BuddyPress.org

Nice questions, walls are critical for a social network. @mentions are cool for forums and such and for messaging, but not good for leaving nice messages on peoples walls that make them feel warm and fuzzy inside and that others can check out

I am looking to do something similar to that. Anyone have any code snippets or hints in the right direction to show X recent forum topics in the groups-loop?

Thanks!

Okay, let’s backtrack. Please answer these questions:

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/when-asking-for-support/

One last thing. BEFORE you post questions in this forum PLEASE search first. Things have been answered 20 times over.

Good reads:

BuddyPress Codex

Hi Mr. Maz,

thanks a lot for all your great work at Buddypress. Your link-plugin is great.

Last weekend I was playing around with a friend on the link-component, and we had some ideas and questions, we would like to ask you:

1. How about adding sub-categories?

2. Is there a way to add custom-fields to links?

3. It would be great if your plugin would recognize the most common formats, like *.pls, *.mp3 … and display a play button for them.

Are you planning to add these features in the near future?

Thanks, Sven

As seen in other threads (and this one) I don’t think you can easily define a Social Network. People have different needs and desires when it comes to connecting with other people. Fundamentally, connecting is the only thing we’re all trying to do in one way or another.

Buddypress really is the kitchen sink. It offers everything you could want for a social network but without some careful planning for your specific community/target audience, BP could be a huge confusing mess.

This is what we’ve seen happening here on BP.org. Fundamentally, people want to come to this site to get information and help on BP. The forums are ideal for a support type of site with each thread being a question with answers, etc. That sort of interaction is difficult in an activity stream sort of model, especially if users aren’t fully immersed in the site. They come, ask their question, wait for an answer and leave until the next time they need help.

Groups are also handy in this sort of site as it allows people with similar interests to create a topic specific forum that doesn’t fit within the “main” forums. Instead of having one massive topic specific thread with many internal sub threads, they create their own group.

Activity streams are a huge mess on this sort of site and can add huge confusion. This isn’t really a socialization site where people are setting up their weekend plans or commenting on their buddy’s latest unfortunate event. That is where an activity stream comes in handy. I see it as being more for “personal connection” sites.

On BP.org, I don’t look at the main activity stream. I find it far to confusing and of little use. The Support index page is about the only place I go because I can see the latest questions and hot topics. It also shows me what public groups are currently getting a lot of traffic.

IMHO, the biggest missing piece in BP right now seems to be the connection between the activity stream and everything else. The activity stream needs to be more than just a content aggregator. Allowing people to comment on the activity stream implies that their response will be connected to the activity item. This is not currently the case and it is a huge usage nightmare.

Anyhoo, enough rambling. BP offers the tools but at the moment I can’t see many sites needing all of the features enabled.

Read my brief post for additional details on this issue.

But isn’t that worthy of discussing in a dedicated thread? I hear what you’re saying, is this not too some degree UI though? the API questions raised were indeed sounding like steps in the right direction especially where they touch on easing life for the presentation layer frontend developer but redefining The API doesn’t necessarily clear up ( or does it?)some of the concerns some have in regards how conceptually the whole ‘thing’ works and how the end user (frankly the only person that actually matters) finds it to use.

Both questions you need to investigate, if either of those are true you need to establish why otherwise you will struggle to ever grow your community, I would test ferociously the sending and receiving of emails and how your server might be configured, you may need an SPF record available so certain email servers don’t flag as spam i.e the likes of your hotmail accounts etc

We need many more details – please look at and let us know about the questions asked in https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/when-asking-for-support/

Also, please don’t bump your own post for at least 24 hours.

Yeah, I’m very much in agreement with Modemlooper on the sitewide Activity stream, here and in general. Focussing on it as a hub of activity is the wrong paradigm, because it moves too fast for anything but the smallest communities. One excellent solution is rich’s plugin that brings activity stream replies to forum posts inline to the post itself — I use that on the site I’m building now, to try and keep conversation from being fractured.

Different users use sites in different ways, of course, and the Activity stream is certainly one user story that shouldn’t be ignored. But, as I’ve said so many times before over the past almost-a-year, forums, in one sense or another, have a sense of permanency for users, a ‘virtual place’ they can return to, and I believe should be the anchor of a site like this and many others, where the ongoing stream of activity and making-friends for superfans and power users is less important than information being discoverable and discussion interactions being aggregated rather than just fading away. I am growing more disenchanted with the apparent lack of attention being paid to what I believe for many is essential for a successful community site — a featureful forum setup that is the steady beating heart of the swirl of activity.

