BuddyPress.org

there are a few Q&A themes that exist already that you could use. Add BP plugin. Create a frontend form that submits questions as Posts with the member poster assigned as author and the comments for the post(?) are your answers. The community layer is the community layer just allow only members to submit questions and answers. Add plugins like ratings and page views and you’re set.

you could go with groups or forums but they are limiting when you consider what can be done with a full blog. So if you are on MU, just create another blog just for QA. that way you keep them separate from the blog and other things. I think post types are great…but at the end of the day you begin filling up your main site admin with tons of stuff. I like spreading the post type and plugin weight across different blogs(or sections)…but if the site is only going to be QA (no blog, no nothing else) just do the same thing but on the main site.

on your bp language change the “wrote a new post” to “added the question: ” or whatever and you’re set again!

It’s not a dummy question but there is little to go on, the best I can suggest is that you start of afresh create a child theme (which it sounds as though you have done) and start to add your old styles in and try and re-create the previous layout based on the new default theme, more than this and you would need to provide far more detail but i don’t think it would help, just a case of getting stuck in really and asking questions as and when you get stuck.

Ugh I’m having this same problem. Everyday I get at least one or two ‘fake profiles’ where they answer questions with ‘johoabjdvbajsldhfs’. I have the CAPTCHA plugin installed and it’s done nothing so far. Each ‘user’ also creates a blog, one was about world of warcraft and the others have been about cars. It’s HIGHLY annoying to have to sift through and mark each of these users as spammers.

Sounds like something I would do using a combo of a custom post type (“Questions”), a comment rating plugin of some sort (for the “this was the best answer” functionality), and maybe custom taxonomies (status (open/answered), categories, tags, etc.)

To clarify, the post in the custom type would be published by the question asker, and people could answer by commenting.

i am happy to share.

so i use jquery-ui first off, but if you just want today’s events, you don’t need to use it

so the first part is what is in my sidebar.php file

<?
// first set up today’s date
$today = date(‘m/d/Y’);
?>

This next part is still in the sidebar.php
<?
generate_week_events(‘1’, $today);
// to figure out tomorrow, i use mktime and date together
$tomorrow = mktime(0, 0, 0, date(‘m’), date(‘d’)+1, date(‘y’)); $tomorrowCompare = date(‘m/d/Y’, $tomorrow);
// you can use the +1 to add as many dates as possible for your calendar
// the ‘1’ that is an argument of the function is the id of the jquery-ui tab. i just add a “generate_week_events” function for as many days that i want to show and increment this number by one for each tab
?>

the function then compares the date fed in as an argument to the date in the custom field. if there is a match, then it shows the corresponding events. i just placed this in my function.php of my theme

<?
function generate_week_events($id, $date) {
global $post;
?>

<div id="tabs-“>
<?
// The cat=>9 here is the Events Category for this site it was implemented on and gets all posts where with a meta_value of the date fed in
$args=array(‘cat’=> 9, ‘meta_value’=> $date);
query_posts($args);

// Here I just split the $date at the “/”. the client at one point wanted the date spelled out in the list as “January 1st, 2010” but later did not, but i kept it here for your reference if you want it.
$r_date = explode(‘/’, $date);
$mk_date = mktime( 0,0,0, date($r_date[0]), date($r_date[1]), date($r_date[2]));
$print_date = date(‘F jS Y’, $mk_date);
// echo $print_date;

if ( have_posts() ) : while ( have_posts() ) : the_post(); ?>

this is the basic concept if you want the full code lemme know and i can email it to you

Any questions feel free

Matt

Hi @rossagrant, @r-a-y & @hkcharlie,
Thanks for the good question. So, there are three separate questions here that are slightly but significantly different, and often get merged into one.

First: ‘Can people upload malicious things?’
Yes. Say I have a file MyVirus.exe. I can rename it to MyVirus.exe.txt, and upload it to the site. Adding a MIME type check would help significantly, but it’s not foolproof, as the MIME type can also be spoofed. What it would do is take what I would call a “casual” malicious user out of the picture, as only more experienced and/or motivated malicious users are going to go through the trouble of spoofing MIME types. Although this sounds terrible, it’s not as bad as you might think, leading into the next question…

‘Will this cause any problems for my website/server?’
No. This is not much of an issue for several reasons. The main reason is that Apache doesn’t give uploaded files executable permission. So, even if a virus is uploaded, and a user clicks on it, the most likely scenario is that the user will see the source code (which may be a bunch of junk if it’s a binary file). Even if it was a file that the web server could process (like a PHP file or shell script), it still would just display the source.

‘Is this a hazard to my users?
Not Likely. Given the above scenario, Someone malicious would need to rename a file extension, upload it to the site, get people to download it, and get people to change the extension. So, if the user is really dumb, it’s possible. I’d like to think that someone that goes around downloading things and changing extensions from txt to exe would learn their lesson pretty quick.

I hope that helps. If someone is a security expert, I hope they might add more to the topic, but those are the risks to the best of my knowledge.

@r-a-y
@hnla – Just for sanity’s sake, I tried again. This time via “Super Admin > Blogs”. I clicked “Edit”, then added an existing user to the sub-blog that way. Works. Can you check to see your wp_bp_user_blogs table to see if it’s recording anything?

May be testing at cross purposes here? Also I t may well be my misunderstanding of things.

