BuddyPress.org

At the risk of being too negative, some of your statements don’t make sense to me and some seem purposefully (or naively) vague. If you’ve been at WP and BP for 3months now, then logic would dictate that you should be familiar enough with the 2 that you’d be able to answer your questions about their capabilities.

If you’re convinced you are onto some new idea of what people want in a new collection of networks, then you will get much better feedback if you added some detail/clarity in your request. So far, imho, the reason you are getting these nebulous opinions is because your request sounds more like “I wanna build this new car that no one has built, any ideas?”

WP/BP are ready for you to launch your project now. Do some styling and you’re off and running. See if that demand is really out there. Good luck.

@Andy,

Job well done on the activity /wire stream, it removes clutter and useful. Please don’t forget that request trac regarding questions on wire for users to answer!

Silly questions…

• Are you 100% there’s no deep integration?
• Maybe put some echo’s in the original bbPress files and see how and when they’re getting included?
• Is there a widget or plugin that’s preloading bbPress before BuddyPress?
• Do you have the old integration plugins disabled?
• Can you confirm in wp_sitemeta that “bb-config-location” is pointing to the new bb-config.php and not the old one?

Just a few things to look at and consider…

Nope, sounds like a good plan.

IME, using wp-super-cache, it creates flat html files on the server. if those are deleted, they get regenerated again. When you remove cache files, performance takes an initial hit until the cache is built up again.

But even outside that – the number of posts & users make it a big job.

You shoudl back it all up, yes. But you don’t necessarily need to ftp it down to your computer. I normally make a copy of the folder right on the server.

If you are double-sure you have cache files, you can clean them out. What are you using the cache? Because wp-super-cache has a cleanout button back there on the admin screen.

It’s not unusually large, no, dpeending on how may users and/or visitors you have. Lots of users, lots of hits, means lots of cache files & loads of upload files if they like to post pics to their blogs like you’re Flickr. (Hi mom!)

Yes, you’ll want to backup the db as well. Optimize those tables, and if you’re really feeling frisky, clean out the spam.

Remember that with the BP upgrade, the theme changes location. The MU part should be smoother.

Pick a time when your site traffic is low, like the weekend.

If you’d like to associate a blog with a group, you could use Marius Ooms’ BP Groupblog plugin:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-groupblog/

Most likely the group filter will pick up the blog as a group.

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There’s also Andy’s External Feeds plugin:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/external-group-blogs/

Which you can use to grab an RSS feed and it will populate the group activity and site-wide activity streams.

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About the other questions, I don’t have time to delve into it!

Maybe a mod or someone else can help you.

IMO this is a theme design decision; if you want a graphic logo on your site, then that’s a custom theme. The bundled theme is just a starting point, even if you only re-do the colours. I’m even going to go so far to say if you want a graphic rather than a text header, you are very likely to want to change some other aspect of the site design at some point; so you’d be creating a child theme for that anyway. I can’t see people *only* wanting to change the site title to a graphic being a very common situation.

In previous versions, we used to get a lot of questions about which file to replace for the graphic, and ‘what font was used/can I have the PSD file for it’, and all the issues that both of these entail.

Hi Philipp

Don’t worry, your English is very good.

To answer your question, I think you need to think about what content there will be on your site.

Will the volunteer placements remain the same each half-year? i.e. a school and (for example) at a charity.

If this is the case, you probably want to keep the structure of the site very similar so people can read and learn from what previous volunteers have experienced. You could automatically ‘tag’ data in each half-year period; this would let you find and sort the data appropriately.

If volunteer placements can be anywhere and different in each half-year period, then you might want to use Groups as a form of category – i.e. rather than having groups for Example School 1 and Example School 2, use just one group – ‘School’. Again, you could let users tag data with their specific placements.

EDIT: I’ve also re-titled this thread to make it a bit clearer as to the type of questions you are asking

@stwc

Thanks for creating the new ticket. You did it right!

Make a note of the ticket number so you can more easily follow any comments or questions posted to the ticket. You can also add additional information as you see fit whenever you like.

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.