BuddyPress.org

@synaptic Thanks for starting this interesting discussion (and for doing it in a more sensible and measured tone than the linked article).

I agree that the current process for selecting and advancing features is not ideal. It is indeed a shame when a ticket like the CPT one gets punted release after release. I’m not sure that I can *justify* it, but I can *explain* it.

In brief, BuddyPress is maintained and developed by a small number of volunteers. (Contrast with WordPress, which has quite a large number of contributors, and a number of people who are paid to work exclusively on WordPress core as part/all of their day job.) So, the things that get developed during any given release are those things that the small number of volunteer developers have chosen to spend their time on. How do the developers choose? Personally, I tend to gravitate toward those items that fall into one or more of the following categories:

1. Items that other people have contributed code to, either in the form of an existing plugin, or a patch, or whatever. This is both because these items mean not starting from scratch, and because it validates those contributors’ time and effort. The new dynamic menu system (described here http://www.wptavern.com/buddypress-1-9-will-include-dynamic-menu-links) is a great example of this: community member imath contributed a very nice patch, so it got moved up in the list and will be part of the 1.9 release.
2. Items that someone is paying me to build anyway. I’m a consultant working on BP projects, and sometimes a client wants a feature that would be valuable in BP itself. If I’m not mistaken, the new notifications component for 1.9 is an example of this – jjj was working on it for a client, and so was much of the way toward having it ready for BP.
3. Low-hanging fruit. Often there are relatively easy tickets, something I can knock off in an hour or two.
4. Stuff I enjoy doing. There are some sorts of features I prefer to work on, and I’m more likely to spend my volunteer time working on them.

This isn’t an exhaustive list, but it gives you an idea of the kinds of motivations that go into the contributions of a volunteer. And it means that sometimes tickets that garner interest and conversation – your CPT ticket example is a good one – can fizzle. Sizable features like this really need to be personally shepherded by someone in order to be successful, and there is simply too little developer time to cover all worthy tickets.

Is our system for choosing features and fixes perfect? No, definitely not. Your voting idea is a nudge toward something missing from my list: “items that are wanted most by the community”. If you’re interested in pursuing something like this, please please please do – the Future Release pile has lots of good stuff in it, but it really needs people to read through tickets and pick out the stuff that should be presented to the community. Feel free to reach out to me if you want to talk more about this.

As a side note: Deciding on roadmaps, etc is really hard. We want to do what’s best for the project (whatever that might be, and however you might determine it), but at the same time we want to ensure that contributors – who, it’s important to remember, are giving their free time to the project – are working on things that they personally find valuable and enjoyable. I’m eager to work with interested members of the community do a better job at striking the necessary balance.

BuddyPress utilizes WordPress’ version of jQuery.

But I can see how this would be a problem for custom themes relying on something like Zepto.

You can try adding some javascript directly after the Zepto library is called to declare the jQuery variable as an instance of Zepto.

Something like:

<script type="text/javascript">
if ( typeof jQuery == "undefined" )
	var jQuery = Zepto;
</script>

Not sure if that will work at all, since Zepto is a lightweight-alternative to jQuery, but hopefully that gives you an idea.

You could try Welcome Pack

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

Hi @laurentdesserrey

You can usually update content of these emails via a filter. See the Codex for more info https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_filter

For example, to filter the email body for message notifications, use messages_notification_new_message_message. To filter the subject line, use messages_notification_new_message_subject

Hope this info helps.

Hello! This thread is mostly accurate, but just to wrap things up —

@jjj has been working at 10up.com since August, and I’ve been at Automattic since the beginning of 2013. John and I had been contributing to BuddyPress for years before we started at Automattic. Our day jobs only affect our contributions to BuddyPress in a positive way; as @henrywright-1 pointed out, John’s built a whole new notifications component since he’s been at 10up! Wow!

While Automattic does own BuddyPress and the trademark in a very legal sense — and it’s my personal wish that one day the BP trademark is transferred to the WordPress foundation — they have no influence over the day-to-day of the plugin, and John remains in charge of the ship.

I’m also having the same issue as mentioned above.

BuddyPress 1.8.1
WordPress Multisite 3.7.1

The button works from the main Groups page, but not when on a single group page.

JJJ’s work on the notifications component pretty much answers that question. If you look at the updates in the Trac ticket you’ll see just how much time and effort he has put in over the past month.

Hi @ubernaut

Yes, if WangGuard detect a user as splogger and you mark it as not splogger, he is flagged as “Checked Forced”. That will force to WangGuard to accept that user as good user at your WordPress.

But if you mark a user as Splogger, and then, you mark it again as Not Splogger, he is flagged as Checked user and he is removed from WangGuard database.

click download gist button and then upload it to WordPress

I would like to offer two ideas for consideration:

1) Integrating basic anti-spam capabilities into core
2) Improving performance via fragment caching

1) I realize that there are already good plugins that deal with spam, both comment and multisite blogspam. But being spam, it is a cat and mouse game and I feel that buddypress should have some basic anti-spam protection out of the box. For example, a hidden text field via css as a honeypot. Users who are not at all comfortable coding or editing files can turn this on or have it on by default (rather than try to follow guides like this: http://www.pixeljar.net/2012/09/19/eliminate-buddypress-spam-registrations/)

2) This was touched on in the recent buddypress panel discussion:

(caching: 19min – 22min)

After spam, the biggest issue that I’ve heard is with performance. I think we should start to address this. For more info and details see this thread.

One of the challenges of using caching plugins like WT3 is that they don’t work for signed in members of buddypress sites. But a fragment caching system can still cache parts of the page which are ‘static’ and would not change as a result of the user activity.

Never done it myself, but i think comment_form accepts some arguments for that kinda of thing. Though since your question is more wordpress related, and you have buddypress installed I’d use buddypress activity comments rather than the wordpress ones anyway

The community decides the direction of BP not Automattic. JJJ is still project lead. Most decisions about BP happen in the IRC dev chats.

list of new features
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/roadmap

If you want new festures you can add a topic here and if it gets good feedback you can open an enhancement ticket on trac.

If you wish to sponsor features you can get a dev to create a new plugin

yeah that article was obviously written by someone who does not actually participate (or lurk for that matter) in the weekly meetings.

Fact is jjj actually put a ton of work into this release of budypress. The part he was working on i don’t even understand because, like yourself i am not a developer. but i do understand it enough to know its the kind of thing very few people may appreciate but makes those few (devs) lives much easier. i also know it took a lot of his hours to make it happen. 10up just today or yesterday announced that they devoting 100% of @helen ‘s time to wordpress so i don’t think it’s accurate to suggest that jjj won’t still be able to spend a good chunk of his time on buddypress.

like any open source project it’s success or failure is defined by the people who volunteer their time and efforts to build and promote it, so if you feel like you’d like to do that, a good place to start might be the regular weekly irc meetings or simply start following the BPdev blog which can be found here:

http://bpdevel.wordpress.com

i would say there should probably be an easier way to find that site on buddypres.org though.

:/

@steel-rat check out how this plugin does it https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-activity-as-blog-comments/

Is WordPress installed in the root or in a folder? sounds like the install got borked. In future I would always use the admin to update WP. Also, this error has happened before when WP was installed using a one click host installer.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-default-data/