and Boone and others, thank goodness. But until literally the last couple of weeks, a lot of the plugin functionality to fill in those gaps, available on standalone bbPress installs through plugins written for bbPress, wasn’t available in Buddypress’s integrated version. So I am deeply thankful to folks working on that stuff and porting it to work natively in BP.

So, for me, it’s not that there’s anything intrinsically wrong with BP’s forum functionality as provided by bbPress, but there are just a whole bunch of nice little things that people don’t think about much until they’re no longer there that I want to make sure my userbase doesn’t miss if we make the move.

Again — that’s just my own personal story with the site I’m currently working on. And yes, I am well aware that Buddypress isn’t about replicating or extending the kind of bog-standard forum style we’re all used to, it’s kneedeep in the MyFace-y Spacebook-y Twitteriffic social networking hoohah that is so au courant these days. All good.

In my case, it’s not a matter of everything looking like a nail because I have a hammer in my hand, honestly. If all my work with BP to tweak it towards something that will please my users doesn’t pan out, I won’t end up using it for this particular project I’m working on right now — but I’m so close I can taste it. Learning BP is an end in itself, as well.

Thanks Bowe for the S2Member suggestion. I did see this while clicking around. Looking more closely, the two missing elements for us are:-

* the heavy lifting that WP-Wishlist does in working with payment processors outside paypal & affiliate systems.

* the private_tag protection of individual text that allows you to personalize the same page to show different content based on level…..(which can be also be a combination of all-access or “drip feed” for learning situations)

I really appreciate the suggestion. Thank you

I’m experiencing the same problem.

Np! Where is my Bug Hunter badge??

If there are duplicate trac tickets for the same issue, obviously, just close them all down except for one of them and put a note in the others pointing to that ticket. Thanks again everyone for your time and effort in reporting bugs

Please search my recent posts for some code I wrote to fix this exact issue. In short, BP Messages fetches server time when it is inserting the timestamp. I think I also filed a trac on this. We should probably cross refence our tracs so the developers can get all the info in one place.

I think that may be your problem. I moved my hosting co to one in the uk because I couldn’t find a fix. That was 6 months ago.

@m In reply to your statement above: “Plus I don’t see any reason not to give the user total control over their profile since it’s their info (thus no need for a setting to “Let user decide” )” I thought I might be able to provide a good reason…

As an elementary teacher using BP in the classroom, privacy is incredibly important, and a trigger that allows me to force the privacy of my users should not be discounted.

Teaching kids how to navigate and manage their digital footprint is easier if admins can ensure that mistakes the users make can be contained in the privacy of the “digital classroom”

Plugin looks interesting, but would love the added security of knowing that my kids’ profiles are private.

Is your server hosted in a different time zone to where you are?

Keep the sidewide posts blog private.

Then it won’t show up.

fyi, i installed this plugin: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-mail-smtp/

When i used the standard php_mail option it does not work, if i use smtp mailing it works.

As mentioned before private messaging between users is sending out notifications without any problem (without plugin). Is there any difference between the mail functions here ?

Andy,

I don’t think that’s the issue. However i am also not sure it is buddypress related, i did some more testing and found that creating a user from the backend does not send confirmation mails either. Private messaging within buddypress is working great however. So it is in my case NOT buddypress related.

lol, so it should work now for me xD

Great, Thanks!

ah, it makes sense now. my code makes all blog pages public, which obviously includes the frontpage as well. so if you’re showing the activity stream there, it would be public. I guess you want to make your complete site private? then the code below should work for you:

function sh_walled_garden()

{

global $bp;



if( bp_is_register_page() || bp_is_activation_page() )

return;



if(  ! is_user_logged_in() )

bp_core_redirect( $bp->root_domain .'/'. BP_REGISTER_SLUG );

}

add_action( 'get_header', 'sh_walled_garden' );

Travel junkie,

is working on the members page, and on my groups page, and it wasen’t working on the activity page.

I had my activity stream as my homepage I change home page to point to a static page and now it seems to work!

I guess you posting does not apply it static pages.

Travel Junkie,

I’m using 2.9.2 with the buddypress default theme. I’m having no luck. I paste you code on my functions.php file and nothing! any suggestions?

well, i’ve got it running on a single install of wp 3.0 alpha, so there shouldn’t be any problems.

Travel junkie,

I’m using a regular WordPress install( not MU) can your posting still work for me?

yes, not better, but more simplified…

i still prefer yours, it’s more accurate, professionalm but… it doesn’t works for me

regards

it’s only a better solution for you, cause you couldn’t get the other one to work but anyways, glad you found something that does work!