BuddyPress.org

Actually that Private BP Pages plugin looks pretty much ideal for what you want @mrbirl.

It would help if you listed the plugins, and details about anything else you have tried such as code snippets.

Did you try https://wordpress.org/plugins/private-bp-pages/ – if so what was the problem?

Not sure if you are still out there, but I am trying very hard (not a coder, btw) to create a site that will allow the members control over who can see their postings, friendships etc.

I cannot figure out how to do it with buddypress. Every solution that has been offered has not actually done the trick, be it a plug in or adding code.

My site is a paid membership site – and restricted to members of a local “in person” social group.

The way buddypress is working, even with the “activity privacy” plug in installed is this:

there is a page called activity stream. It has 4 tabs in it:

all members
friends
@mentions
rss

Everytime someone joins the site, it shows up in the all members tab
everytime someone accepts a friend request, it shows up in the all members tab
everytime anyone posts any status updates, photos, or anything, it shows up in the all members tab

anyone who has a membership can view the all members tab, therefore, nothing a member does is private.

I have not tested emails, so perhaps emails are private, but so far, nothing else is.

I have tried in vain to find a way to be free of the all members tab and cannot get a solution. I am considering abandoning buddypress and trying symposium and seeing if that offers privacy.

Once the all members tab is resolved, you would also need to resolve similar issue with rss feeds, as that pumps all info out there as well, as best I can tell.

Buddypress seems to be designed as a very very public space and I fear that trying to accomplish any privacy is a losing battle.

If you find something that does work, I would appreciate knowing what it is as I am at my wits end with it.

Best of luck to you.

I see. One idea could be separating the users from different url:

paied.yourwebsite.com
free.yourwebsite.com

When a person is paying, just change it to another website and they will be able to post privately. Apart from that, I can’t think of any other way. 🙁

…can I just create those pages to satisfy BuddyPress and then just make them private?

You can. In fact, if you’re sure you’ll never need them you can perform a 301 permanent redirect to ensure they never show. For example:

function redirect_pages() {
	if ( bp_is_register_page() || bp_is_activation_page() || bp_is_members_component() ) {
		wp_redirect( home_url(), 301 );
		exit();
	}
}
add_action( 'template_redirect', 'redirect_pages' );

If for some reason you find you do in fact need the activation page, then remove || bp_is_activation_page() from the above code.

I can’t really tell for sure but reading your post it seems you have ‘private tags’ that you’re wrapping around stuff you’d like to keep private?

Maybe try wrapping these tags around the members loop bp_has_members()?

Rick, glad that we’re clearing up some confusion. To confirm, yes, messaging is totally different than posts. Please read the codex links provided. Also, if you really want to take buddypress for a test drive, set up a development site either on a live site or right on your own computer using http://www.instantwp.com/ and then add some “fake” users and messages, and data using this plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-default-data/

And then jump in there and click around like crazy, edit, message, post, and see what happens! this is the best way to really check things out without doing any damage to your own site. Nothing compares to getting your hands dirty and mucking about (in a safe test environment).

This way you can really understand what messaging is, what private messaging is, broadcasting from admin to all members, etc. You can also add/remove plugins and check out their functionality, all in the comfort of your own computer’s hard drive or a test environment set up at a test domain/host that you control/own.

Also, keep in mind that buddypress has many features but you do not have to enable them! for example, there is a feature for groups. But you don’t have to enable it! you can add a forum (using bbPress) but you don’t have to! you can have private messaging so members can send private messages to each other… but, you guessed it, you don’t have to enable this feature. Also, another powerful feature is that you can give members of your site the ability to start their own blogs! this is called “multisite” but you can choose to enable this or not. Same goes for “friend connections” feature… etc.

My suggestion is to start with a very simple starting point and then as your community grows, add features that they require or need. It is a far too common mistake for new buddypress users to just turn everything on at the start.

If you don’t want to restrict your membership in any way or to collect money online from them then you don’t need anything else other than buddypress and wordpress. But look through the membership plugin links I provided to familiarize yourself with them and their features just in case. A few are completely free and still have tonnes of features.

Finally, keep in mind that spam registrations do happen. There are many guides and tools to mitigate spam membership registrations. Here’s a good start:

Preventing Spammer Registration

Google is your friend for more info on spam fighting.

I’ll add this to clarify further, a person can join your website but with a membership plugin you can have several tiers which would act as a filter to designate what they can and can’t do or see on the site.

So for example, a regular member can read the blog. A ‘premium’ or ‘conference’ member can read the blog, write comments, read the conference specific blog posts, private message other conference members, etc.

Some membership plugins are quite powerful and granular… if you need that sort of thing.

ok, let me see if I understand you — if not, correct me 🙂

1) you have a website at: http://www.betterpresenting.com/
2) you have created another separate website at http://www.summitcommunity.org/ where you want to install buddypress and create a community website for a conference

ok I think before we even get to the ‘messaging’ or ‘post’ issue, we have to clarify something.

As of now, http://www.summitcommunity.org/ forwards to http://www.betterpresenting.com/community/

Buddypress automagically works seamlessly with your existing theme so it looks good… this wasn’t always the case so thank the developers who added this feature just a few months ago! moving on from minor digression…

So it looks like you don’t have two separate sites but your domain at summitcommunity.org is 301 redirecting to http://www.betterpresenting.com/community/ and this is where you have installed buddypress.