It isn’t so much sub blogs issue it’s a general member of the main site BP / WP blog has no means of easily logging in to the dashboard to make a post as a ‘contributor’ or a level elevated from ‘subscriber’ (As was raised by the OP on this thread?) further to that I realised that also there was a similar issue when installing WP as single blog in that users – at any level – had no bp-adminbar links to access the dashboard (normally under ‘My-blogs’) this issue is known but I had to quickly whip up a crude function to test user level and drop a series of dashboard links on to the adminbar if !bp_core_is_multisite() not ideal but functional.

The issue which still puzzles me is that on, for example, a multisite install, no user blogs created; if I take a user and elevate their role to ‘contributor’ or even ‘admin’ they still get no means of logging in to the dashboard, not at least under the my-blogs link (as the super admin gets) Perhaps they were never intended to be able but it does mean an awkward route for them to be able to make a post, in my mind I expected them to receive a link to the main blog under ‘my-blogs’ as the super admin or main admin gets, but it isn’t their blog so they don’t.

I would suppose that a bit of a rewrite of the ‘my-blogs’ function would solve things for both missing link on single installs and for elevated member roles to receive the link as well, I was starting to look at ‘my-blogs’ and adapting it but time is my enemy at the moment.

@ray – i’m thinking of the one under the Dashboard – My sites…

A plugin’s readme.txt file is your friend. It can answer many of the common questions you may have about a given plugin. Your question is answered on the first sentence of the Installation section.

From the Installation section of the readme.txt file for BuddyPress Links: “Notice: This plugin is under heavy development, and is not recommended for production environments!“

This is the same information that is displayed on the plugin’s page here on BuddyPress or within the WordPress Plugin Repository.

Hi Andrea, this isn’t true. A bug was fixed a few weeks ago in bp-blogs-classes.php that wasn’t correctly pulling a user’s blogs.

@hnla – Just for sanity’s sake, I tried again. This time via “Super Admin > Blogs”. I clicked “Edit”, then added an existing user to the sub-blog that way. Works. Can you check to see your wp_bp_user_blogs table to see if it’s recording anything?

I think the “my blogs” link pulls blogs that the user is an *admin* on, not just ones they have any access level to.

Just some basic questions: multisite (which is important as a different process)? registration steps completed? data in mysql for a failed user signup? (check _users->”user_status” and _usermeta->meta_key->”activation_key”)

I was pointing out the php file and functions – if you wanted see the flow of the signup. (wp_insert_user, setting user_status, generating and saving activation_key, sending activation email to user). You mentioned “My install of wordpress does send emails successfully, until I activate Buddypress (then it breaks).” BuddyPress uses the same WordPress functions to send an email – so nothing changes in that regard but maybe some weird oddity in your setup causing a null email address or some other unpredictable result.

@nuprn1

As I said to Paul… Being “a bit off-putting” is not my normal MO, but the original post was written two weeks ago and the only thing that’s happened since is a whole bunch of people have said “I have the same problem”. It hasn’t been until I was “a bit off-putting” that someone actually replied to the original question/post.

Enough about that.

Sorry, but your questions are a bit over my head. Any and all PHP coding I know is completely self taught and I’m not far enough along to grasp what you’re asking me to look for.

At any rate, thanks for the response.

-Justin

I have to admit defeat here ‘my blogs’ will not show anything other than ‘create blog’ been through every setting repeatedly in different combinations.

Tried both figuring there was likely a difference, seemingly same results, I’m going to have to look deeper before commenting further and discount any gross ignorance on the part of the operator – me

Hi Norman, first thank you for your script – I am trying to convert an smf installation to buddypress with it, but I have no success – hopefully anybody can give some hints? I have a few questions:
– How exactly do I have to proceed? I installed wp-mu, then via the plugin menu buddypress and smf-importer. The import seems to finish without errors, BUT I do not see any groups or forums at all! The link to /grous or /forum siple give a 404.
– I do not understand, if I need to install any forum separately? Do I need to install bbpress in another folder? Or does your import script generate some forum, but why is it not there?
– I do see however that there IS some data in the database that has been imported. But no way to see it on the side.
– Also many strings are beeing cut off, so title of groups and forums is corrupted.
– How can I debug this process? Is there any option to get some debug output?
– I s there a command line version of your importer or will it only run in WP context?
– Is there some technical documentation what exactly are you doing (yes, I know, use the source, Luke – but some hints will be helpful
– What exactly does this message mean and what can i do about it:
“Skipped 941 topics and 5075 posts due to missing users, boards or topics.”
How can I make it not to skip? or get some more infos which boards or users are missing? I do not think any users or boards are missing, btw…
– What if I want to use some more powerful forum? Which forum can I use and STILL have groups functionality?
THANK YOU very much for your attention!
Snaky

How are you adding the user? Are you adding the user via the Super Admin menu? or via the blog in question’s dashboard under “Users”?

I did the latter as a super admin.

Yep realise needs to be network mode and most of my test installs are, but that also raises another issue which I left a ticket on ‘ lack of link to dashboard with single blog install’

Hmm on WP 3.0 BP 1.2.6 user with own blog , elevated to ‘contributor’ on main blog, at least logged in as Admin and selected user and changed role from ‘no role for user’ to ‘contributor’ yet logging in as this user shows only their blog under My Blogs. Still not convinced I’m not simply overlooking something obvious so will leave for a while and come back to this when thinking clearer

You need to have network mode enabled in WP 3.0 to view the “My Blogs” menu.
Do you have this enabled?

No I get no drop down at all and the top level link ‘My Blog’ is not an active link, checking the DOM shows an empty child UL. It’s an odd one, if you say it works for you on same setup there’s probably something I’ve overlooked and I’ll investigate further.