BuddyPress.org

hi Ray

hope you wont mind my earlier post .

@foxly

Please take a look at my response to Travel-Junkie’s query here

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/gallery#post-32530

If I release the plugin as it is now, for free, I am not sure I will be able to support the plugin as there will be a helluva lot of questions each and everyday until the plugin is mature enough. We are dealing with media and I know what sort of issues can come as of my experience from now. That’s why I always said It will be available as free as soon as the people think it’s mature enough.

Again, I support you guys developing album+, It was a need here and hopefully, when gallery stable is released I am going to point the people to album+ for a lighter/fee alternative as it seems now.

@mercime – I’m not insulting anybody. I’m asking some tough questions about what this community is doing to get a high quality, free BuddyPress photo album plugin out, and that seems to be making some people in here a bit uncomfortable.

Hopefully, uncomfortable enough that people start building things.

Namely, a plugin.

What all of the people posting “BP Gallery is Free, etc, etc, it will be released free when we have a stable version” are missing, is that if Brajesh would just upload his code to the SVN *right now*, we could all jump on it and help him finish building and testing the plugin.

Look, I have nothing to gain financially by building a BuddyPress photo plugin. I just want this problem solved so I have a stable, reliable plugin to use on my websites, that doesn’t depend on just one person to keep it going.

@thekmen – good point.

^F^

hi all

Just got pointed to this thread, so I thought, I need to chime in .

I am happy to see the BP Album+ coming as a successor of Manoj’s Bp-Picture album, I am not very happy with the criticism here for the gallery, and I thought, I will express it here.

@foxly

First of all, I don’t want to go into the details of opensource philosophy, but what about RedHat Enterprise in case of Linux. People prefer them because Redhad has more reliability over it’s free alternative(e.g centOs and others). Let the choice is in the hands of End users, and GPL does not restrict to charge for code/distribution.

For your questions:-

1.Being free/opensource does not guarantee quality, what are the measures of quality, let me know, I will be glad to allow someone who want to do quality analysis have access to the code and post his/her review here.

I have no objections, if you say, gallery is paid and you will avoid using it, but Gallery has much better code quality than most of the plugin available free. And I am ready to go through any quality analysis process to make sure, what I say is correct. I will urge, do not predict anything, if you have not seen the code.

2.Delays:-

If you know, buddypress 1.2 had scheduled release date of 2nd week of Dec, but it was released after 15th Feb, so the core project got delayed for 2 months from it’s original schedule date. and You know, any project which depended on it, got delayed too, and to add that, from Rc1 to RC2 transition for buddypress broke many things. How about that ? The Rc2 is coming tonight for your info.

3. No of contributor: How many contributors buddypress had before the joining of JJJ, only one, and He was Andy, so how do you felt at that time ?

4. GPL::- Have you seen the license for Gallery:- IT is GPL and will remain that, so If I leave development(which is not going to happen in near future), anyone can go ahead and do that. I choose GPL to allow others to use it in case something happened wrong with me, otherwise I might have opted for more restrictive license. I will advise to read terms at my site, it specifically says, until and unless mentioned, everything available there is GPL. Each and every component available/coming are/will be released under GPL only.

6.Code Quality: You are most welcome to check the code, and see where the gallery code compares to any of the plugin available for Buddypress.

7.As far other programmer are concerned, a few most respected programmers of the buddypress community have access to the plugin(I am not going to mention their name), may be they can chime in if they want.

8.Extendability:- Currently, gallery supports user galleries,group galleries, and has well written filters,action to hook gallery with any component, be it events/blogs or what ever new component which has a presense of its own. I agree I have not provided a user documentation, where is the documentation for other well written plugins for Buddypress ? Can you point me to a few? and I assure, I will provide the documentation before the final release. Documentation will come after the stable is out.

9. Supporting Plugin: Is there any one paid plugin/free plugin/themes on Buddydev which is not supported, point me, I will change my statement here.

10. Why do you think BP Gallery to be released as opensource is nill, It is currently released as opensource but paid. You should rather correct and ask what are the probability of getting it released as free(It is already opensource, and there are so many differences between free/opensource).