Yes, I know the bbPress option is suboptimal as a solution, but it’s what we have to work with, and it can’t be ignored or passed off to bbpress.org, because we’re not running bbPress, we’re running an interface free, bbPress-plugin-incompatible fork of it, in essence if not reality, and I really do believe that more attention needs to be paid to the limitations of it as a component of BP and ways to make it work for community-building and user satisfaction.

Anyway, back to Activity. On true social network sites (whatever that means, exactly), it makes some sense that things are ephemeral, that interactions disappear beneath the fold, because, hey, it’s all about interacting with people, socially.

But the focus of this site (and most sites I might consider building with BP) is not just making friends and having a grand old social time. It’s sharing information, asking questions, discussing solutions, offering and asking for assistance, and it’s important that the interface those interactions be structured discoverable for people who are going to have the same questions in future as BP adoption grows, and the toolset for creating them be rich, both from the administration and user-facing perspectives.

How many times do we see the same questions being asked, basic or otherwise? To answer my own question, a lot. That’s just human nature in part, certainly, but it’s also, I think, because the tools we have for using these forums are vestigial, and people just don’t have the information they need at their fingertips. User confusion and frustration will kill a community faster than goatse images. We’re all so used to using this app that I think we lose sight of just how daunting it is for new users. The site I’m building for an existing community on a different platform has taught me that, very quickly.

Not a comprehensive list, but just stuff that comes immediately to mind: things like the lack of a link in the overall forums directory view to the last post in a thread, thread pagination links, or the username of the thread starter, like the inability suddenly to post code, like the lack of pagination to get to older threads in the forums directory (which leads to a ‘uh, now where do I go to see older threads’ reaction, in me, at least, a question to which I still don’t know an answer that doesn’t involve an awful lot of clicks and blind alleys), like the fact that a and a:visited elements are styled the same, like the eyestrainy new design, like conversation being fractured between activity stream and forum posts, like the loss of the ability to favorite threads to bookmark them for later and a place to easily survey and keep up with the threads we’ve started or commented in, well, it’s death by a thousand cuts at the moment.

Don’t take this as just moaning, though. I don’t mean to insult anyone, and I know how much my feelings are hurt when my own users level harsh criticism of my design decisions. I love BP, I think @apeatling and everyone else involved in building and supporting BP, ‘officially’ or not, are doing a great job, and I see nothing but further successes. But I think BP itself, as it stands, without thinking a little bit (OK, a lot) more about how actual users use it, is a poor match for this site, so far. It wasn’t that great in the old design, but it’s orders of magnitudes more confusing and difficult to use now, even for someone like me who’s been nipples-deep in BP for many months.

OK, I’ve typed enough. I’m going back to work on my Stylish Firefox extension stylesheet for this site so that the low-contrast doesn’t give me headaches any more.

This thread is quite interesting to me, and I do appreciate everyone’s thoughtful posts.

I may sound silly asking some of these questions so I would like to beg your forgiveness in advance,

1) Is WPMU still a base requirement for BuddyPress?
2) When a membership site is using BuddyPress, WordPress or WPMU (if required), 1ShoppingCart, and Wishlist Member, is the login seamless?

I guess further questions are relatd to the answers to these. Thanks in advance for your responses!

After a few months of working with BP (with a good background in working with WP in general, and pretty strong HTML/CSS skills), I’m getting pretty comfortable. I’ve found the best for me has been to

a) set up a localhost install using WAMP or XAMPP that you can play with and wipe easily.
b) look at what other sites including this one have done, learn and understand how child themes work, try out new stuff with your own child themes, dig into the templates (and bp-core stuff) and see how it’s put together
c) look at the way plugins you like or think are rock solid are put together.
d) when you get stuck, ask questions here, the more specific the better.

For my part, my great weakness is in PHP. What I’ve learned, I’ve learned by fiddling, but basic concepts and stuff, well, let’s say that I fly by the seat of my pants. If working with PHP functions and actions and hooks and filters and arrays and all that kind of stuff isn’t something you’re comfortable with, brushing up on it (or learning by doing and failing, as I have been), is a pretty good idea.

