BuddyPress.org

Thanks, David. I’ll pursue these options then let you know what happens.

As for login, Id like to use the “Login with Ajax” widget because it has a “Forgot password” option and it allows for redirects to custom URL on login and/or logout. I’d like to stay away from the WP screen, if possible.

In fact, that’s yet another challenge: how to give them access to create Posts without seeing the WP-admin screens — especially since I want any profile changes to be done via BP (so they’ll see their xprofile fields) rather than the more simplistic WP fields. alas… for now, i need to get some of them started and I’ll have to save that battle for another day.

This blog is for a private group of about 20 people.

@Xevo,

no, I am not talking as “Polls” being a plugin. There have been user-polls in the past at this very Forum, at which everyone could vote on features they would like to see in the future-versions of BuddyPress.

In general, all I want to say with my initial post is that we should not loose sight of what kind of features are really important.

Everybody has different priorities and everybody needs a certain feature, but we should not loose sight that certainly everybody will need “Privacy Features”.

Privacy might not be very important in the USA, but I can tell you gonna have quite big troubles in running a Social-Network in many countries in Europe, without providing User-Privacy.

There is a good chance you gonna run into legal troubles – which is quite critical, besides that users will complain about finding their private information on Search-Engines like Google. Just think about running a Dating-website, where users post lots of private information, but literally its not safe for them to use your website.

The other feature of “Advanced Search & X-Profile Fields” should be also within Core-Code and will definitely enhance every website being run on BP, no matter your niche. Think about -for example- performing a search for the users at your website being “male” and at an age-range between “20 and 30 years of age”. This is currently not possible.

The necessity of the feature of “User-Blogs-Posts from Front-end” is debateable, most probably not being used by everyone. But did you ever go into the “backend” of Facebook in order to write a post ?

Anyhow, just wanted to highlight to make sure you still see the forest in a clutter of trees…..

Please… I went live with the update without knowing that could happen. Could someone point me in the right direction?!

Just installed it. But it didn’t do anything. Still no content shown…

Any more help, suggestions?

Anyone else having that (I think I cannot be the only one, since it is on two totally different installations)?

No, do I have to do that? I thought this would be just, if I still want old features like wire etc…

Some further Infos: in my other install ( subdirectories) exactly the same…

Strange: some don’t Show content & activity at all but some Show just a few items from a long time ago ( like 9+ months). But there would Be alot more content in the months between!

Argh!

I am not trying to compare facebook or ning to BP. I am merely trying to highlight that users will ultimately make comparisons, whether webmasters or developers like it or not.

Most casual users of the internet are you used to the facebook experience where you do everything from the front end. Lets say if i want to use Buddypress to set up an organic farming community for example I am going to have many of my users getting confused with having a backend and a front end and all of the options and admin stuff in the backend.

Most of my users of my hypothetical site are 40 to 50 somethings who hardly know the difference between the front end and the back end and have only recently discovered Facebook. So I will find them struggling and complaining with using the site. So I will have to set up my network on Ning instead, where so many other 40 to 50 somethings have setup groups. It would be better for me to have my own private site but what choice do I have.

Buddypress is an excellent idea but having it religiously follow the dogma of wordpress when its aimed at being a platform for community sites, is ultimately going to cause some issues. All I am merely suggesting is tailoring WP to make it fit to the requirements of users.

Obviously human politics creep in everywhere and as a result this as well as technicalities Andy has his hands tied when it comes to forking WP for example. So why not turn BP into a separate project all together by integrating BP and WPMU into one package and stripping out some of the WP centric things like most of the backend. It can still say based on WPMU on the box but it won’t look and feel so much like WP to the end user if you see where I am getting at.

After all how many people who use BP will also want to use the WPMU only features on their site. Once you set up a social network you can’t go back to just being a multi-user blogging site. So stripping out the WP centric features surely won’t be an issue in the context of running a social network.

@Michael Berra

I understand what you are saying now

r-a-y is correct as he and I have discussed this privately since he has a plugin which injects media into the activity stream. I am working on integrating Links *directly* with the activity stream so you can attach a link to ANY activity update, just like you see on Facebook. Except I also hope to enable attaching links to replies as well. This is still in the planning stages, so if anyone has some input, now is the time to put in your two cents.

Thanks, mark. That’s what I needed.

Andy, the problem is that the More Privacy Options plugin adds new privacy levels, like on wordpress.com and the Activity Stream doesn’t recognise those. It only knows about Searchable/Not Searchable ‘privacy’ options (I’ve never understood why blocking search engines is referred to as ‘private’ – I think it’s misleading).

Hi,

thanks for the answers so far!

Setting up a separate bbBress is not really what I want, because it somehow would be overhead and a lot of additional for maintaining and everything.

Restricting Group creation sounds good. However this would require that all users are automatically created as members for the default group which will be used for getting the Forums. Additionally that would require some work on the theme, so that the users don’t get to see any Group related stuff.

I guess all this would be possible and I’ll look into it, but it’s not really what I had hoped…

@ashfame:

Just because I don’t want to use Groups, BuddyPress is still well suited for my project. I currently have most of the other components disabled as well (like Blogs, Friends, Activity Stream), but nevertheless there are enough features that I can use for a private community. I especially like the easy administration (from within the WordPress Frontend basically), because I don’t want the users to be in the WordPress admin area.

All of this is superior to a plain bbPress installation, because I get all the WordPress features with it “for free”. So basically this enables me to keep the current website for the project but add some community features to it.

Regards,

Tobias

hey all, the plugin can be downloaded at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-announce-group/ (once they approve it)

but for the time being it can be found at http://bluemandala.com/plugins/bp-announce-group.zip

it is pretty straight forward and can work with public groups, private or even hidden groups. Basically it make is to that only admins and moderators can add content. Regular members can join the group but can’t add any content.