BuddyPress.org

@jordashtalon

From PM Re: “

Awesome thanks for your help. I just realized I wasn’t on the latest Beta version ( I thought I was)

The new versions automatic thumbnails works really awesome.

I am noticing one bug, in the activity stream (domain.com/activity)

It shows the picture and everything, but the link to them is not working right it has this URL:

http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-media/6/

When I browse to the picture itself using the “media” tab the url that works should be:

http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-album/1/single-media/6/M/

(it’s also sometimes O instead of M)

Any ideas why that would be happening? Is this the best place to post these type of questions?

…

The activity stream bug was reported by @connor-mccarra this morning. We’ll fix it in the next beta, out in a few days.

The “http://domain.com/members/admin/album/single-album/1/single-media/6/M/” where the suffix may be T, P, S, M, L, or O is the plugin automatically selecting the best image size to fit in your template.

It has to account for some users uploading very large images, and some users uploading very small images, resulting in there may or may not being various downsampled sizes in the cache. It uses a nearest-fit algorithm to determine which size is closest to “medium” and serves that image.

All of this will be configurable in the backend, allowing different sites to be optimized for say, photographers -vs- mobile phones.

^F^

@Gene53 – Facebook and Flickr require users to create an album before uploading, so we’re following that lead.

There are some compelling technical reasons for doing this.

First, if users didn’t have to group their media into albums, many of them wouldn’t. The result of this would effectively be like the user having one massive album with thousands of images. So when we went to the database to get that user’s images, the query would return like 2,500 images instead of 200 (which is the maximum number of images FaceBook lets a user have in one album). That would be a huge database hit, and slow down the site.

Second, to provide a quality user experience. It has been shown that people will eventually get tired of digging through an unorganized photo set and stop browsing pictures. To get a first-hand experience at this, go to a site like “istockphoto.com” and try to find a picture of a female model typing at a computer by typing in ONLY the search term “female”.

Generally, it’s a bad idea to force users to do things. But sometimes a gentle “5 seconds of work” push in the right direction greatly improves the community. That’s why the plugin is set up this way.

Also, if you’re running a “hobby site” where you’ve only got a couple of thousand members, future updates to the admin screen will let you disable albums entirely and dump all the media on a single page, much as version 0.1.7 does.

^F^

@Mike Pratt

I think all three of your points are great ideas.

First off, with regards to #1, we’ll be adding full configurability for what privacy categories are called and which ones are available. The code is already in the place for this, we just need to add the config options to the admin screen.

Second, with regards to the album creation process, actually the way Facebook implements it is just with an “Add Media” button on the home screen. And then as part of the upload process, you create an album for the media items. So the process has “flow”.

We’re going to do this as well, but we have to get the multi-file uploader finished first.

Third, with regards to tagging friends. Again, Facebook implements it exactly as you have described …and so will we.

It’s actually been very easy to design the UI for this plugin. Whether they realize it or not, everybody wants every feature to work like either a) Flickr, or b) Facebook or c) YouTube …lol

^F^

@Mike Pratt

I think another amusing point about the whole “online social community” thing is that people mistakenly think Facebook invented all these concepts and that we’re somehow “ripping off” Facebook by emulating these features.

Facebook did not invent ANY of the key features people associate with social networking.

That credit goes to the dial-up bulletin board community of the late 1980’s. Specifically, a piece of software called “The Major BBS”, which you can learn about here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Major_BBS

Twenty years ago, when I was coding “plug-ins” in C for Major BBS, we had ALL of the following features:

Poking = “Paging” You would type “/p username” and it would pop-up on the other user’s screen if they were online. Or if they were offline the system would queue-up pages and notify you when you logged back in.

User Profiles = “User Registry”

Facebook Apps = “Add Ons”

Chat = “Teleconference”

Private Messaging = “Site Mail”

Friends = (Implemented using a lot of different features, but to the same net effect.)

Activity Stream = “Site News(?)”

Groups = “Forums” (Entirely text based)

Photos = “File Archives”. (Text based, queued downloads. At the time it would have taken 20 minutes to download a 300×600 pixel image, and JPG had not been invented yet. So you would queue the images you wanted to see and let them download overnight)

Marketplace = (Done with “classified ads” add-on)

FaceBook Ads = (Ads were manually added to pages by the SysOp, but could be paid for online with a credit card using another add-on)

And many of the major BBS features in turn emulate old UNIX functionality.

So to all those who are worried about [insert company name] patenting [whatever feature] or who feel bad about “copying” what somebody else is doing, practically any patent claim can be easily invalidated by showing prior art.

Anyways, back to coding…

^F^