Topic: BuddyPress Links 0.2-RC1 now available

BuddyPress Links 0.2-RC1 now available

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

Hello All,

BuddyPress Links version 0.2 (RC1, unstable) is now available for download!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-links/download/

(Don’t forget to re-copy the “links” folder into your theme!!!)

* Added support for auto-embedding of rich media (API documentation coming soon!)

* Reduced create/admin form to one page

* Wider selection of thumb sizes for the links widget

* Many CSS improvements and fixes

* Lots of general refactoring

* Some minor bug fixes

Currently supported rich media services are YouTube, Flickr (Photo & Video), and metacafe.

The rich media embedding is scalable to an infinite number of rich media services by extending the class API. I will be writing some more extensions based on Alexa.com reach statistics when I have the time. I am also going to try to write up some basic documentation for how to write custom services. In the meantime, if you are a PHP OO wizard, you will have no trouble figuring it our by yourself, just look at the class interfaces in bp-links-embed-classes.php. Feel free to contact me if you need help or would like me to check your work.

Please post any bugs or other issues to this thread. I will do my best to monitor it and address anything that comes up.

Enjoy!

Marshall

Viewing 25 replies - 26 through 50 (of 60 total)

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@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@jivany

I agree it is annoying having to manually move the theme files. Have you actually put them in bp-sn-parent/ and it worked? I have never tried that! I have designed it so the folder goes in your “default” or customized default theme.

There are two issues with your proposal for automatic moving.

1. If the links dir goes into bp-sn-parent, what happens when buddypress gets updated?

2. If it goes into your main theme, how will I know that I am not overwriting any customizations you have made?

I think the long term solution is to keep the links theme files in the plugin directory, and auto-detect if any custom files were put in your theme folder, but I am not sure if and how that would work.

If anyone has done this successfully with buddypress, please give me a shout!

@mariusooms

Participant

15 years ago

MrMaz, the bp-groupblog plugin uses an unorthodox technique. It does exactly what you mention. It works from the plugin folder, but if the theme folder gets moved to the ACTIVE theme folder it will prioritize.

It does something like the following for template files:

<?php function groupblog_screen_blog_content() { global $bp, $wp; if ( file_exists( STYLESHEETPATH . '/groupblog/blog.php' ) ) load_template( STYLESHEETPATH . '/groupblog/blog.php' ); else load_template( WP_PLUGIN_DIR . '/bp-groupblog/groupblog/blog.php' ); } ?>

I’m using STYLESHEETPATH since that finds the file for the active theme. I prefer to stuff theme files in the active theme, just in case people may or may not a parent/child theme.

Hope this can help. I hear good things about your plugin, can’t wait to try it.

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@marius

Thanks for taking the time to explain your method. I originally thought of doing something similar, but I was a little worried about breaking the flow of how WP “hunts” for templates. In BP (and buddypress links) there are lots of calls to locate_template(), and I haven’t yet taken the time to learn exactly how this works too see if what you suggest causes any problems.

I also have a bunch of calls to bp_core_load_template() that I want to get rid of.

It is encouraging that you have an established plugin that works using a custom locate technique, so I think I might do the same in the next iteration.

STYLESHEETPATH is a sweet constant, I only wish there was one for get_stylesheet_directory_uri()

@djpaul

Keymaster

15 years ago

You ought to be able to use the ‘bp_located_template’ filter to be able to find templates within the plugin’s folder. Let me know if you get stuck.

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@DJ

Thanks for the tip. I will keep that in mind when I tackle it

@Everyone

I didn’t receive many bug reports for this RC, probably because nobody will notice they can upgrade until the stable tag changes. Nobody has reported any catastrophic failures, so I went ahead and tagged version 0.2

Thank you very much to everyone that took the time to test this out and give feedback!

@ahjira

Participant

15 years ago

Maz you have my vote for awesome plug-in as well. I’m excited about this one and the addition of the social media stuff this round was a great surprise.

If you want help with the presentation layer, I will help you. That’s my forte. I’m developing a theme framework for BP right now and am finding a lot of plug-in developers writing their code with a dependence on the BP theme framework

I’d like to see everybody move toward theme independence where you create tags that theme developers can drop into their page templates. I realize we may need BP to serve up a standardized page template, with all the appropriate hooks and standardized list navigation for plug-ins however, but we have to start somewhere. I just don’t want everyone to get so far down the road where we’re all stuck with using the BP theme framework because all the plug-ins were written with its HTML and its CSS.

Ping me and I’ll help you.

P.S. I use Safari 4 so you’d have that piece covered too.

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@Suzanne

Thanks for the kind words!

Managing themes in BP is a chore, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is just so much HTML required to display it. I tend to agree with you though. Simply extending the existing default theme is the quickest way to get up and running, so you end up with most websites just changing the colors, and not much of the layout. A separate framework for developing themes would be awesome, but you are still at the mercy of the direction of the project.

When 1.2 comes I will have to re-theme this plugin, so I will take all of the help I can get at that point! Any input as to how to re-make the templates so they are more generic would be great.

@bpisimone

Participant

15 years ago

So this won’t be working for 1.2 bleeding then? Haven’t tried it yet, but I was going to very soon.

