BuddyPress.org

I had this working and upgraded wordpress and this seems to have broken this functionality – perhaps there is a bug to be investigated?

@synaptic as said before i would certainly agree that visitors is not the best way to gauge usage but it is the industry standard for this kind of hosting. These hosts are not simply slapping a few plugins on and calling it “wordpress hosting” at least not wp engine’s case. i know that people love to hate on dreamhost but their vps was fairly decent.

one thing i would say also is that you almost never know with the smaller hosting companies who you are actually buying your hosting from a lot of ‘hosts’ are simply reselling others’ services under their own brand. Oversell is common throughout the hosting world, always has been and just because your host maybe under capacity today doesn’t mean a thing if you outgrow them or they outgrow you. Fact of the matter is if you run buddypress then you are in the top 1% of sites in terms of server resources required to run your site, managed scalable wp hosting is a good solution for many situations, imo.

@bphelp it depends on who the host is, find a good one and you’ll be just fine (webhostingtalk forum is the best place to start looking for a quality host that is affordable). you can find shared hosting that is *better* quality than some VPS out there, you have to do your homework! shared, reseller, VPS, etc. these are all labels and you have to scratch to get at the real stuff underneath as well as the host’s reputation and service history

@ubernaut I reject completely the notion that counting visits is acceptable. This is hosting we are talking about! just because a few hosts have started calling themselves by a new tag ‘wordpress’ does not mean they are doing anything different or special. It is still just plain old hosting.  And as I said, you don’t need ‘staff’, you can get a freelancer to set up your site and plugins for $50 or so depending on the complexity. And once it is set, it is set. Instead of paying monthly, you pay once for that as it should be. And then you pay a reasonable fee for hosting monthly or annually.

ps dreamhost? seriously?!? c’mon! do yourself a favor and drop by the forum I mentioned. You’ll thank me for it. There are smaller and medium size hosting co. you’ve never heard of but they are the BEST and they have the rep to prove it (as well as great prices).

well his article is not really on this site he was just promoting the article here and i’ve seen some be far more blatantly self promoting in their posts. Anyway i would say that putting an affiliate link attached to a review/comparison certainly calls into question the objectivity of the author, generally speaking.

Regarding WP Engine i think you over simplifying you analysis of the situation, @synaptic. First off it is standard practice amongst the managed wordpress specialty hosts to charge by visitor count. I would be the first to agree that its probably not he bet way to count usage and lends itself to discrepancy but so far at least they have been more then reasonable with me at least about not holding my customers to the inflated numbers. Also they offer way more then just an optimized platform, all they do is wordpress granted if you are extremely experienced or well staffed you can achieve what they offer for probably less money but if you cannot devote that level of time or resources to your own infrastructure wp engine (as well as the other wp specialty hosts I’m sure) provides a real value. Our site runs quite bit faster and more securely on their platform then it did with a basically whole vps (2 in fact) on dreamhost.

back to @cannedbear ‘s question @ 25K per month you are really talking about 1000 per day or on average about 5 or 10 at any given time during a week day. Even at that level i would not personally recommend any shared hosting for buddypress and in fact i’d say at that level you probably wouldn’t want shared hosting for any wordpress site, remember site/page load time is one of the top factors now in determining your page rank in google search results (at least according to google).

I don’t mean to take the discussion on a tangent but am curious, what is buddypress.org’s policy regarding affiliate links? The article’s conclusion is an affiliate link which for now I’ll accept is because Ben truly does like WPE and that is why he’s recommending them, not the commissions. So I’d like this clarified by a moderator so we know where the board stands officially (@mercime ?)

Getting back into the discussion, WPengine is unnecessarily expensive.  Buddypress users can get the same (and more) functionality with a few free and very low priced plugins at a fraction of the cost.

For example, using proper speed optimization methods (minify, cache, etc.) as well as free backup plugins and CDNs (1 TB of transfer for $40/year) – I won’t mention names here but you can easily find out the most popular CDN for wordpress and that is its price.

Even if you are a novice, setting up a few plugins is easy. If it isn’t, you can get someone to set it up for you at fiverrr or similar freelancer sites (freelancer, elancer, odesk, etc.) for very cheap.

The net result is a rock solid buddypress+wordpress install that runs blazingly fast and has daily backup. And the price? a very small fraction of WPengine’s price. I have this on a shared hosting plan with a great quality host found at webhostingtalk and my cost is $14/month at 200 GB bandwidth/month.

