BuddyPress.org

@arunbasillal it works. Thanks for this temporary solutions. Hope BP will have official fix..

@raywaldo – This is an old thread.

You might be interested in a proposed fix for this issue here.

Closing thread.

@wordpresschina – Thanks so much for your work on this, and especially for sharing your work on the forum. Very glad you were able to make it (mostly) work.

When I built the plugin, I didn’t make any effort to differentiate between different kinds of profile fields (checkboxes vs radio buttons vs text boxes etc). It’s impossible to get this info merely from the Ning export (at least, the old style CSV export), so it would require prompting the importing admin for each new field. Not impossible, but it required a lot of coding that I didn’t want to do because I wanted to get the dang thing out there so people could use it

I’m hopeful that the upcoming Ning network exporter will produce more robust data that will allow easier, and more fine grained, imports into BP.

Whether that can be expanded to more general CSV imports will always be a tricky issue. Ideally, an importer would be designed to handle a generic import format, so that importers for new formats would only have to convert to this standard format – all the BP-specific stuff would be done with the all-purpose importer. I’m afraid I don’t have the funding to build such a plugin right now, but it will definitely be crucial to the growth of BP as a platform in the months and years to come.

You’re looking for the BP Template Pack plugin:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/

Follow the instructions on the settings page.

“Anyway, BuddyPress just seems a little confused when it comes to it’s ideas around Friends, Followers and Members. It feels like an odd mix of Twitter (wide open) and Facebook (walled off).”

I’ve had an active BP Site of about 400 real-world members for 6+ months or so now and I can report back that very few people are actually using the BP functions. It’s not clear exactly what they are supposed to do and how it would benefit them. Twitter is intuitive, Facebook is semi-intuitive. BP, not so much.

Considering that wordpress is first and foremost a blogging platform, core BP should do three things well:1) Enhance members’ blogs (vs. an mu-only environment) and 2) Encourage interaction between members, and 3) Make members and their activities easy to find. BP is struggling with these basic objectives.

Regarding blogs, it is intuitive that members should be able to post from the front-end (One Quick Post is nearly ready). It is critical that sub-blog posts would show up in search results, but they don’t. And, it’s intuitive that you should be able to easily find relevant blogs (link tumblr), but you can’t. BP should make members’ blogs more visible, but it really doesn’t…at least not in an intuitive way. As a result, my members that joined primarily to blog (which is most of them), have little or no use for BP.

SOLUTIONS: Make sub-blog posts show up in search results. Apply xprofile fields to blogs and make them sortable. Create a front-end dashboard – I don’t think users should have to go to a dashboard with BP. Create a core-function to showcase sub-blog posts (then let the plugin devs apply slideshows, etc.)

Regarding interaction between members, BP tries a lot of things, misses the mark on some critical elements. Group-only forums are simply not intuitive. Regardless of where you stand on the issue, the fact that it’s been such a hot topic since 1.2 came out proves this point. The activity stream has merit, but is confusing for a lot of users. I have people posting “updates” who think they are posting blog posts or starting forum threads (perhaps is should be read-only?). Friending is fine, but doesn’t provide many obvious benefits beyond sorting your stream. Same with following. Groups are great, but without a solid core of features, groups don’t do much. (even here, they aren’t used much beyond forced-joining for forums). There should be an “events” element in the core.

Most importantly, it’s very difficult to keep track of things…try and find an old discussion thread on this site!…I’ve added a trac ticket to make anything (blogs, comments, members, discussions, etc.) “Followable”, allowing you to keep track of stuff. There should be a simple “Stuff I’m Following” button where you can keep organized.

SOLUTIONS: Enable a read-only option for the activity stream. Add hooks to “Follow” anything and make a “Stuff I’m Following” button. Allow forums without groups. Build Events into the core. Build more basic group functions (like group blogs, group email subscriptions, and invitations) into the core.

Lastly, I’m getting complaints and feedback about the ability for members to be found. Searchable, sortable, xprofile fields are a critial core component that is just plain absent. I run a real estate community. People intuitively-expect to be able to find a real estate expert in their geography…good luck. It’s virtually-impossible. Moreover, this is how, in more other communities, you can find people to network with. How can this basic element be missing?

