BuddyPress.org

“Automattic needs to go back to the basic building blocks – users, posts, comments – and make sure they are solid, remove redundancies etc. And then develop different ways to connect those elements and display the data in different user interfaces; blog, social network, forum, microblogging, social bookmarking, etc“.
Just to be clear, on this account I agree wholeheartedly. Forum functionality is one thing, but a separate script all together to make a forum when you’ve already got WordPress and BuddyPress put together with their respective building blocks at your disposal, that seems like a flawed development practice to me.

With WordPress, 3.0 and its custom post types in particular, we’ve got all we need already. This is what I tried to get across on my ‘rethinking posts’ thread.
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/miscellaneous/forum/topic/re-thinking-posts/

@twodeuces – Nice job! It’s always nice though to attribute the original work. Also, it should be quite easy to add your admin menu to the existing BP admin menu without waiting for the 3.0 merge.

@3sixty (“The irony of “BuddyPress shouldn’t be about forums”, and “if you want a forum, don’t use BP” and “bbPress is a parasite in BP…” is that the FORUM is the center point of activity here on buddypress.org”)

There’s nothing ironic about that. Traditional forums are very useful, but if you want a traditional forum you can install PunBB or bbPress. The point is that bolting a forum onto a social network derails the social networking structure. Mixing forum and social networking is the cause of a lot of the confusion and interface problems that this thread is about.

Social networking sites (Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.) imho evolved from traditional forums; they are a next generation paradigm in how to structure a web community, with more emphasis on individual members, less on forum topics. That’s also why I keep complaining about anonymous usernames and the underdeveloped member management in BP.

It has been depressing to see in recent months that people who primarily want a traditional forum are taking over Buddypress, pushing it back into the older forms. Mixing these different approaches to structuring a community does not make it a more versatile product. It’s the kitchen sink. It’s becomes an unwieldy mess.

As explained earlier in this thread, you can get forum-like functionality following existing Buddypress/Wordpress structures. You can display blog posts and comments in a forum structure. You could probably do it in a template. There is absolutely no need to bolt on an external forum, adding new database tables and functionality that partly overlaps/clashes with existing functionality.

Automattic needs to go back to the basic building blocks – users, posts, comments – and make sure they are solid, remove redundancies etc. And then develop different ways to connect those elements and display the data in different user interfaces; blog, social network, forum, microblogging, social bookmarking, etc.

Wow, amazing analysis by Boone… I really “get it” now. Andrea_r also has a good point though that WPMU is distributed in other ways that are meaningful and powerful. I think the author’s comment was just speculation, and limited to a project called “DiSo” that was apparently designed to integrate with WordPress; not sure if DiSo worked at all with MU.

The part about that quote that resonated with me is just the idea of “WP wasn’t designed from the ground up to host BP.” When I’m writing something for BP, I always feel like I’m gaming WordPress to do something it was not really designed to do. So I’m writing code that somehow has to play nice with the host, WordPress, which is awesome in its own right – but what I’m really trying to do is build a social network. So it would be more logical to me to say, “OK, here’s my BuddyPress network. WP is really good at XYZ, so how can I adapt *WordPress* to meet my BP needs?”

“1) They tried to add on to WordPress, a project which was not designed from the ground up to be a distributed network.”

okay, here’s what I don’t get – isn’t MU a distributed network?

Is your problem that the javascript isn’t loading?

The best way to include the script is with https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_enqueue_script.

You could also just edit the header.php file of your theme to include a script tag.

“1) They tried to add on to WordPress, a project which was not designed from the ground up to be a distributed network.”

This really feels like the “elephant in the room” every time I visit my wp-admin panel. My BuddyPress admin menu keeps growing and growing, disproportionate to the WP-specific admin menus.

I keep waiting for the discussions to start on how BP is “outgrowing” WP. I guess that happens when the limitations of WP start to outweigh the advantages, such as all the great WP functions we get “for free”. When you think about it, it is a little weird – for example, how blogs and forums are integrated with BP in such different ways and don’t really “talk” to each other in a meaningful way. The whole idea of “like” and “favorite” and “report” buttons that work on one content type but not another. Etc.

Always good to have options. Four coders on the project sound good.

Here’s one thing that caught my eye when the Diaspora coders were talking about similar projects that failed (DiSo):
http://joindiaspora.com/2010/04/30/a-response-to-mr-villa.html

To answer directly, I am pretty sure DISO failed because:

2) (a guess) they quickly tried to support all sort of features without building some sort of common infrastructure before trying to add functionality.

I would have replied and mentioned BP of course
But I also get their point.

If you’re using standard WP, you should be able to use any ecommerce plugin that’s available for WP.
https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/tags/ecommerce

@erich73, I can tell you’re really excited about the new version, but asking every couple days if they’re done is kind of like being the kid in the back of the car ‘are we there yet?’

