BuddyPress.org

Wow…I go to sleep a few hours and the world changed from quite quiet to one full of interesting conversation. Exciting. Thanks all for joining the thread. I’m originally from Los Angeles, but have been living in Goa (West Coast of India) for a long time. Wondering where in the world everyone else is?

@bphelp @mcpeanut @rosyteddy: I really appreciate your ideas, challenging comments and questions. Sorry, I haven’t been clear about what we are doing. Let me elucidate so you can understand I’m not some crazy person sitting in the basement of my parents’ house dreaming. The project is called Planet Earthlings and is based on an animation/live-action TV pilot we created a few years back with a team of over 120 people in seven countries. The TV series was done in 3D and told the story of four animated aliens who come to Earth and meet four live action children. They play and learn in a magical animated world.

What we are doing now is a space theme 2D Virtual World (probably to be built in Unity with Smart Fox Server on the backend). The world will combine cooperative gaming, collaborative apps and tools for youngsters to learn and make friends all over the globe…hence the subtitle “One People, One Planet.” The dream is that if you bring kids together for cooperative and collaborative educational fun they’ll make friends with people all over the planet making it difficult…hopefully impossible…for governments to convince them people in other countries are our enemies. Yes, it’s ambitious, but there are many people all over the world who are interested and already joining the process.

The “main” project will live at “www.planeteartlings.net.” Which will be overseen by the Planet Earthlings organization, but we will be creating a Open Source front end so that people, companies or organizations who want to create a planet in our universe which is compatible with the overall philosophy of what we’re doing will be able to do it. We are also looking for open source games and apps that can be used in world.

Initially, (as in right now) we are testing WordPress/BuddyPress as a platform for the development team at “www.planetearthlings.org.” That may become something bigger, but for now it is simply to bring together kids, parents, different advisers and our core team to discuss and share ideas on HOW to build something truly unique and powerful for youngsters. The children will be “Kidvisers” and will get rewards for taking part and even reporting on other worlds, games and apps telling us what they like and don’t like. Others will take part because they want to be part of an exciting project for kids and are interested in being part of the change.

This is part of the process leading up to a CrowdFunding campaign we hope to start in June. After that we will decide on what will be included in Phase One development. We do NOT know how the development process will proceed as we’re still investigating the various options which include forming a core team locally, gathering an international team to collaborate remotely, partnering with an established Virtual World development company or even forming something elsewhere. When we move into that stage there will be funding and decisions will have to be made about how to proceed.

I have investigated several social network options and tested a few, but decided on BuddyPress because the “open source” philosophy behind it (and WordPress) are a big part of what we are creating. I am concerned about the scaling potential, but have been assured during my research that the platform will scale to thousands of users if it is hosted and setup properly. ***NOTE: This is one of the main concerns at the moment.

We aren’t looking for full-time BuddyPress developers right now and I wouldn’t expect anyone to work full-time unpaid. We’re simply looking for a few hours of advice and possible implementation from people who are intrigued by what we are trying to do. Would love to have input/suggestions about what functionality we should include in the initial version of the site and with the look. Examples of what we need now would be design suggestions in terms of look, including help with the site typography and possible suggestions about functionality…for example what would be the best way of integrating galleries of both images and video.

@mcpeanut I understand your view that most people want to get paid. We all need to eat, but there are plenty of people who want to be involved in something with lofty goals. I personally have worked almost five years unpaid on different parts of this project. Right now the project is setup with a “company” mostly because we’re not in a position to understand and deal with it differently. It may be something that becomes profitable, but we may set it up as a non-profit. That is one of the questions we will be discussing on the development platform.

@bphelp I hope you will continue with the discussion and pose as many difficult questions as you can come up with. I like difficult questions because they make me think, and often about things I haven’t yet considered. I don’t have all the answers even though I have hard drives with about five terabytes of data for this project, thousands of images, video and hundreds of thousands of files. I may be a dreamer, but I’m also an experienced IT Project Management consultant, a feature film director, novelist and entrepreneur, among other hats I sometimes wear.

There is much more about the project to discuss, but I leave it at this for now. Hope you don’t mind the length of the post, but I feel confident there are many people out there in the WordPress/BuddyPress world who are interested in this kind of work. Some will join us as volunteers and others in paid positions when the time is right.

Thanks all! If you want to learn a little more about the earlier project including lots of press and even a national magazine cover you can check that at http://www.palaflicks.com. Cheers!

I already test on new wp + bp install.
These code not work! 🙁

// MODIFY GROUP NAME TABS
$bp->bp_options_nav['groups']['home']['name'] = 'Group Activity'; //NOT WORK
$bp->bp_nav['groups']['home']['name'] = 'Member Activity 2'; //NOT WORK

//REMOVE SPECIFIC GROUP TAB
bp_core_remove_subnav_item($bp->groups->slug, 'send-invites');

taken from: http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/14469/remove-tabs-from-buddypress-groups-and-members-pages >> It’s not work anymore in latest BP 2.2.1

I’m using latest WordPress 4.1.1 and latest Buddypress 2.2.1
So.. how to exactly modified Group Tabs in single group page?

anybody? Please help. stuck in 3 days for this.
Thank you.