I have mentioned it again and again, It will be released as FREE on/before bp 1.3, and I have mentioned it to all the members/ here in the community too. So, you should still be happy to know, I will release it as free before bp 1.3.

I am not pulling $30,000, at all, and neither I am pulling $3000 per month, it is much lower. and there are very few paid members, there are thousands of free members there. If I had to charge, I would have rather charged much higher not the mere $30.

Please do not make it as an issue, I wish the development of BP Album+ all the best and If you need any assistance, do Let me know, I will be glad to help you as I have done these things for gallery.

It will be better if we concentrated on the purpose of this thread.

Thanks

Brajesh

@gregfielding I never said I was “against” BP Gallery, I said it was inappropriate to use a *commercial* plugin with only *one* contributor as a BP core plugin, which is our ultimate goal for the BP Album+ plugin.

No matter what claims are made about this and that being “free”, until Brajesh releases his plugin, properly documented, into the WordPress repository under a GPL license so others can reuse its code, it is a *commercial* plugin.

In terms of features, BP Gallery *currently* has much more functionality than BP Album+.

But over the next couple of months, we’re planning on adding a huge amount of functionality to the BP Album+ plugin, and as we get more people onboard, BP Album+ will probably quickly eclipse BP Gallery.

I’m not going to try and tell you what gallery you should use for your site, but I want to point out some key reasons why I’ve chosen to team up with another developer and write a free open source BuddyPress Photo album plugin (and give it away to the community!) versus just handing over $30 and using BP Gallery for all of my social networking sites:

1) The release date of BP Gallery has slipped six times over three months, and its status hasn’t been updated since Feb 06 2010. Brajesh announced he was releasing RC2 on March 11/12. Didn’t happen. And BP Gallery Stable on March 14/15. Didn’t happen.

2) Simultaneously with all of this, the guy’s released two themes, two other plugins, and has posted that he will be releasing a chat plugin and another BP theme by the end of March. He’s also handing out free subscription extensions to all of his members for not getting his plugins working on time.

That’s impressive. Much respect to Brajesh for sheer volume of work!

But it raises some scary questions:

a) If he’s sprinting to get fifteen different projects done simultaneously under penalty of losing all his members, how efficient, extendable, and secure is the code inside BP Gallery? Has it been checked by other programmers?

b) Brajesh makes his money by releasing several new plugins every month. What incentive does he have to keep *improving* his existing plugins versus writing new ones?

c) If a BuddyPress core update breaks his plugins (as *just happened* with Manoj Kumar’s original BP Album, prompting the development of our plugin) …how long is it going to take Brajesh to repair his dozens of plugins, and where will BP Gallery fit in that lineup?

d) What happens if Brajesh gets hired by Google and quits developing plugins? Who will keep them working with future BuddyPress updates and how will they learn such a huge codebase in time to avoid disaster?

And to the people that keep saying “Well he’s going to release BP Gallery as Open Source in a week or two”, consider this:

e) If you were a website owner that’s paid $30 a month for a site membership to get the BP Gallery plugin, and then patiently waited for 3 or 4 months for the developer to finish it (and don’t kid yourself, that’s what 90% of the site members are there for) …would YOU be happy if the developer finished the plugin, then released it for FREE to EVERYONE as open source?

I’ve been wrong before, but I’d say the odds of BP Gallery being released as free open source any time soon are slim to nil.

It’s a sad situation, because if Brajesh released BP Gallery to the plugin repository, we could continue development on it for him, integrate it with our app, and release a fantastic plugin that gives the community what they want; and he would have more time to work on his other plugins. But again, very unlikely to happen.

….

There is a solution to all of the above problems: build ONE application that is FREE OPEN SOURCE, maintained by MULTIPLE developers, and can be EASILY EXTENDED. It’s how Linux is developed. It’s how WordPress is developed. It’s How BuddyPress is developed.

And it’s how the BP Album+ plugin needs to be developed.

….

As for “Community Support” …. we’ve had 600 downloads in 48 hours and will probably hit 1,000 downloads before most people even see this.

Unless Brajesh is pulling $30,000 a month from his site (=1000 members) I’d say we’ve already beat BP Gallery in terms of installed user base.

