BuddyPress.org

I think the plugin will be called Rate Vote Like Anything. And I’m building it with those three systems in mind:
Rate: you can rate things 1 to 5 (or whatever scale)
Vote: you can vote thumbs up or down (1 or -1)
Like: you can like something

So it probably will work to replace other voting systems. I’m going to take your advice and do my best to include an API so that others can use the plugin for any type of content. I’m going to replace my other BuddyPress Rate Forum Posts plugin. Tens of twenties of people (!) have asked me to extend my other plugin to rate blog posts and comments, so this new system will do it.

And as far as group rating is concerned, I’ve already built the star rating aspect for another site. you can see it in action here http://www.fashionsalade.com/2011/02/street-people/my-icons/rebeca/ (you need to login via facebook first).

The major benefit of this new plugin is that it will have shared ‘karma’ from all the items you create. Some people will want this, others might not. But it’s a cool feature that I really like. Site admins can also decide which items will be karmable (i think i just made a word up).

I’m also not making it BP dependant, Although I’m guessing it will mainly be used on BP sites, as wordpress already has things like GD post ratings – but that plugin is a beast.

After suffering most of yesterday while stretching custom post types to do my bidding, I’ve decided to create new tables today. and now i’m at peace However it was a great exercise to do, and I got to dig into wordpress core much more than I normally do, which is always fruitful. Thanks so much for your encouragement.

Thanks for the advice – have used the plugin and it seems to work very well.

I have run into a different problem and have posted about that separate here:

https://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/child-theme-displays-incorrectly-on-public-pages/

storing meta data in an array is good for simplicity, but it fails when I want to do any type of query on that data.

Boone, Good points about the date I can use those. And what you say about the back up makes sense too – it goes both ways, it will bloat the table AND it will definitely get backed up.

Thanks for listing the hidden things that you get when you use the custom post type api. When dealing with custom *content* I think they are all very relevant (such as you wiki plugin). However when dealing with meta content such as Ratings and Likes, it breaks down a bit.
– Yes caching is nice, but I can deal with that using the wp’s nice caching functions, I will loose out on other fancy caching methods, but its good enough.
– I believe I will already get proper query escaping because I’ll be using the $wpdb class and prepare the query accordingly.
– different database setups – very good point, no argument here
– post revisions, I have no need for this, in fact I have no need for title, content or excerpt which causing wp_insert_post to fail, so I need to artificially create a title just to be able to post. this makes me think I’m abusing the system rather than using it.
– I have no need to loop through this rating meta data.

While it is almost always a good idea to use the built in APIs for all the reasons you outline and more, sometimes it is not. I think there are some rarer cases when using the API is a hindrance. It’s kind of like someone using wordpress to build a gigantic e-commerce store – sure you can do it – but maybe you should have started with magento instead. I feel that my plugin is in the middle and could go either way.

This exchange has been quite fruitful, thank you for the great discussion.

Ok, I did this again and it’s worked!! hooray!
This time round I activated a wordpress (non-buddypress) theme before deactivating, which seemed to do the trick.
I’m now on WP 3.1.2 BP and 2.8, finally

well of course i did!
my problem is that when i go into lets say http://skolstaden.netne.net/wordpress/activity/
it opens a brand new site instead of putting that site within the content area of my wordpress posts wordpress

@hnla basically I want the ability to replace the buddypress main nav with wordpress menus: via Appearance > Menus.

Being able to have a custom menu like:
Home
Community
-Activity
-Members
Groups
…

What would be the best way to implement this?

I haven’t confirmed whether standard WordPress notifications are being delivered to email addresses with country code extensions. I’ll give that a try and report back.