BuddyPress.org

Have to say, I was bummed to see the scheduling conflict w/ Andrea and I – – I did not want to miss her panel. Hopefully some kind soul will tape it (hint hint)

I’m also doing a BP Workshop on Sunday — kind of a hands on install-to-launch in steps .. maybe I can convince someone here to help me co-run it to help field questions? Sunday looks like it’s shaping up to be an “Unconference” day with lots of opportunity for open discussion, networking and workshops. Fun stuff!

We would still really, really answers to those questions we keep linking you to!

In the interim; it looks like you’ve got the theme in the correct place with its functions PHP. A google suggests that hostmonster allows htaccess by default. I’m going to assume you’ve been able to confirm that the htaccess is being loaded.

More googling suggests that hostmonster is a subsidiary of bluehost, which we’ve seen problems with on this forum before.

Was WPMU and/or BuddyPress installed via SimpleScripts?

All I can share from personal experience is this: It’s real easy to get lost in all the gloss. About two years ago when I was hunting down low-cost, self-hosted, white label social networking software, I narrowed it down to two choices, Elgg and Dolphin. What I loved about Dolphin was how intuitive and pretty the whole backend was — you could easy drag/drop/rearrange different menu items and easily swap out your pages/columns/widgets. You could even change the sizes of certain page elements with just a few mouse clicks. It was almost like a Square Spaces for social networks. But then came more research. And upon that research, I found that Dolphin has some of the ugliest code ever written. On top of breaking tons of add-ons during upgrades, there also wasn’t (and probably still isn’t) an active support group available — more like a commune of helpless, p/o’ed customers who were all experiencing the same bugs. That’s not to say that it’s useless. I’m sure it works fine for a good handful of users who dumped a lot of money into development. But it became apparent that I needed to look into Elgg instead.

Now, Elgg does everything it says right out of the box 100% and we had instant love affair — http://www.michaelkuhlmann.com/category/elgg-vs-buddypress/. The whole installation took me about 10 minutes and there wasn’t a single problem… until I tried to re-design it. It was virtually impossible creating an entirely different layout. In fact, I have yet to see an Elgg-powered site that looks completely custom-made like the BuddyPress-powered VW TDI Truth & Dare site. Again, I’m sure Elgg fulfills the needs of many of its users – and probably a lot more so than Dolphin – but when it came to theming the software, it just fell a bit short. Although I could see how it could seem *ahead of the game* with its ease of use and drag’n’drop capabilities, it really isn’t compared to BP.

So BP came right along just as I finished *theming* — I should actually just say “colorizing” – my Elgg installation. Immediately, I dumped Elgg and switched to BP. I had seen what Andy did with ChickSpeak several months before the BP/Automattic venture was announced, so it looked quite promising. Then, the first release came out. First, I had trouble installing WPMU. Next, I had trouble installing BP. Following that, I couldn’t figure out how to get forums up and running. I sounded just like Mythailife – frustrated to the core. But I also remembered what an amazing difference a few months of development did to WordPress going from version 2.3 to 2.7, so I decided to stick around.

Up until now, I can easily say that BP has made strides in development. Out of the dozens of forums that I’ve visited, BP has *consistently* given the most support to its users in a timely fashion – FOR FREE. I have to stress the complimentary tech support part, because a lot of people tend to demand an answer to every single question immediately after they’ve posted their question, which is ridiculous. And if that speaks to you, here’s what you are getting – again – FOR FREE:

– A social networking system built on top of one of the best open source publishing systems, which means you’re also inheriting tons of great functionalities like WordTube/MapPress/eCommerce/Facebook Connect

– Loads of documentation including WordPress for Dummies and the upcoming book BuddyPress for Dummies (books are not free, of course, but they do count towards documentation)

– Support forums, development roadmaps and overall project transparency

– Ability to customize/theme BP exactly the way you want it to appear

– Dozens of available plugins

– Did I mention that this is built on WordPress?

If you don’t have the luxury of time to wait for support-related questions or still feel like this project is lagging AND you have deep pockets, there’s always Crowdfusion and Anahita. Otherwise, don’t get lost in the gloss, because BuddyPress is the next-best-thing to come out of the Automattic vault.

Make sure that you have a .htaccess file in the root of your WPMu install. Also, to better help you out, you need to answer the questions found in the thread to which DJPaul linked.