=====================================

@Modemlooper I’m going to turn this around on you and say “What if WordPress had no text editor, no file upload capability, no admin menu, and no comment functionality”. All of these are required elements to make a blog platform run, and that’s why they ship with WordPress. Twitter functionality, on the hand, is not a required element, and that’s why it’s implemented as a plugin. Likewise with BuddyPress, Forums, Profiles, User Activity, and… photo albums … are required elements of almost every social networking community. That’s why I want to stop screwing around with third-party plugins and help build something that’s good enough to ship with the core.

So there’s my thoughts!

^F^

@foxly

I’m not sure why you were stripping down and rewriting bp-gallery from Brajesh to 1.2 because that’s all it’s been developed on. he’s about to release rc2 and then go stable but the release of bp 1.2.2 broke a few functions that he’s having to fix. You must be thinking about bb-picturealbum from Manoj Kumar that he quit development on. Those are two different developers. Please make sure that you have them correct.

@m@rk,

Those posts that you have that are referencing bbpicture are Manoj Kumar’s plugin from 1.03, NOT bp-gallery. bp-gallery was written for 1.2 and does work with 1.2’s default theme.

@gregfielding,

bp-gallery is something that I’ve been testing since the alpha and the differences from what I see are that gallery supports all media, including images, video, and audio. There is also group support already included and privacy settings for them all as well. He is also going to release the shortcodes to include the images and albums in posts.

For those who are still confused, and this is NOT an advertisement, just answering the questions about the differences and clarifying any misconceptions, the site for bp-gallery is at http://buddydev.com

SG is a great platform initially when you want to start up a social network.

I have been with them for 3 months. Great software and easy to use but there are MANY limitaions. YOu don’t host anything yourself you you are reliant on their servers which as of late have been terrible. Lot’s of problems, slow page loads etc and issues with widgets not working.

They have just moved data centres so that should improve.

The biggest problem I have is not having access to the content my users create. the vaule of our sites is often user generated material such as forums.

Yes of course SG is secure but what happens if we build a network with a couple of thousand users. they may create thousands of posts which give our site value. Just say SG end up having problems with their servers or indeed don’t last out and aren’t in business down the line. All of our content is gone.

Also you are pretty much limited to their widgets for chat etc which are lacking.

Some good stuff to test out your niche market but I am looking at migrating to BuddyPress in th enext couple of months. I’m putting everything together now.

If you have any questions just ask

Cheers.

I find that the greatest gaps in functionality for the new site I’m putting together is in the integrated BBpress forums

BBpress is not part of Buddypress -> BBpress forums

When I ask about core BP issues here, I’m often referred to the WP or WPMU forums. But questions about BBpress are apparently OK. Why? I don’t get it. Personally I don’t see what forums have to do with a social network. You don’t see Facebook and LinkedIn integrating an oldfashioned linear forum.

So my wishlist? Remove forum integration so I don’t have to comment stuff out or have one more item in an already way too cluttered admin area.

And things like adding (parts of) TinyMCE to textareas you can do yourself if you know some basics of theme customization and read the instructions in the TinyMCE documentation.

(Edited by r-a-y to stay on topic)

As webmaster, you have to use some tools to have anwers for such basic questions.

You can use web developer, for example. Or firebug…

A few questions.

1. When I go to my profile button and click chat it says You’re currently logged out. (I’m not)

2. When I go to another persons profile and click the chat button (next to groups middle page) it says:

Only steve can look at steve’s chat. (I’m logged in as admin in both cases)

3. When on a group homepage, is there a chat button somewhere for the group chat?

4. I’m using a custom bp child theme. I created the folder directory in my child theme /members/single/chat/index.php but it was not taking effect, not to mention I am not sure what I should put into that file.

Are there instructions anywhere on what the child-theme path should be so that we can style the page appropriately?

I would start with GF “paid” help. I’m working with them on similar questions, so check the forums there. Ultimately, it will be a matter of creating a function that inserts the results of a bp function in the value of a form field.

check out my interview here: http://wpmu.org/wordpress-as-a-learning-management-system-move-over-blackboard/

lmk if you have questions

@thecorkboard

Cheers Mariusooms and co… good work!

