Howdy all. I’ve got a little plugin ready for testing that allows bp group forum functionality in bbPress. From the readme.txt:

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Description

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Enable BuddyPress group forum features in bbPress.

BuddyPress has three types of groups. Public, Private and Hidden. In all three

cases users must be members of a group to participate in group forum conversations.

These two plugins modify a standard bbPress forum installation to allow

BuddyPress group members to carry on discussions in bbPress.

BuddyPress public groups will be read only in bbPress. Anyone wishing to participate

in a public group discussion must be a member of that group in bp.

BuddyPress private and hidden groups will be hidden in bbPress. Only members

of these groups will see the forums and be able to participate.

BuddyPress group admins and mods have moderator privileges in bbPress.

The moderator role is restricted to their group forum.

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I’m gonna do a blog post about this but first I have to run up to the store and get something for my girlfriend. Something pink and expensive. Candy people, candy. This is Valentines Day right? Forgot all about it being buried up to my eyeballs in php for the past week.

EDIT: I’m back. Girlfriend is happier. I’m happier that she’s happier.

Read more and download the plugin:

http://code.ourcommoninterest.org/2009/02/14/buddypress-group-forums-for-bbpress/

[@nicolagreco Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

YU HU,

AWESOME

(add it on bpdev)

Nicola

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I’m gonna. Gotta do some things first.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

So far this is working for exactly as advertised and intended. Major thumbs up and I’m quite surprised it isn’t a built in part of BP.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hey John. I was just going to suggest on the other thread that we move any discussion to here. You’re way ahead of me.

Keep banging on it.

There are things that have been left out intentionally. Lack of time. Don’t know what to do with certain things. Certain areas in bp haven’t been fully developed yet.

[@mikepratt Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Burt – Congrats on what appears to be a successful plugin. Could you humor me? I don’t quite understand the use case for it. Is it for folks who want to leave the confines of the BP Group forums and interact via the bbPress door to the same forums? I don’t deny that someone would but I’m not sure why since they can do it right there in BP (at least on my site)

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

This is for sites that want to use bbPress as it was intended. As a forum. bbPress is designed to be that. The feature set of vertical software is more rich than horizontal software. bbPress does things now that bp doesn’t do and may never do.

I like having a forum interface to bbPress in bp. I’d like to see a blog interface also. I don’t expect the feature set to be the same.

It’s wonderful that bp has a forum interface since I think that forums are an extremely important part of social software. People who get together in groups like to talk. I think that the tools we use to communicate can constrain or enable that communication.

The purpose of bbGroups is to extend bp’s native strengths.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

@mikepratt, Burt nailed it on the head, but I’d like to add that I think many people are still stuck in the forum world, and haven’t peeked their heads out to see that social networking has evolved in the past 5 years or so. I know on lots of car or video game forums, it’s basically just a free for all chat fest, and trying to convert those minds into using BuddyPress or WordPress alone is too big of a change; I’ve tried it twice now with little success. Having a dedicated familiar looking forum but using BuddyPress to emphasize the social atmosphere helps those stubborn users transition a little easier and allow them to fallback on the features of a dedicated forum in the event it doesn’t work out.

@burt, I noticed on your Common Interest site that you have the forums separated between public and group. I would like to do something similar, and am curious as to how you did so. Also, is there an easy way to tap into the profile fields/user information from BuddyPress and display it as post author information in bbPress?

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

@john, I included some template tags in the bbGroups package that demonstrates some of that theme’s use of bp centric features. I didn’t include the forums feature because it was specific to the theme. I’ll just zip up that theme and post it on my blog for you to look at the code. Gimme a few.

OK. It’s here: http://ourcommoninterest.org/downloads/oci.zip

You should just be able to unzip that in my-templates. One thing though. bbPress doesn’t seem to have a functions.php file that gets run in each theme/template as wp does. So I had all the template specific code being launched from my oci_bb_group_forums.php plugin. I’ve got all the template code living in oci_bb_custom.php so it get loaded up automatically. I included my oci_bb_custom.php file in the template zip. Just drop that in my-plugins and it’ll be loaded by the bbGroups plugin in bbpress.

If you look at the front-page.php file you’ll see how the forum list is generated.

<?php oci_forum_list('open', 'Community Forums', false); ?>

<?php oci_forum_list('readonly', 'Group Forums', true); ?>

<?php oci_forum_list('hidden', 'Private Forums', true); ?>

That fn is a little out of date. I used to have an option in there to generate identicon avatars for all forums. Even the forums that weren’t bp related. I took that capability out. What it does do now is display avs for the currently logged in user’s groups only.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Awesome thank you very much. Curious if removing the “- Forum” from the forum name of a group forum has any ill effects on it? I hate the redundancy but am afraid to break it.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Does nothing to remove it. It’s kinda like a mattress tag. I complained about that and Andy put a filter in there for group creation. We can override the forum name that gets created and the description I think.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Installed and working. Yay!