I’m getting pretty comfortable with digging into the guts of BP now, but I’ve got a long way to go, even as someone who’s been building sites as a hobby with and without WP for many years. Still have an enormous amount to learn, especially about working with PHP, though.

At the minute once the user logs in it redirects the to their profile page. How and where do i include that code so the home button disappears?

Those are two different questions. Login With Ajax would help with the redirect. https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/login-with-ajax/

As for the home button, in your header.php you just wrap is user logged in around Home. See https://wordpress.org/support/topic/367625?replies=5 for a bit more (and some oddities people are having with it…)

@thekmen – I’d say you’re ‘on topic’. The new bp.org can’t be used to support plugins until there is a common understanding of how bp.org is organized and operating.

Very happy (in a misery loves company kind of way) to read these posts. I’m having trouble understanding the flow of content on the new buddypress.org. You’d think it would be fairly intuitive given I host a bp site and have been a frequent visitor of the old bp layout. I agree that Activity Stream reply’s to forum posts should be disabled. Where are we posting comments / reporting bugs / asking and answering questions about specific plugins? Plugins now have group pages but there is no group forum. Are we supposed to post Everything on the Group’s Activity Page? That doesn’t seem to lend itself to efficient/effective archiving of various topics and discussions. Maybe we’re still in the early transition stage and I missed the memo explaining ‘who’s on first’. If I did miss an ‘overview’ post about the new bp.org, please point me to it.

All support related questions for the Featured Members Widget should now be made with the Featured Members Widget Group forum. You must first join the group to be able to post to the support forum. While your there, please consider making a donation to keep me alive!

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-featured-members-widget/forum/

Sorry, no answers, just additional questions:
@katendarcy Which plug in do you recommend or use for facilitating the payments?

In the front end I would like to display custome fields of paid users only. Still I want all users to see all custom profile fields when setting up their profiles so they see what they are missing when they have a free membership.

designodyssey: I found that role scoper helps to shape the user types and their capabilities. So the user role should be the key. In future there might be two or more categories of paid users.
I see there are a few more of you working on this, so any hints are appreciated.

There is almost no reason to use an external bbPress; Groups (and their forums) are very powerful and can be skinned to match your requirements. The upcoming design of THIS website should open some people’s eyes.

I tend to agree except that I want a way to have an ‘open’ forum as well as group forums You know? A way for people to put up support questions without having to join a group. Unless there’s a way to make a group that anyone can post in, member or not, it’s a bit of a sticking point.

Hey 3sixty, just been testing this plugin out and it seems to work well. It has thrown up a couple of questions for me about the way in which BP works. I’m a total novice so bear with me.

I noticed that the drop down list contained a couple of group names that I thought I had edited in the past. I had created 2 groups in the past with an extra word in the title that I did not want. I had edited these successfully but your plugin had picked up their original name in the DD list.

I looked at the URL and low and behold, even though the name displayed in the group was the edited one, the URL was actually showing the old, original name.

The same thing is true for the forums too. After i deleted the offending groups and re created them with the new names (your plugin showed these new names) I recreated the forum names too. The forum names are now given a URL with a -1 after the name now, indicating the original forum name must still be on the database.

After you move a forum topic to another forum also the topic is actually still available in it’s original group through a direct URL.

Is there anywhere to go into the database to clean these things up?

Also one thing that would be great with your plugin would be to order the drop down in Alphabetical order rather than order of creation. Any way we can do that?

Great work though. It was something that was lacking from BP as standard so thanks. My site hasn’t launched yet but if I end up needing to use it, I’ll Paypal you some funds over to say thanks!

Ross

@smuda I totally agree with you, it just doesn’t look good if someone could go inside the “admin panel” of Facebook, for example (imagining such a thing exists ) it has nothing to do with your theme design, surely not customized, etc, etc. Even if they could not change any configuration (always talking of a social web with no “blogs for everyone” as is my case too).

@etiviti (rich!)

Thanks for your help! I’ll try to apply that

@Paul Gibbs

I’ts fine, I understand, nevertheless I think this kind of questions/debates should be able to take place here since the people who asks are BP users and everything is related at some point. For example, WordPress gives us the admin panel and BP de “Social Layer” where one feature could be the “everything can be managed from the outside interface”… please don’t take this as a hard complaint just my 2 cents