Announcing a new plugin for BuddyPress : Community Blogs

Description

This is a BuddyPress plugin that allows a Blog or Site Admin to turn a normal blog into a Community Blog or a Group Blog. By activating the Community Blogs plugin, Administrators can give immediate registered user status to any member of their BuddyPress enabled site on the blogs they choose. All the member has to do is visit the blog and they are greeted by a new menu item on the buddybar inviting them to ‘Join! this Blog’. When the user hovers over ‘Join! this Blog’, they are informed that ‘This is a Community (or group) Blog. Click to join as: Author (or contributor).

When the BP member clicks the menu they are immediately added as a registered user of that blog. Administrators can choose the role the new user has. Either Contributor or Author. Admins can give access to all users or users from specific BuddyPress groups.

Configuration Options

This plugin lives in the /wp-content/plugins folder and can be enabled on a blog by blog basis. Site Admins can control the activation of the Community Blogs plugin through normal plugin management methods such as disabling the plugins menu or using any plugin admin utility such as Plugin Commander. Community Blogs settings are configured in the Settings > Join! this Blog admin form which is available to blog admins.

* Enable this plugin: which turns off new user registrations but leaves the plugin activated

* Default User Role: for new users clicking to register as Author or Contributor

* Allow All Registered Users: when set to Yes then any member of the BP community can become a registered user at the default role on that blog. When set to No the Community Blogs plugin becomes a Group Blogs plugin.

* Groups To Allow Access: is a list of the BuddyPress Groups that can become registered users. More that one group can be given access if you like. The group slugs are used to specify what groups have immediate registration access to the blog. This allows blog admins to configure the plugin without the Site Admin having to give them group ids. If the blog admin can find the group slug they can configure access.

BuddyPress doesn’t have Group Blogs as of yet. Something like this might be a good start. We just need to tie the Group Blogs into the member theme. I was thinking that a flexible way to enable BuddyPress to implement a Group Blog component, would be to allow BP Group Admins the ability to specify the url or blog id of their chosen Group Blog. We could then create a Group Blog posts template that functioned similar to the Group Forums area. The Admin of the designated Group Blog just creates and configures the blog. Drops in the Community Blog plugin and away they go.

Group Admins could even specify multiple Group Blogs that aggregate and allow access through the member theme.

Until we have a member theme that is ready for Group Blogs, all the members of a Group can still have the blog component with this Community Blogs plugin.

I’ve been playing with this and think it works well enough to use it on my site. I could use some help with further testing though. Can I get some volunteers to give it a workout on one of their test servers?

I’ve tested this on Windows Vista and Linux running the latest BP trunk and Mu 2.7 trunk. It needs testing on Mu 2.6.x. I don’t think I’ve got any Mu 2.7 specific code in there but ya never know.

This is a call for some hearty, adventurous alpha testing souls.

Screen shots and download here :

http://burt.ourcommoninterest.org/2009/01/02/community-and-group-blogs-in-a-can/

[@dimensionmedia Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Burt,

This is awesome. It has inspired me to complete my Auto Suggest plugin and i’m having a few test it. Regardless, I can easily see this as a useful plugin for many.

[@nicolagreco Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Really good work, send it tu buddypressdev.org/add-plugin !

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

Howdy people. Download is available for the community blogs plugin now.

http://burt.ourcommoninterest.org/2009/01/02/community-and-group-blogs-in-a-can/

I also setup a group with a support forum on my site for this:

http://ourcommoninterest.org/groups/commoninterest-code/home

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

@nicolagreco I haven’t forgotten about you nicola On my way…

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 11 months ago]

What a wildly useful and wonderful thing is buddypress.

It’s just occurred to me that I could setup a support forum on my site for the Community Blogs plugin. Then it occurred to me that I could setup a bp group for that purpose and have all the benefits that buddypress and groups provide. (duh) (been buried with my head in code way too long)

Then it occurred to me that I need a blog for this too. I can move all my personal blog junk, which is just code I’ve created and modified, over to this new Group Blog.

Now I need to hook the new group blog up to my new support group. I can’t do that right now but I will be able to. Be back in a few days…

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Suggestion for this…

While that logged in user does have the ability to create a blog post, an administrator does not have the ability to create a blog post on their behalf because their name is not added to the authors list.

It would seem to me that this plugin hooks into the logged in users specific ability, versus the post forms allowances and permissions?

How difficult would it be to add this ability?

[@johnjamesjacoby Keymaster 15 years, 10 months ago]

Burt, not sure if you saw this or not, and while I don’t usually like to bump topics I’m anxious to see if this is possible.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Hi John. I’m not sure what you are asking here. The community blogs plugin just insures that a user who meets certain criteria has a role specified by the blog admin in that blog. It either creates a user in the blog or bumps a user’s existing role if needed.

You are asking if it can be enhanced to allow an admin to create posts as another user? No, never had that in mind at all. It just creates a blog user or bumps the user’s role higher.

[@lsm_267 Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

hello burt,

i posted a comment on your site but in the meantime i’ve found that slug is just the name of the group, isn’it ?

i installed the community blog plugin in the blog i want to become the community blog, enabled it, indicate the slug (name without nothing and no/) of the group but the plugin isn’t doing what i expect.

i would like that any new registered in a group becomes automaticly author of the group blog.

did i miss something ?

thanks for your help

edit after few minuts

OK i installed the plugin on an other test version of buddypress without localization (fr) and it works : the invited users becomes automaticly author rights on the community blog and apperas in the registered users of this comm. blog.

could it be the localization, any idea of what could be wrong with it ?

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Hello, the ‘slug’ can be found by going to the groups directory and looking at the url for the group. An example “My Group” would have an url for the group home page of: http://example.com/groups/my-group

The part at the end of the url that is unique for each group ‘my-group’ is the slug.

I didn’t see any mention of a problem. Did you have a problem?

[@lsm_267 Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

thanks for the quick answer.

my problem is that i can’t get the plugin running on one of my installation. when a user join a group, he does not become automatickly an user of the community blog.

[@lsm_267 Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

I update mu old version of BP to the RC.

It works now perfectly

sorry for having polluted the thread

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

ism_267, yes that might make it work. bp changed the global var $bp from an array to an object and all plugins broke. If you’re running a plugin that is written for RC-1 and you are running anything less than that. Things don’t work.

[@modemlooper Moderator 15 years, 9 months ago]

love this plugin but would like it to put a link in group side bar that says blog and keep everything in the group. like the my recent posts link.

[@burtadsit Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

modemlooper, currently that’s beyond the scope of what community blogs does. What you are talking about is a custom ‘blog’ component. Integrating a group blog into bp. Community blogs is a step in that direction.

[@weblogian Participant 15 years, 9 months ago]

Role manager come handy for this plugin for me to control submission

[@larsg Participant 15 years, 8 months ago]

Hi, I’d like to know if the idea modemlooper raise to have “blog” as one option in the group side bar has materialized? The community blog plugin is great, and it would be nice to see that fully integrated with the group concept in Buddypress.

[@mariusooms Participant 15 years, 8 months ago]

Yeah, Agree with Larsg and Modemlooper. Just wanted to share that it would be a very welcome addition and would solidify the term “community-blogs” especially in regards to groups.

You mention a custom ‘blog’ component would be needed, how many steps would it take for this plugin to get to that component?