PS I just noticed that WPengine prices their plans according to ‘visits’ instead of the hosting industry standard of GB or TB of data transferred per month. This is disingenuous at best and downright sleazy at worst. Yet another reason to stay awaaaay!

i think “damage” is the wrong way to put it. the extraneous roles attached to your existing sites are meaningless and should be ignored in any case. you may be able to reset the old roles by running the built in bbpress repair scripts or alternatively you can install this plugin i use:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/user-role-editor/

which also has the ability to sort of reset all users to their default roles and capabilities.

It’s worth noting that in the past, BuddyPress created bbPress 1.1’s roles in the same global namespace as WordPress’s blog roles. This is suboptimal, as it requires a user to be EITHER an Author, or a Moderator, or an Editor, or a Member.

Most people will want an Editor to ALSO be a Moderator, or an Admin to ALSO be a Key Master.

bbPress 2.2 and beyond allow for a user to have multiple roles on sites (in a network) that have bbPress active on them. On other sites without bbPress active, users still have regular old roles.

http://wpmu.org/daily-tip-how-to-disable-the-wordpress-toolbar-and-revert-to-the-buddybar/ should work.

More importantly than being able to see the plugin listed is whether BP is running correctly?

The plugin – activated as ‘network’ – is listed in plugins list on the network admin dashboard.

pardon me for chiming in here but if i might i think mercime is trying to say that the roles you are referring to as “missing” should not be available on sub-sites since they are buddypress roles and should only ever apply to the primary blog. the list of roles you provided for the sub-site is the normal list of wordpress roles and is what you should be seeing.

@discdemo please don’t bump if less than a day as we’re all volunteers here living in different time zones. That said, I’ve checked out the site and the sidebar width is 224px less 40px padding = 184px space for the image. The ad you have there is 203px wide, hence the image was cut off.

About the available themes: if you upgrade to BP 1.7 beta 1 download at https://buddypress.org/2013/02/buddypress-1-7-beta-1/ you can use any WordPress theme which does not override core templating system and you’re good to go. Caveat is that only a few BP plugins have been upgraded for BP 1.7 beta 1 compatibility.

You will have to create a custom menu.
https://codex.buddypress.org/user/setting-up-a-new-installation/how-to-set-up-your-main-site-navigation-using-the-built-in-wordpress-menus/
Then check the box beside register then add to menu. Save and refresh your front end to see the new menu with the register page.

@mareksgregs

I am using this plugin for my test wp blog, it works great.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/private-only/

Hi @jcangler,

you have to activate BP only once, on the main site.

The main site is the WP declared as network. In the network admin you install BP as plugin. And BP would only be managable from within the network admin. And that’s right so !
Now this site is network enabled and  is using BP. If you want install other blogs, do so from your network admin. Those blogs are all included into BP activities. There is no need to install BP on each secondary blog. This cannot work.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_Multiple_Blogs
https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network
https://codex.buddypress.org/user/setting-up-a-new-installation/installation-wizard/

This drove me a bit nuts. I figured out how to do it though and it’s very easy.

With buddypress installed it takes over the registration entirely and ads this activation email which is outside the normal header load so it;s outside of the functions.php call include.

The way I got it to work was by adding a call to the welcome email action after the do_action( ‘bp_after_activation_page’ ); in plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/registration/activation.php file.

Near the end of the file you see this.
do_action( ‘bp_after_activation_page’ );

Add the following
do_action( ‘welcome_email’ );

Now this may work because I am using a plugin to modify the welcome email to begin with. I am using SB Welcome Email Editor

As for why someone would need to send the user their id and password. I needed this because people can sign up using a name with spaces but the id is created with a dash in place of spaces so they may never know their id isn’t what they saved it as. I also added a condition on the id entry to force them to not use spaces but I like to cover all bases and let them know what they signed up with.

Hope this helps.

I’m not sure that I’ve seen a huge amount of demand for event plugins specifically for BP in my experience. I hear more about media galleries, but again, it’s infrequent. It took a long time for WordPress itself to get a better media upload/interface. There’s no technical reason why a simple plugin couldn’t be built to use that.

The scope of the problem (“what is a media gallery”) is pretty huge, and means different things to different people, and I bet that any new plugin that picked a focused implementation which isn’t going to be ideal for everyone.