BuddyPress.org

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

Hi Travel-Junkie!

The checkbox to indicate acceptance to the terms of service is exactly what I want to do.

However, I am a total noob in understanding the programming involved (like “actions”) for example.

Do you have a recommendation? Should i look for a plugin for this?

Or a link where the concepts you refered to are more easily understandable by me?

(sorry, I’m a recent “ning-orphan” trying to find my way around Buddypress)

I have not heard of any issues with load-scripts.php–at least when using the default theme just with BuddyPress and no other plugins.

Let’s back up a little too learn more about your setup. Please answer these questions: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/when-asking-for-support

Oh, and @Aaron Edwards – we’re looking forward to the day you guys join the bp.org community to help, answer questions and provide insight instead of just shilling product

@3sixty – To some extent I think you’re right. There’s a certain quickness to say “That’s a WP question!” in these forums. (Although I will say, anecdotally, that it used to happen more than it does now.)

Often there’s a good reason for redirecting questions to the WP forums. For one, the user base there is much bigger, so questions are likely to have a lot more readers, and are thus a lot more likely to get a good answer. Moreover, many common questions have already been answered there many times over, and it doesn’t really pay to rehash those issues in this space.

Still, some reproduction of content is probably a good thing, especially in cases where there is as much overlap as with BP/WP. So I don’t mind providing a certain amount of WP (or even general PHP/HTML/CSS) help in these forums when the mood strikes me. Constantly passing the buck – “that’s a (fill-in-the-blank) issue” – is not a great way to welcome new users to the BP community.

Sounds like a plan.. It’s a matter of weeks until WP 3.0 is out, and BuddyPress will be compatible from day 1, so you might want to launch the site when WP 3.0 is out with BuddyPress from the start! Good luck!

to answer both of your final questions: Yes and Yes!

You actually don’t want folder permissions as 777. On some hosts, 777 even cause an “Internal Server Error 500” error. It also means anyone and everyone can read/write/execute in that folder. At the most, you should have 755. Some hosts may differ on this, but in general, these rules follow. I don’t know that 755 will fix anything, but it may, so give it a try.

For the rest of the questions:

What kind of server are you hosted on?

What version of WP/WPMU are you using?

What version of BP are you using?

Excellent topic!

I had it a bit differently when I started my first wpmu bp site. I was active on one of my country’s leading social networks when it was starting to fall apart. People were leaving everyday because the system was built on old software and no one seemed to care about support, etc. I then decided to create my own social network (similar to the popular one) and created my bp network taking 20 of the top networkers on the other site with me. The network has grown quite bigger than the first 20 members but I must admit it’s a slow process as others first wants to see what is in it for them.

To get back to the topic. Be active on the network and show your starting members how to use the network and all the benefits of your network. Also be sure to write “help” files as you won’t be around to answer everyones questions all the time. I’ve added a “feedback” floating bar button on the network where members can submit feedback /queries regarding the network to me.

I would like to add the Twitter and Facebook connection settings to the network but it doesn’t make sense as this network is country specific and on the registration page there’s a couple of fields that must be completed.

I have been having a few problems with the avatars, the only ones that wants to work are the gravatars, which are fine but i want to offer my users something more, there are two questions that i would like to ask. The first is how do i get them to show? i have tried other peoples suggestions but nothing works, i do have GD Lib on the server, as i have used it for other projects so i know that isn’t a problem, what happens is i goto the change avatar part of my profile and try to upload it does upload to /wp-content/uploads/avatars/1 however the crop part dosent show any image at all, and other users have told me that this is happening as well. have you any ideas on how to fix this problem?

Also on a slightly less important note, i would like to change the default avatars that users can select, to fit in more with the theme of my site, is there a way to do this? I have a few created that i would like to use for members to choose from IF i can get this to work.