Good questions. First of all let me correct you, the price is $89 or $90 for single site users. $200 is for 5 sites. Also, there is no option that is $250. That said, price aside, I would pay $250 for EasySocial any day. It is fantastic.

To answer your questions, Feature wise, it is incredibly feature rich, and they work very hard to push more features all the time. It is a young project, and it already has all the features you really need for a Social Network. All in one package. It is on a whole other level.

There is way more backend control, user control, profile control, performance tweaking control etc.

In terms of performance, it is way ahead of BuddyPress and JomSocial. In tests BuddyPress and JomSocial load significantly slower on a highly populated site than on EasySocial. Especially when hosted on a LEMP Stack running Nginx, Php5-fpm, MariaDB and ngx_pagespeed on Debian.

I could answer any specific question about my experiences using EasySocial and JomSocial over the years. But I do recommend that developers take the time to get inspired by EasySocial.

I do understand that the business model is different, but I have seen many incredible open source projects over the years, and that is no excuse. That said, maybe BuddyPress should consider a much more complete version for premium subscription or something.

Hi @shanebp
First of all, thank’s a lot for your fast answer. Now I have understood a lot of thinghs, but I have only two little questions more:
1. The solution using ACTIVITY.PHP, listing in the following topic , let administrator introduce comment from ADMINISTRATION PAGE (DASHBOARD)? Or neither user and administrator will can to do comments in the groups?
2. If I create a CHILD THEME, where I must introduce the file ACTIVITY.PHP ?
Maybe, I need create the followings folders GROUPS/SINGLE into the folder ENFOLD-CHILD? And introduce there ACTIVITY.PHP file into SINGLE folder? Is it so?
I am not informatic and I don’t undestand very well what I need to do.
Thank’s very very much for your answer.

Hey @danbp

Thanks for the feedback. Before I answer your question, I just want to point you to question 4 in the plugin’s FAQ

Why is it that some members don’t have an identicon?
An identicon is used as a member’s avatar only if a profile photo hasn’t been uploaded. After activating the plugin, all new members will be allocated an identicon. Existing members will need to log in to get their identicon.

The reason existing users have to log in to get their identicon is simple. Imagine if a site had 100,000 existing users. At the point the website owner activated the plugin, there’s no way 100,000 fresh identicons could be created. It’d crash their server immediately. I needed a way of staggering the creation of identicons for existing users. The approach I decided on was to create existing user’s identicons on their next login.

Now, to answer your questions 😀

– first time i activated BI, all users showed the mystery man. And plugin works, as i see the border.

Great! That’s expected.

– changed profile photo of admin: custom picture appeared.
– removed the picture: identicon appeared on the admin account.
-tried to do same thing with a dummy user. Nothing happened.

The reason nothing happened for the dummy user is because you’re still logged in as admin. You will need to log in as the dummy user for his/her identicon to be created.

– create a new user from back office, with gmail address, identicon showed up

Great, that’s a new user created. Identicons are created for all new users so that’s expected.

– manually created a identicons folder in /uploads/

There’s no need to manually create folders. The plugin takes care of that for you automatically 🙂

– modified all dummy user mail address. Mystery man still showing.
– applied a custom picture to one, ok, then removed. Mystery man again.

Again, if you’re doing this logged in as admin, then nothing will happen. The actual dummy user will need to log-in in order for their identicon to be created.

– tried global settings to “empty avatar”. Nada ! Reverted to default MM setting and still no identicon.

Global settings aren’t taken into account by design. If you want to disable identicons, simply disable the plugin. Want them back? Re-enable it 🙂

On a dev site, using this plugin would really help to avoid calling an external avatar service.
Would also be true for a prod site, where specially gravatars are mentionned to be optimized as they slow down page speed.

That was one of the driving factors behind creating the plugin. The beauty of it (in my opinion) is there’s no need to make requests to an external service. Everything is stored locally which should improve page load speed.

Hope this info helps to clear up any confusion. If you need any more info then just give me a shout, and feel free to open a support ticket on the plugin’s forum if you find a bug.

@danbp Thanks! And apologies, my questions may appear to be too basic. This is partly because I am a newbie and, I guess, partly because our documentation needs further improvement.

I am slowly getting a hang of what happens when something goes in functions.php/bp-custom.php.

But still I am not able to achieve something that appears to be simple. May be, I will need to ask a better question. Which I will do, in a separate thread.

My questions might have been too complicated. To put it simple, that’s the kind of website I am looking for:

– Homepage: public
– Pages 2 to 8: public
– Page 9 including subpages: members only

How do you set this up with BuddyPress? Is WP Network (Multisite) necessary?

Thanks Henry! I’ll get to work on that. I have so many questions about BuddyPress!

sorry but see resolved? Questions still not answered!