Have faith and a little more patience. They’ll put out 1.2.4 when it’s done and working, and not rush it just to get it out there. Right now, the roadmap says they’re 81% done. They MIGHT even be waiting for WordPress 3.0 to get finished since both projects are right next to each other. But they’ll get done soon

There are two popular solutions for regular WordPress (not sure how they would work with BuddyPress… I guess they would only translate the blog portion of the site). The two options are WPMU and qTranslate. WPMU make a separate post for each language while qTranslate puts all languages in one post separated by special comment tags. I found the management of a WMPU blog to be confusing. qTranslate has a simple tabbed user interface… so within your edit page for your posts… you get a tab for each language.

Exact same problem as described.
I did a clean 1.2.3 install running on WordPress MU 2.9.2. I followed the how-to as presented on this page, and changed the permalinks setting to something other than default.

A .htaccess file is indeed created, and the buddypress installation does run. However, when I try to visit the about page or the members page, I get a 404 error stating the page doesn’t exist. The link is correct (http://localhost.localdomain/wpmu/members/ i.e.) , but it simply doesn’t show anything.
I can’t visit a members profile either, it simply stops everywhere outside the mainpage.

I’m using the default Buddypress theme btw, nothing changed on my side.

First of all, we may need more information. If what I suggest below does not resolve your issue, then please answer these questions: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/when-asking-for-support/

The error message that you have posted is strange. BuddyPress does not have a file called bp-cores.php. You mentioned that you made some file modifications. Did you open up the file bp-loader.php? I would look in that file on line 19 to see if you accidentally added an “s” to bp-core. Line 19 should read:

require_once( WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/buddypress/bp-core.php' );


If you see that there is an “s” but you are sure that you did not change it yourself, I would suggest deactivating then deleting BuddyPress. Then redownload BuddyPress and reinstall. Make sure your are downloading BuddyPress from this site

Finally, when trying to debug BuddyPress, always use the default theme and deactivate all other plugins. You need to isolate what is happening within BuddyPress.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/sitepress-multilingual-cms/
This plugin claims to do the job. It claims to be easy as well.

Quote:

WPML’s showcase includes samples of blogs, full websites and even multilingual BuddyPress portals.

I’d like to know how to extend it to the activity feed as well as bbPress. I have bbPress integrated with WordPress and the users’ first names are appearing instead of their usernames.

I finally sat down and read through the whole discussion. Some great points. I don’t know how possible it would be to do this, but what about multiple streams? @Sadr made a great point that the activity stream should have elements that users could subscribe to or not subscribe to. Right now there is one stream that either has too much information or doesn’t have the right kind of information. With multiple streams, each of which could be put on a different page or within a different area on a main page, the information flow could be tailored by each site designer and user to serve their needs and the needs of their communities.

Another point that was brought up was navigation, now I know that this is partially the theme setup, but in a default install even if a user is redirected to their groups, it is still another click away to a the groups wiki, blog, forum or documents or whatever your groups are based around. It needs to be easier to place the sub areas of a Buddypress site where you want them. Maybe the new menus in WP 3.0 address this (I haven’t had a chance to play with them much) but navigation needs to have small blocks that can be quickly and easily rearranged in order to design navigation paths that fit your community. And navigation is all about menus; activity streams are a form of navigation if they send you quickly to the information you are interested in. Couldn’t the profile, for example, be more widget ready so that either admins or users could pick and choose the pieces they want (think iGoogle).

@Peterverkooijen made a good point about members profile / privacy. It is possible to do it now to a certain extent, but this needs to be easier and more comprehensive.

As many people said the users are who are important and poor UI will drive people away, but Buddypress is used in such a wide variety of situations, that it needs to be easy to customize for each communities needs. To use an analogy I don’t want Buddypress to be like Moodle, for example; if you’ve seen one Moodle site you’ve seen 98% of all Moodle sites. The strength of WordPress is the ease with which one can customize not just the functionality but the looks and UI of the site, let’s not lose that.

Well, you are probably talking about WP 3.0. Not surprised the entire Web does not work with 3.0 yet.

WP-United has been around for a long time and is now a very mature software package so I would be surprised if it did not work with the stated specs:

Tested with: WordPress 2.9.x & phpBB 3.0.6

http://vaso.sma.hu/blog/restricted-area-plugin-for-wordpress/

Try that to hide parts of posts until users log in,

Tried it, doesn’t work with recent wordpress and recent phpBB, let alone buddypress.

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-documents/ is awesomesauce.

Try replacing “template_url” with “stylesheet_directory”.

https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/bloginfo

You can create a nwew page in the wp backend and use a custom template for it (you can find information on how to do that in the wordpress.org codex). At the top of that template file (before the function get_header()) you can put something like this:

`global $bp;

if( ! is_user_logged_in() )
bp_core_redirect( $bp->root_domain .’/’. BP_REGISTER_SLUG .’/’ );`