Since I converted my db from a wordpress.org install, not all of my users have converted their information, i.e. real names, etc… Is there any way to have a fall back and use the nicename in the event no real name exists? Also, if there is no avatar uploaded, it doesn’t seem to use the generated avatar for me. The idea would be to have everyone use an avatar eventually, but alas my user base can be slow to adapt…

Do you have a way to do the user names in forum.php, functions that are usually topic_last_poster() and $topic->topic_poster_name? I suppose if the user->ID of those people is within $topic then it’s pretty straight forward eh…

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hi John. Glad it’s working for you.

I’m kinda confused. You’re talking about bbGroups plugin, the bbpress template that runs on my forums now or bp?

We’ve got several things you are mentioning:

username, nicename and full name

avatars

If you are talking about my template for bbpress then what you see is what I got at the moment. Nothing held back. That bbpress template was really just a toy to get some bp goodies showing in bbpress. Just an experiment. I was and still am using it to test code and ideas.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Sorry for the confusion. I’m juggling a few ideas so I’m probably not communicating in a straight line right now.

Check out http://delsolownersclub.com/discussions/topic/great-job-john for an example…

Basically some of the people logged in and posting in my forums were converted over from a wordpress.org install, and they have yet to update their buddypress profiles with real name info, so using this plugin, their names don’t show up at all, and neither do their avatars as they haven’t uploaded one yet either. Make sense?

And yes about your template… If you look at the front-page.php or forum.php files, you’ll see that the usernames still fall back on the bbPress username of ‘admin’ instead of your name as ‘Site Admin’ if that makes sense? Striving for uniformity, I’d like to get all of the names displayed the same.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I see your problem with the avs and names. Only suggestion I have is to write a little script that stuffs default names and avs for your users. bp just uses the gravatar’esqe identicons, wavatars and such for non uploaded avs.

This function here might help you out: bp_core_get_avatar() in /bp-core/bp-core-avatars.php

These lines in that fn do the default av for a user:

$ud = get_userdata($user);

$grav_option = get_site_option('user-avatar-default');



if ( empty( $grav_option ) ) {

$default_grav = 'wavatar';

} else if ( 'mystery' == $grav_option ) {

$default_grav = site_url( MUPLUGINDIR . '/bp-core/images/mystery-man.jpg');

} else {

$default_grav = $grav_option;

}



$gravatar = 'https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/' . md5( $ud->user_email ) . '?d=' . $default_grav . '&s=';

One little thing I noticed on your site. I have some debug info in the forum list that appends the forum_id. It’s still in there.

My Favorite Forum (9)

Where (9) is the forum_id.

It’s in line 110 of oci_bb_custom.php

<?php forum_name(); echo ' (' . $forum->forum_id . ')'; ?></a><br />

You can take out the echo ‘ (‘. $forum->forum_id . ‘) ‘; stuff if you want.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Yeah haha I noticed that too, thanks! Fixed.

Thanks for giving me a direction, I’ll totally check that out and report back what I figure out.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hey Burt… Something strange is happening… Could be I broke something, but I noticed it after I upgraded to .41 of your community blogs plug-in. It probably existed before hand, but I just noticed it now so it’s something to stay cognoscente of.

When looking at the front page of my forums, there are two (three for me) forum sections, public, group, and hidden. The most recent posts in my groups forums area link to the most recent posts in the public forums in the same position. Basically in the same order, but in the wrong forum. I think you’ll have to look at it to see what I mean.

Looks like maybe the $topics needs a separate loop or needs to be cleared? I haven’t dived into it yet, but I plan to shortly.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Der… This might not pertain to you anyhow, as I forgot that it also involves the forum last poster bbPress plugin.

Diving deeper…

Looks like this is only happening on the Groups forums Burt. The hidden forum appears to get the correct last poster info no problem.

Still diving…

Yep, Nevermind! Not your problem!

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I like those kind of problems. The ones that are not mine.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Where would I want to hook into, to update the bbGroups array whenever the logged in user edits their xprofile data?

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

John, hang in there. Been moving myself and my laptop to a diff town past 3 days. Getting setup again. I think I’m hooking the ‘xprofile_updated_profile’ action.

…

Yep. In 0.22. Should work. Lemme see exactly how much of ‘changing’ the profile that actually covers.

brb.

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

At second glance, the reason I asked is because I’d like to update all of the xprofile user info that I want visible in the forums, into the bbGroup array, even if they are NOT in any group.

I think that using your array for my purpose isn’t really “right,” but it will work once I can get non-grouped users to have a bbGroup array.

I haven’t had time this week to come up with what I consider a “real” solution that doesn’t piggy back on top of yours, to pass all xprofile info from bp to bbp.

Your bbGroups really does work perfectly for people that are in groups, just not people that aren’t I think. Ha!