No questions or comments so far as I don’t have time to test today but wanted to say thanks.

r-a-y, I definitely understand that these days people like to consider older posts and forum threads dead after a short period of time. Some user just like to jump on old stuff without finding the answers in newer threads. However, when there is a dearth of information about a particular topic and people are trying to properly research before posting and all that comes up is old threads, I’m of the opinion that they should be resurrected. Why start a new post asking the same questions and diverging the threads? I’m actively searching for information about this and scrounging through PHP code and websites for answers. I’ve uncovered some good information that I’m trying to share, but am still looking for more answers. If I run a search and it returns all these “dead” threads and no new threads, the masses are going to as well.

Plus, I just replied to other threads offering to help with questions you’ve asked here months ago to which I see no answers. If you’ve figured all this out, why not update those original threads with the answers for newer folks trying to figure things out? If you haven’t figured everything out, then why not be happy that the threads are going active again and information is being shared?

Please don’t take this the wrong way, I just don’t understand why some forums seem to be filled with people complaining about “old” threads being responded to and others appreciate it. And why don’t the forums that are dead-set against replying to old threads, simply close out the old ones?

Alessandro, I’m a bit confused with what you are trying to do. It sounds like you have a normal (single) WP installation and are looking to go social with it. A lot has happened since you posted this and BuddyPress is now available for single WP installs. I’m testing it out now. In WP v3.0, WordPress MU will be merged with the single WP installation and there will be a migration path. I can help answer questions around this… just let me know some more specifics.

@muratk

there are 3 different questions up there

1) if he’s using WP instead of WPMU then the answer to “How do users make blog posts?” is “they just can’t”. You should use BP with WPMU (not BP + WP) in order for you to enable blog posting by users.

2) “Is there a way for users to make posts to the main site blog?” – It depends on what Hypergripe means by “main site blog”. One of my installations (BP+WPMU) have two different blogs; a) one belonging to the site owner and b) others for each user. Now, Hypergripe, do you mean enabling your users to post on your blog site referred to in a)?

3) “my goal is to have users be able to make a blog post while in my site theme” – The answer of Travel-Junkie is right. However, you may have an options: style your WP back-end the same way your BP site is styled (not so very complicated if you are familiar with CSS)

The upgrade worked for me…Thanks! I’ll post further questions/issues on your site.

@Andy

sorry if my following questions are off-topic:

when I do create a “Private Group” on Group-creation:

– are the members-data who have joined this “Private-Group” visible to search-engines like Google ?

– are the user-images (avatar-images) and user-Profile-Fields of “Private-Group-Members” visible to search-engines ?

– is the user-activity (e.g. Permalink-comments) within a “Private Group” being exploited to search-engines or is it hidden from search-engines ?

– are all data from “Private-Groups” are actually hidden from other members within an installation ?

So if “Private Groups” would be hidden from search-engines, this would be perfect “Privacy” – just need to setup “Private-Groups” only, instead of “Public-Groups” ?

Many thanks.

I simply did the easy things. I added yes or no questions. I put in default profile fields they would have to answer and I added a date of birth field.

What I don’t understand is right now I have registrations closed and they are still signing up.

Registration has been closed for almost an hour and I still got 8 or 9 spam accounts over the last 40 minutes.

How is that possible?

I have tried both http://www.winextra.com/forums/ and http://www.winextra.com/forums/bb-config.php with the same result – can’t find the file.

If I’m not mistaken, I think you have to put in the absolute file path to bb-config.php (eg. /var/www/forums/bb-config.php).

—

1) bbPress plugins in BuddyPress will require porting to a WP plugin so BuddyPress can detect it. Depending on the complexity of your bbPress plugins, this might be complicated.

2) You’ll basically have two sets of forums – BP group forums and your external install of bbPress. Your external install of bbPress will need to be themed if you want it to match your WP/BP site.

3) BP forums are powered by groups. You need to create a “group” in order to create a forum in BuddyPress. If you choose to integrate an external install of bbPress with BP, your BuddyPress forums will show up in your external install by default as well. To avoid duplication in your external bbPress install, read this thread.

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Re: long range question. Not sure what is going to happen.