BuddyPress.org

Buddypress could be a next generation social network because it would be more content-centric, thanks to its WordPress roots. Forums only distract from what could be a very logical conceptual approach.

This doesn’t even make sense to me. ‘Groups’ are a ‘killer app’? ‘Next generation social network’ because it’s ‘content-centric’? What on earth?

Yes, those are scare quotes. Honestly, though. I don’t know what kind of point you’re trying to make, other than that you HATE FORUMS GRAR.

@Sadr (“I see immense potential in BuddyPress as an open collaboration platform. I do believe though that traditional social networks do not encourage collaboration, maybe continuity in particular, well enough, and so there’s a lot to learn or borrow from other systems more commonly used in that context.”)

I agree Buddypress has great potential as a collaboration platform, but the natural focus point for that collaboration would be groups where members would come together and share content using blog posts+comments, WP’s native way of organizing content.

Why would you need forums? What makes forums so great for collaboration?

Groups could be Buddypress killer app. Buddypress could be a next generation social network because it would be more content-centric, thanks to its WordPress roots. Forums only distract from what could be a very logical conceptual approach.

@stwc (“People get so attached to their meaningless buzzwords they forget that the whole idea is to serve the needs of actual users … Abandoning a tried, tested, and true form of internet community interaction because of some quixotic quest to be modern and social-networky …”)

If you can’t tell the conceptual difference between a forum and a social network, this discussion is wasted on you.

Thanks @r-a-y. It could be done without a plugin by uploading the desired theme files into wp-content/themes/default folder to replace the files there. Then change the Theme Name of file of new default theme’s style.css to Theme Name: WordPress Default

Just keep a copy of the preferred theme in your computer so that whenever you upgrade your WP install, you upload your preferred theme files with the revised Theme Name in style.css again to wp-content/themes/default. Since upgrading WP occurs around 5 times a year or so, no hard task at all.

The only hitch is if the replacement theme has hardcoded paths instead of using relative paths and therefore would not work in folder name different from referenced files’ URL’s.

@r-a-y @peterverkooijen
Just to clarify: I’m not really for the actual inclusion of bbPress inside of BuddyPress. What I want is the ability to replicate forum-like functionality within the boundaries of what WordPress+BuddyPress can be extended to. I believe social networks can be the next generation of collaborative forums. That is the type of functionality I have envisioned for my still-hypothetical BuddyPress site anyways.

It all depends on what you want to do with your community.

Since you have no experience with WordPress, the BuddyPress for Dummies book might be a good way to start:
https://buddypress.org/2010/03/book-buddypress-for-dummies/

If you have some coding experience, it shouldn’t take you long to get up to speed. Although it would have helped to have some idea of how WordPress works, especially with themes and hooks.

BuddyPress might very well be used first and foremost as a forum by those of us who want WordPress+bbPress without any fuzz (because BuddyPress delivers).

But BP isn’t a forum. Just use bbPress if you want a forum; it’s less overhead as well. Plus you get access to all the existing plugins without needing to tweak them for BP.

FYI, there are signs that bbPress is coming back to life.

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To some extent, I agree with Peter (but not his tone!). We should be taking advantage of the existing activity stream coupled with some activitymeta (title, tags). I think this could potentially be used as a very nice “forum alternative”; we also wouldn’t have to worry about forking discussions from the activity stream. Also, I think this new enhanced activity stream should only be used for groups. Just a thought.

I’ll see if I can get a proof of concept going.

Btw, @peterverkooijen – I’m not sugarcoating anything; I understand the rationale used for incorporating bbPress up to version 1.1. I definitely don’t believe it’s a “parasite” like you do.

@andrea_r You say BuddyPress is not a forum. Before it integrated bbPress into the core, I would agree. Now, BP better put that script to excellent use, or else it’s just bloat. The fact that bbPress is ‘in between places’ these days has made many of us bbP enthusiasts turn to BP as it’s successor, since it is clearly actively developed and seems able to use bbP in ways never before possible!

Until bbPress comes back to life, in whichever form that might be; and BuddyPress integration comes with it, BuddyPress might very well be used first and foremost as a forum by those of us who want WordPress+bbPress without any fuzz (because BuddyPress delivers).

By all means, I think it should be possible (and rather effortless at that) to mold BuddyPress into a more forum-like environment. After all, forums is the ‘light’ social network most of us low-tech people know as a do-it-yourself collaboration platform. Remember all of those free-install forums on a sub-domain, usually with nasty ads forced on users? Millions used those; it’s the platform we’ve come to know better than any other, as a social administrator.

download it from the plugin homepage or wordpress.org, its very much alive and works great

Ahh okay, try this plugin by Rich:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-forum-extras/

This extends the functionality of the group forums. One of the features is a group forum index.

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Also make sure you have enabled the discussion forum for each group.

Just stepping in with a recent observation that I am not sure how to address.

in looking aroudn and watching tweets & blog posts elsewhere about newcomers to the platform, someone somewhere started referring to it as a FORUM.

It is not.

And newcomers expecting a forum-like interface and usage are the ones I see struggling the most. Whether it’s being confused with bbpress (the name) in general, I dunno. But it might make a bit more sense and be less painful to regulars if we could start stressing that is is not a forum, it’s a social networking add-on for WordPress. Not separate (man, I am not impressed with the auto-install script…), and outside of anything that’s been done before.

