Topic: BuddyPress Friends on-line plugin development

BuddyPress Friends on-line plugin development – any wishes?

@slaffik

Moderator

15 years, 1 month ago

Hi all.

If you are interested in BuddyPress plugin that shows your currently on-line friends’ avatars in a widget, than please help me to make further development. The main problem is… IDEAS! Just give me some of your thoughts.

Wanna make smth useful and interesting for everyone.

Plugin link is:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-friends-on-line/

Best wishes,

slaFFik

Viewing 20 replies - 1 through 20 (of 20 total)

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

Hi Slaffik,

Good idea, and I would like to know more about this, but I can’t read your website since is Ukrainian.. Does your plugin display the friends that are currently online on your BP site? If so it would be a good idea to display the friend who logged in the most recent first.. It would be cool if they would be displayed in the buddypress bar aswell.. so you would have a new menu options called “Friends” (after Notifications) which list your online friends. Hope you like the suggestions

@erich73

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

why not make something like this:

– “all people currently online”

– “newest people online”

– “most active people online”

– “most popular people online”

– “person online since xx minutes”

– “all friends currently online”

– “newest friends online”

– “most active friends online”

– “most popular friends online”

– “friend online since xx minutes”

@johnjamesjacoby

Keymaster

15 years, 1 month ago

I’m seeing a trend erich73.

I haven’t checked this out, but it’s something I’ve been meaning to develop for a while now. I know that I really just want a function that returns true/false if the user is currently online or not from within their profile. If this plugin can do that, then I’m happy.

@slaffik

Moderator

15 years, 1 month ago

Bowe, actually, it’s in Russian )) And yes, my plugin display only those of your friends, who are currently on-line. Or rather (due to BuddyPress restriction) it shows those, who were active during the last 5 minutes.

Don’t you think, that if you have 50 friends and at least 20 of them is on-line then the list from the BuddyBar wll be tooooo long…

But I got the idea. Thank you!

Erich73, really the trend is almost perfect And I understood what you want. Will see what could be done easily and quickly. But Are you sure that all of that features will be useful for END-USERS (’cause everything we do is for them). Too many options sometimes make them unhappy with your site…

John James Jacoby, glad to see that you interested in my plugin ))

Well, plugin is doin’ almost what you wanted. It filters your friends and currently on-line people (in whole) and then I just check whether on-line person ID is the same as one of your friend’s. You will understand better if you find 2 minutes to see its code.

Thank you all. But I’m waiting more suggestions!

@erich73

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

@JJJ

…..the trend is your friend

@Slaffik,

I agree with you that too many options will confuse people, but this is not too much and I strongly feel those options will provide a great user-experience.

We currently do have the tabs “Groups”, “Members”, “Blogs”.

Why not having a tab named “Friends” ???

KISS

Keep It Simple & Stupid

@slaffik

Moderator

15 years, 1 month ago

Erich73, oh you gave me some really-really great idea! Will think carefully. Some extraFriend component?

@21cdb

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

Hey that sounds great! Erichs idea of another directory tab besides “Groups”, “Members”, “Blogs” called “Friends” is growing on me more and more!

I know from some other social networks and the behaviours of some friends, that the first thing they do after login is to check what did their friends most recently.

Maybe you could include the latest status update of your “friends” to that component! So at the end we would have a friends directory that appears after you are logged in that displays your recent online friends accompany with ther status.

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

That would be a great idea! An extra widget on the homepage which displays Friends activity.. I’ll make an mock-up screenshot tomorrow morning, with my ideas (and hopefully the rests aswell )

@erich73

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

@SlaFFik

this is my problem – I do have many ideas but I am not able to translate those into the real world as I am not a programmer.

Please make sure I get a free copy of your plugin – or even better yet: program it so good that it will make it into BP-core.