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@Bpisimone

I am assuming it won’t work because 1.2 has a new theme. I have not even looked at theming for 1.2 yet, because from what I hear, it is still under heavy development. Once it has stabilized I will create a new theme with templates that work with the new 1.2 theme.

@ahjira

Participant

15 years ago

I’m basically one-week new to BuddyPress and but I agree, right now, it’s a bit difficult to be theme agnostic since you have to provide the page templates yourself. We’re going to have to work with Andy and the other devs to find a way to start moving more toward the way WordPress does it:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Hierarchy

This way your plug-in’s action, i.e. create new link, just uses the template framework’s create.php page and you don’t have to provide your own. Same with directories. There should be one directory.php file in a theme and every directory uses it.

Granted this is a huge task But maybe we can spur it via Links since Links is kind of the poster child for BP component plug-ins. I’m available to help hammer that out if any devs catch this thread.

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

Hey there guys!

WPMU 2.8.6 + BP 1.1.2

1) Its breaking the formatting on my site

2) Can I specify a different directory to upload the avatars?

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

also:

im getting this error:

Upload Failed! Error was: Unable to create directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars/3. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

@bowromir

Participant

15 years ago

For your error: you should probably make your folder link-avatars folder writable on your server by CHMODing it to 777. Almost every FTP program should do this without a problem!

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@PH

Can you please provide more details about how its breaking the formatting of your site? Is it possible to provide a link?

There is no way to change the directory where avatars are stored, except maybe with a filter, I would have to look at it. I don’t think its a good idea though. They are stored under the same parent directory as user and group avatars to try and do everything the standard BP way.

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

@MrMaz

on my site.. http://porscheheritage.com the links are displayed not in a list..

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

Follow up question

@MrMaz

Am I suppose to create a directory inside WP-CONTENT/BLOGS.DIR/1/FILES/

and is that directory suppose to be called /LINK-AVATARS/

****

Im getting an error when uploading an avatar.

Upload Failed! Error was: Unable to create directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars/3. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

Crap.. now all file permissions are BORKED!

I cant upload any file:

1) Via Media Library (Add New) *stopped working

2) Via the Avatar upload image of Buddpress Link area * Doesnt work

3) Via creating a new post.

/BLOGS.DIR/ is owned by APACHE in the APACHE group with these permissions rwx r-x r-x

@modemlooper

Moderator

15 years ago

This plug in completely breaks in new theme not just the layout, it doesn’t show videos at all just the link.

Works fine in older theme.

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@PH

Can you post a screenshot of the site? It looks fine in FF. There have been some reports of Safari bugs, but nobody has been kind enough to submit a fix/patch yet.

File server permissions are kind of beyond the scope of support for this particular plugin. The files are set up to be created in the standard WPMU directory, the same as the core BP components. In your case the directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars needs to be writable by the web server. You would probably have better luck opening up a support ticket with your hosting company.

@Modem

Thanks for taking the time to test and post feedback.

I have not worked on BP 1.2 support yet. They are saying that it will probably be late January before 1.2 is officially released, so I don’t want to try to support it yet when a lot could change between now and then.

I am getting a lot of requests to support 1.2 “now” but all I can say is that 1.2 is bleeding edge right now, and I don’t plan to ever support bleeding edge versions of BP. Once it is closer to release I will start working on support.

@modemlooper

Moderator

15 years ago

I hear ya I was testing to see if it would only be theming issues but I think there are others. I’m finding that most of the bp plugins will have to be completely re-written to accommodate the current trunk.

A suggestion for this plug in is to make it similar to the way you add content to the activity streams on facebook.

The new default bp theme is very micro-blog / facebook feed and could use some media post capabilities.

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

@MrMaz

Heres a screenshot..

http://porscheheritage.com/members/admin/album/picture/4

it looks like a problem with Chrome

http://porscheheritage.com/links

also looks bizzare on Chrome — im gonna geuss that its gonna look weird on Chrome and Safari or anything WebKit related..

@mrmaz

Participant

15 years ago

@PH

I made a poor assumption when this was initially reported that this was a CSS issue when in fact it was a mismatched tag. Here is how to fix it…

In bp-links-templatetags.php on line 2245 replace ‘</span>’ with ‘</div>’

Here is the file/line in trac for reference.

https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/buddypress-links/tags/0.2/bp-links-templatetags.php#L2245

I think that should put this one to bed, which is where I should be, hehe.

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

That fixed it dude!

<high five>

MrMaz

@porscheheritage

Participant

15 years ago

@MrMaz

It would be a NICE feature if theres a general “Landing Page” to add links and it automatically detects if they are logged on and it ask them to log on if they are not.

also.. a BookMarklet that people can use.

@jeffreeeeey

Participant

14 years, 11 months ago

Fantastic plugin which I came across in error

However I see a problem:

1) I’ve posted my first link and set it to private, so only I can see it… But after posting the link, there’s no way of deleting it via the admin panel as it doesnt appear.

Yes you can delete it from the front end, but thought Id report this anyway in case you wasn’t aware.

I’m using BP 1.1.3 and WP 2.8.6

Other than the above- Fantastic plugin. Probably the best 3rd party one ive come across yet

**EDIT** I see the problem now- If you made the link public, it will then display in the admin panel. However don’t you think admins should be able to see ALL links, private or not?