Is that correct?

If this is correct, then we can move on to the other question you posed.

I went back and read you original post that you referenced above:
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/installing-bp-into-a-portion-of-a-site/

In that message you write:

“If I understand correctly (a reach at best), posts become messages. But I post at betterpresenting.com about a great many things, not just ones that would be for the conference community.”

Posts do not become messages. Posts and messages are separate things. ok?

A post is well, a blog post. I’m sure you know what that is.

A message is an internal message sent from one member to another (if you have enabled this feature of buddypress – you don’t necessarily have to! or from admin to members)

https://codex.buddypress.org/buddypress-components-and-features/messages/
https://codex.buddypress.org/component/private-messages/

Also, admin can send a ‘broadcast’ message to all members with this plugin:

BuddyPress Live Notification

Hope that clarifies words and definitions so we have a standard vocabulary with which to communicate!

Now, if I understand the rest of your original message accurately, what you’re saying is that you run a website and have an annual conference and would like to know how buddypress can help you with both. And you want to make sure there is a way to keep the conference ‘stuff’ separate from the other regular website ‘stuff’.

To solve this, you don’t need subdomains or extra installs of wordpress or any of that. Here’s what I would do:

I would install buddypress as a plugin in your existing wordpress blog (the ‘main’ site). Then I would use the buddypress features to run your annual conference by also enabling a membership plugin.

Using the membership plugin you can post ‘conference’ related material and pages which ONLY THE MEMBERS SEE and interact with. To someone who just comes to your site, all they see is your regular blog/site… until or if they ‘login’ and have paid or are accepted as ‘conference’ participants.

People who are members of the conference (aka buddypress + membership powered) site can see and interact with both the conference portion of your site as well as the regular part of the site.

If I have hit the nail on the head and accurately understood your needs, here are some reference material:

http://chrislema.com/comparing-wordpress-membership-plugins/

How to choose a WordPress membership plugin

If not, let me know!

Hi Rick, I think you need to clarify exactly what you’re trying to do. What you write is very confusing and may have lead to your and others’ frustration in attempting to help you:

“But our main site has an active blog and I don’t know how to separate posts that are intended to be read by the entire world and shown across the entire site from messages that are intended to go just to the Summit community.”

Are we talking about messaging? as in private and internal messaging between members and between admin and members? or are we talking about blog posts that are read by all or some parts of the community?

If you want to restrict blog posts to just members, this is extremely easy and there are many plugins that handle this.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/private-community-for-bp-lite/

as well as s2member and other ‘membership’ plugins which work with buddypress to create tiers to separate content (pages, posts) so that you have control over who sees or reads what.

So please clarify EXACTLY what you are trying to accomplish and hopefully the community here can help you.

There is an option to make a group hidden,this may be what you need.

On the group admin panel as you go through the create/edit process you can make the group private or hidden.

If you make the other groups Private or Hidden, users can only join the one group you have left Public. You’ll need to provide more detail if you are looking for something different than that.

Maybe this will help?
https://buddypress.org/support/topic/sorting-private-message-threads/

Sorry I didn’t explain this as well as I could have. You shouldn’t need a lot of servers, just one very good server. So if you’re using cheap shared hosting at $5-10/mo, that’s not going to cut it once your site scales up large. In that scenario you’re sharing bandwidth and resources with many other sites, and the server itself (which is just a computer really) is likely not all that fast if you’re not paying much. You can rent your own server, or a virtual private server, and it can have very high specs all dedicated to your site. Like 24 cores, 2-4gb RAM, etc. That will be fast. You can get that for $50-$100/mo depending on what you choose/need. And you can always migrate a site from one server setup to another. A developer experienced in moving sites can usually do this within a day.

A HUGE site does need multiple servers. Facebook for example probably has thousands of servers all around the world. But keep in mind how much raw data they must serve. A BP site at 100,000 users can probably be delivered from one database, from one server. The guiding strategy is to take as much load off of that server as possible, and then make sure the server is good enough to handle what is left without crashing or stalling with not enough RAM. “caching” at the server level is a method to take load off of the server. Using a CDN takes load off of the server. etc.

I’m sure speed is an issue that the BP team thinks a lot about, but it’s a hard one to tackle as people are all customizing everything and it’s not really best practice to include caching within plugins. Although best practice isn’t everything, because in reality a solid caching system for BP would solve a lot of speed issues. It would need to cache individual components and break them live with AJAX, or something like that – not my expertise. I can imagine this interfering with many custom setups and plugins however, so like I said, probably not a simple fix.

Same here, my user clicks “Request Membership” button on a private group and gets page that says “This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?”

I’m using BuddyPress 1.9.1, BuddyBoss theme 3.04

I’m experiencing a simular problem with bp groups and bbpress. If my group admins change their group settings from public to private, the forum type doesn’t. The forum tools doesn’t fix it.

WP 3.8
BP 1.8.1
BBPRESS 2.5.2

Thanks!
Daniel

Hi @marcella1981

You’d release your theme through the WordPress Theme Directory (or you can make your theme available privately – through a GitHub repo for example).

There will be a theme review process if you plan to release through the Theme Directory. Take a look at this for more info:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Review

For guidance on theme development (assuming you haven’t finished your theme yet), check out:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Theme_Development