@balinic

Please answer DJPaul’s questions as well.

You must have proper rewrite rules in a .htaccess file and mod_rewrite enabled. If you successfully installed WPMU, then it automatically creates a basic, working .htaccess file. Check to make sure that that file exists. Since it is a hidden file, you will need to set your file browser to view hidden files. If it does exist, then next thing to verify is that your hosting provider has mod_write enabled for the Apache.

I’m afraid if the developer of that plugin is not responding to your questions, then that may very well indicate that they have stopped supporting the plugin. You should post (if you have not already) on the WPMU forums and see if anyone has information.

Perhaps someone there may know of an alternative or will adopt the plugin and bring it up to code. Make sure you mention that you want to use this plugin in BuddyPress.

@ Murphygonzalez

Did you find out anything?

I notice that there are several others on this forum asking questions about paid membership. This is what I want to do also. Another solution “may” be WishList plugin but that remains to be seen, have not found definitive confirmation of this works or not with WPMU.

for bp_is_user_profile(), you can use this…

<?php

global $bp;

if($bp->current_component == BP_XPROFILE_SLUG) {

//Your code here

}

?>

Found this tip here… https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/show-specific-content-on-profile-page-only#post-26739

I haven’t time to dig through answers for your questions, but if you’ve updated or replaced a record, you can get the ID immediately afterwards via $wpdb->insert_id.

You should never modify the parent theme. When you update buddypress and with it the parent theme all your modifications will be lost.

A good tutorial source for PHP and WP is net.tutsplus.com. And of course the codex here and on wordpress.org. As for writing functions, you do that exactly like I referenced in the comment above.

These are good questions which you need to ask to whoever wrote that plugin.

Most of the do_actions you find within the default theme don’t have any actions hooked to them. I guess they are mostly there for plugins and for child themes.

Yep, any template file you copy from the parent theme to the child theme overrides the one in the parent theme. With all these actions, though, you won’t need to do that much. Say you want to add a terms of service checkbox to your register page. So, rather than copying registration/register.php to your child theme and adding the checkbox manually, for example, you could just write a function in your child theme functions.php that hooks into a do_action call at the end of the form and adds a terms of service checkbox for you.

Makes it really easy updating the parent theme.

To find out what an action does, if anything, just copy the name of the action and do a search with it in the buddypress plugin folder. That should list you all functions that are hooked to that action (add_action).

The best way to start with a theme for BP is to start off with the bp-default theme. Then copy files across from the bp-sn-parent theme if you need to modify a file. If not, then you can leave that file in bp-sn-parent, cause WP will get that automatically for you.

Of course, you can add all the functions later. The codex here is a great starting point on what functions are available to you. You can also go through the bp-sn-parent theme and have a look what’s in there and move it across, if you don’t want to use a parent/child theme structure.

You can place div#search-login-bar anywhere you like.

do_action functions cannot be reversed. They happen at exactly that spot in the template files. There’s so many, though, that you won’t have a problem finding one that suits your needs. Basically, you can write some custom functionality and add that to a certain hook by calling the add_action function. Here’s an example.

Somewhere in a template you might have this:

do_action( 'your_action_name' );

Then in your theme’s functions.php file you could put the following:

function your_function_name()

{

//some stuff happens here

}

add_action( 'your_action_name', 'your_function_name' );

That’s basically it. Sometimes the action passes along a variable with which you can then work.

Hope this helps you along a bit. The codex at wordpress.org is pretty extensive as well and you’ll find loads of stuff on actions.

@madyogi

Your questions are really better asked in a new thread, not in this thread.

To help you get started, have a look here:

BuddyPress Codex

You may have issues accessing that link at this time. It is a known issue that is being investigated. But, once it’s accessible, you will find many resources there to help you get started.

Well, I appreciate the sentiment but I do not consider myself the most important. That is why I’m sleeping now.

To reconfirm what both Paul and John said above, Andy is the only official core BP developer. There are no other official core developers at this time. The rest of us play our various roles, trying to pitch in where we think we’ll have some positive impact.

From those who file bug tickets and offer patches, to those who create new plugins and themes, and to those who answer questions in the forums and IRC, it is truly the contributions of the overall community that make and will continue to make BuddyPress a strong product.

I don’t have answers for all your questions, but you can’t access bb-admin for “the built-in forums by buddypress.”