To get BuddyPress integrated to your WP theme – https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/
where you would have to make some tweaks with some div classes/ID’s and tweaking style.css

As for BP users commenting on videos, it’s the WP thing, just go to dashboard Discussion > and allow only logged in users to comment if you want to set some limits

Has anyone made any progress on this one? I’ve a XAMPP setup running on XP Service Pack 3 behind a corporate firewall. WordPress seems to work fine – I can configure, add BuddyPress, activate plug in and themes, etc. I have a .htaccess sitting in C:xampphtdocswordpress-mu which looks like the htaccess.dist file but with modifications.

Clicking on http://computername.corporatedomainname.com/wordpress-mu/ (where I am installed) lets me go to the BuddyPress home page (and very exciting it is too). Then clicking on the “Members” tab give me a http://computername.corporeatedomainname.com/wordpress-mu/members/ and

“Object not found!

The requested URL was not found on this server. The link on the referring page seems to be wrong or outdated. Please inform the author of that page about the error.

If you think this is a server error, please contact the webmaster.
Error 404″

Ok, i have found a theme i want, Deerawan – Cloudy 1.4.2, but how would i make it so it was buddypress compatible?

This theme appears to be a WordPress theme. Use the BuddyPress Template Pack plugin in conjuction with your WP theme:
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/

And how do i display my groups in the forums i have on my site? I have posted several things but not showing up in the actual forums, but in the groups forums.

Not sure what you mean here. Are you talking about showing the group avatar or a list of groups in your external bbPress setup? Being specific really helps!

I think i really need help with getting these groups set up to run the right way…..

It all depends on what you mean by “the right way”.

Mike Pratt said 1 day ago:

“@peterverkooijen @hnla I take the other side of your “little diff b/t blogs and forums” opinion. To me, a blog post is a significantly more “deliberate” piece of content … For ex, we have a group called the “12th Man Training Table” which centers on athlete nutrition. Folks want to post recipes for training means. Clearly, forum topics are the wrong vehicle. On the other hand, there are raging debates in that group that definitely belong in the forum construct..not a blog post with comments … So Peter, please keep in mind that what you would do to BP would build a BP that works for Peter, but it’s not necessarily the only use case around, that’s all.”

Mike Pratt, you miss the point. I’m talking about how the script and database is structured, not what you as a user should do with it. Functionally a blog post and a forum topic are the same thing; a piece of content that others can comment on. Similarly there only needs to be one way to store (threaded) comments. There is no need to duplicate that in forum thread, wires, etc. There is no need to have variations of posts and comments in different places in the database.

I’m talking about taking redundancies out, boiling down the architecture to the lowest number of necessary parts, less is more, keep it simple stupid. That does not mean you as a user will have less options. WP blog posts already provides many ways to make very different types of posts. In my P2-based custom theme I have started making a clear distinction between ‘status updates’ and ‘blog posts’ using categories. Apparently WP 3.0 will have more sophisticated hooks to do different things with different types of content.

Same for comments. There are already lots of different things you can do with comments, from IntenseDebate and other plugins to built-in threaded options, inline Ajax commenting and styling possibilities via your theme. Buddypress should leverage basic WordPress building blocks as much as possible instead of adding new database tables and third scripts like BBpress. Ultimately a lot of this is for the theme developers to develop. They could develop out-of-the-box themes for different use cases; schools, companies, sport clubs, etc. BP should focus on a solid core and flexible API.

I have BuddyPress installed with WordPress Single User with the BuddyPress plugin and I didn’t see the Create A Group button either.. so I Turned OFF: Let Users Create and Join Groups and TURNED IT BACK ON.. and the button now shows!

Also.. the place where you see the button is: yourwebsite dot com/groups/

You will need to create a link to that “Groups” page as it doesn’t appear in the Admin Bar normally.

I had the same problem but finally got it solved. I had to do 2 things:

1 – go into “settings>miscellaneous” and fill in the “full URL path to files” so it will be example http://yourdomainname/wp-content/uploads

2 – requires editing the php coding in the file bp-core-avatars.php in BuddyPress. You can find this file by going into “plugins>editor”. On the right side, there is a drop down box labelled “select plug-in to edit”. Change this default selection from Asimet to BuddyPress and press “select”. The list of files beneath will change. Scroll down to “buddypress/bp-core/bp-core-avatars.php” and select it.
The changes need to be down on lines 389 & 390, it’s down near the end of the page. (I used copy/paste in MS Frontpage editor to find the line number close to “function bp_core_avatar_upload_path() {“) You’ll be replacing the 2 lines with 3 lines. ** Use the WordPress editor to make the changes to copy/paste the lines once you find them **

Replace:
if ( !$path = get_option( ‘upload_path’ ) )
$path = WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/uploads’;

With:
if ( !$path = get_option( ‘upload_path’ ) )
$path = WP_CONTENT_DIR . ‘/uploads’;
else $path = ABSPATH . $path;

See this post for the solution https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/avatar-cropping-after-upload-image-and-cropper-dont-appear-fails/