SOLUTIONS: get xprofile fields working for members, groups, blogs, etc. Consider creating sub-fields as well.

If you can’t find or be found, your blog doesn’t get any extra exposure (actually it gets penalized for posts not being found in search results), friends and following provide no great benefit, and forums are too confusing to use, then it’s hard to justify joining the community.

I can’t say for sure that an MU blogging community is better with BP. I can’t say that a bbpress community is better with BP. And without these basic intuitive basic functions working right, it’s hard to make a case that BP is a great “community” platform.

I’m using it and hoping for the best, but my 400 members so far aren’t too impressed.

I was pretty amazed that something like the activity stream on front page issue could exist especially as it seems such a core part of WP/BP and not exactly hidden, and more it worries me that it’s left to kindly souls as r-a-y rich! and rvenable to try and find a solution and before anyone says it.. no it’s not a given that this is how projects work

To some extent if you are planning on rolling with BP there is little point in waiting for ever more and a day for a 100% stable release as there is unlikely to be such a thing for quite a while, it’s the nature of the methodology in use and for very reminiscent of the early days of WP. 1.2.4.1 and WP 3.0 is holding up pretty well yes there are issues but you’ll have to bite the bullet at some point

Sad, that every time you get the courage together to update any part of a BuddyPress installation, the whole system explodes. (OK, you can say: “There are hack in Trac!” – seriously: come on!) I was hoping, these problems would be tested more thoroughly in the meantime but I am losing faith in BuddyPress here. Was hoping to recommend BuddyPress to actually be used soon – but how can one recommend a system that very well may crash and waste huge amounts of support-time at each upgrad?

W3 Total Cache, but not its Page Caching with BuddyPress.

Welcome Pack doesn’t touch that email; it only does some of the core BuddyPress emails in the current version. Erich’s asking about a WordPress email.

Very odd although apparently not uncommon:

I used the excellent bp-template-pack plugin and am now up to step three (the plugin “skipped” step two). This is the step where the plugin identifies what index files I need to edit to match the structure. But for some reason none of my edits are taking. I am ftping the edited php files back to my theme directory but it almost seems like buddypress is pulling from somewhere else, is that possible? I went as far as deleting my /activity/index.php file and somehow the activity page still shows up. What can I be missing here? I’ve seen a few other posts about similar “edits” not “showing up”. Any ideas on what to troubleshoot would be greatly appreciated.

I am using the (http://tinyurl.com/cpmq9u) Magazeen theme and wordpress 3.0 and buddypress 1.2.4.1 and template pack 1.0.2.

Thanks!

well, that is the first thing I could come up with @hnla

@erich73 – try the welcome pack plugin, https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/welcome-pack/

Sorry, I should of mentioned I have already run the theme through BP Compatibility. The theme displays ok until you look at any buddypress related page where the sidebar will display under the page.

I understand I have to fix the alignment by matching the structure of page.php to the child theme pages (e.g /activity/index.php, /blogs/index.php). So how do I go about matching the structure?

Here is the page.php file

http://www.makingtrails.com/page.txt

If you want the redirect to happen after only the new user’s first log in, use the Start Page feature of Welcome Pack.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/welcome-pack/

Run this plugin: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/

@dennis_h huh, i just noticed load more is no longer working too… is that in trac?

as for all the forum vs activity – i’m still hacking away at an activity stream discussion to replace bbpress. i hit a snag and more important projects came up so i’ll try and revisit it soon.

i still think the activity stream is the core of buddypress – if you can wrangle it and tone down the duplicates (ie, for blog comments/posts/forums topics/posts remove the excerpt and just make it a one liner with a permalink to blog and comment) – xxxxx user left a comment on blog xxxxxx. That is the nice thing about BP – change whatever you want.

i also have another advanced plugin – this would replace blog comments with the activity stream (though i don’t know how this works with a wpmu setup – single it works great)
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-activity-as-blog-comments/

I am attempting to convert a theme called Blocks (Version 3) but these theme looks too complex for me? Could someone have a quick look and tell me what I need to do?

https://wordpress.org/extend/themes/blocks

Thanks!

I dropped @rvenable‘s fix into my functions.php file for my child theme and it worked like a charm. Thanks yall.