@21cdb

definitely the “status update” of my friends is the first thing users are interested in.

see this trac-ticket and also the very nice screenshot:

https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1262

https://trac.buddypress.org/attachment/ticket/1262/friends.png

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

If you combine the Friends Status Update tab for user profiles (which Erich just showed) with a Friends Widget which can be used on the frontpage, you should have a very useful addition to BuddyPress!

@slaffik

Moderator

15 years, 1 month ago

So what we need:

In Friends menu we might have a new submenu “Updates” (right Under My friends and Requests). On this page currently on-line friends will be displayed and some tabs will be available: Status updates, Recent activities (everything else without statuses), All friends (what does this tab mean?).

Did I understand properly?

@xevo

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

All friends speaks for itself, it’ll show you all the friends you have.

@bpisimone

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

Wouldn’t that be something that could be accomplished thorugh filtering the site wide activity? So it actually just shows the people who you’re friends with? That would give us something like a facebook live feed.

@slaffik

Moderator

15 years, 1 month ago

Xevo, didn’t understand your post. What will show you all the friends you have?

Bpisimone, nice idea, thanks!

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

Ok I’ve made a mockup of a site widget that can be placed above the Sitewide activity feed on the homepage..

http://img199.imageshack.us/img199/5948/screenshot20091105at156.png

The idea is that it display the 10 latest online/active friends of the users. With the most recently active first (left) and the last active last (right).. If you have more then 10 users online you could make a ajax carousel which loads 10 new memebers, But I don’t think that’s really needed atm…. It’s just a handy widget to let users instantly know which friends are online atm.. Please let me know what you think!

@21cdb

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

@Bpisimone: Don’t we have that already? Check testbp.org, log into your account and check “Activity” -> “My Friends”

AJAX live updating of site wide activity stream is on the roadmap for BP 1.4 (https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/)

What i think would be really helpful for users is some kind of “Dashboard” component that appears as your landing page when you are logged in. It should include everything that is interesting for you and you normally would check manually, including:

– Last activities of your friends

– Your friends that are actually online

– Latest status updates of your friends

– Newest activities of groups that you are a member of

– Latest replies to your forum posts.

– Your last recieved messages

– A field where you can update YOUR status.

That would give an overview of nearly everything thats going on. A place where everything is aggregated. I’ll bet users would love this page.

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

I think that would be the best option aswell 21CDb.. a My Network page which includes everything you just said and where you’ll go after your log in.. I think it’s an awesome idea and it should be in your user menu at the top above the Activity option.. I could include the widget mockup I made..

@bpisimone

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

@21cdb Yeah you’re right we kind of have that. Now we’re talking about the dashboard again aren’t we…

I thought there was already a basic online users widget?

@erich73

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

guys:

keep it simple !

1)

if you talk about a “Dashboard”, then we are talking about the very ugly and un-handy Dashboard-interface which we do have currently for users writing their Blogs, etc.

I have actually disabled my Dashboard because this interface is just too complicated for a normal user not experienced with WP.

2) Friends:

as said: we do have the tabs “Groups”, “Members”, “Blogs”, “Forums” (some people will have “Events”, etc.).

Just make a simple tab named “Friends” and put all the friends information into this, like:

– “all friends currently online”

– “newest friends online”

– “most active friends online”

– “most popular friends online”

– “friend online since xx minutes”

– “friends status updates”

– etc.

3) Members:

for the information about “Members” which are not friends, we do have the tab named “Members” already. Put all the “Members” information into this page, like:

– “all members currently online”

– “newest members online”

– “most active members online”

– “most popular members online”

– “member online since xx minutes”

– “member status updates”

– etc.

4)

for the “Site Wide Activity” filters, we should have:

– Members

– Friends

– Blogs

– Groups

– Profile

– Status

– Events

5)

TRAC-ticket:

https://trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1321

@bowromir

Participant

15 years, 1 month ago

I was just reading about the Dashboard thing and I read that Andy already made it, but somehow it’s not released.. If someone could make something like that it would be awesome..