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Converting Single WP site to BP and left with a few questions

  • @symm2112

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    I’ve been working on converting my wife’s fan site for a band from a single wordpress magazine style theme over to buddypress to try to give more community interaction. I’ve been following and reading buddypress news for the last 6 months at least and we still haven’t launched because it seems like every time we get moving, some great features get added that make us need to wait for that. But i digress…

    I have a few features that I’m trying to accomplish for the site and i want to find out if i’m the only one that has looked for these, or if i’m just not finding how to do them anywhere.

    1. We imported our userlist from the old site over to the new wpmu/bp installation so that their users are already there and they can login immediately. in the event that some of them used their real names or email addresses as their usernames and don’t really want that listed in the member directory, is there any way to allow users to “hide” and not be listed in the member directory? We imported almost 1300 users and it would be nice to let the majority of them use their existing credentials but for the few that never wanted their username to be publicly listed, I’d hate to cause problems. I’ve loaded Jeff’s privacy plugin but that still doesn’t allow hiding from the member directory.

    2. we’ve modified the cosmic buddy theme, which is a widgetized theme, for use for the member blogs following the tutorial by pulling out the home.php with the rest. This seems to work well but I wanted to know if anyone knows of a way to “force” a particular widget to show up automatically on all created blogs? We’re using the group blog plugin but since we’re not using the bp default theme, we can’t use the theme it came with. The blog template seems to work well except that their is a sidebar in the theme and if someone creates a new group blog, until we find out that the blog is there, it’s going to show that it needs widgets added. We’d also like to “force” some widgets like recent comments and some ad blocks in there. Is there a way to do this or is it better to just hack the member theme some more and pull out the sidebar and hard code what we need in there?

    3. by these questions, it should be obvious that we’re pretty new to php and learning things. We’ve found that there are some bp themes that have great member profile pages that include things like their albums, their wire, and other info on that page. The cosmic buddy theme really only lists the wire on the page with the rest relying on navigating through the menu. Does anyone know of any tutorials to customize the profile page to pull in things from the other pages/plugins? For instance, we have the bb-picture album plugin from Manoj Kumar. If we want the gallery to show on the profile page, would that be hacking the profile page and just pulling in the code we need from the other pages?

    4. If I’m trying to make this a really user friendly site, does anyone know of any other front ends for wp other than posthaste? I really love the p2 theme that was mentioned in the other thread but we really need more of a magazine style theme so that won’t quite work and we are really trying to keep the theme consistent across all blogs rather than using something like p2 theme for the member blogs while using another for the home blog. I’ve already loaded posthaste and got it working but I haven’t found anything that includes the ability to insert images like the new front end on the p2 theme. would it be easier (and/or legal/ethical) to pull out the front end from someone else’s theme and import that into the current theme or would it be easier to find someone to assist with adding the insert image feature to the posthaste plugin on my site?

    5.Also, I know that this isn’t the right place to ask for questions on someone else’s theme, but is anyone using that theme that would know how to pull out the nav bar on my sub blogs? By converting the buddypress theme to a blog theme, it still leaves the nav bar alone so if my site is at blog.com and i have a group blog at sub.blog.com, the nav bar still shows the home, blog, members, forums, etc but all of those are all wrong because they point to sub.blog.com/members, etc. Is it possible/easy to create a global nav bar so that on all the sub blogs, the members/groups links all point back to the main blog or is it easier to just pull it out?

    Thanks for any and all answers you can give me on these features.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)

  • @djpaul

    Keymaster

    14 years, 12 months ago

    1) Not aware of any existing code that does this. However, your users would only have to go into their profile and change the ‘name’ field (this is what BuddyPress uses).

    2) I think the addon you want is called “Plugin Commander.”

    3) All of the core BuddyPress features are detailed on https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/ which you can use to integrate bits of functionality wherever you want. As far as third-party plugins goes, it is dependant on how the plugin author wrote their plugin.

    4) Have you looked at new BP theme on http://testbp.org/? That and BP 1.2 should be released mid/late January.

    5) Haven’t got time to discuss how to fix but look at trac.buddypress.org/ticket/1501

    @mercime

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    1. If I remember right, Jeff’s BP Privacy Options Plugin will allow the user to make profiles private. Just need to wait for the plugin upgrade for BP 1.2

    2/3/5A. cosmic buddy theme – I would suggest asking Brajesh, the theme author about how to do that

    5B. Yes you can create a Sitewide/global navigation bar in your blog’s themes, by using WPMU’s native switch_to_blog and restore_current_blog functions. Therefore, if you want the navbar of main site (blog_id_1) to be shown in you sub-blogs, you add the code below to your blog’s theme’s header.php

    <ul id="nav"
    
<?php switch_to_blog('1') ?>
    
//copy the code from header.php of either bp-default/bp-sn-parent theme
    
//or the code used in main site plus any customized links you added in main site
    
<?php do_action( 'bp_nav_items' ); ?>
    
<?php restore_current_blog(); ?>
    
</ul>

    You’ll get the correct URL’s which point to main site’s respective BP components.

    @djpaul

    Keymaster

    14 years, 12 months ago

    Switch to blog is considered to be a slow function to run and I wouldn’t recommend putting it in a theme header!

    @mercime

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    switch_to_blog — when abused to get numerous queries from other blog/s, or get all widgets of the main site’s sidebar, or get sets of posts, etc — is going to be a “slow function” to run. But when used for main navigation which has what, 5 to 8 links, switch_to_blog runs in a split second wherever it is placed – I just prefer to place my main nav in header.php.

    If one is wary of switch_to_blog “overhead” for navigation, then easiest method is to look at source code of main site’s navigation and copy the navigation links there and paste to sub-blogs theme’s header.php or wherever they want to place it. Caveat to this method is, you’ll miss the automatic generation of new links when new plugins/components hook to bp_nav_items. This won’t happen when you use switch_to_blog and add restore_current_blog after the bp_nav_items block.

    @symm2112

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    The trac suggestion made a lot of sense but this is what the code is in my header.php. I thought about my situation and the reason I can’t use the global nav option is because with this configuration, the home function seems to work as does the blog slug, but the members, groups, etc all point to sub.domain.com/members, which is obviously wrong since it should be pointing to domain.com/members. I would like to keep the home and blog slugs pointing to where they are, but fix the members and rest of the links to point to my root domain slugs.

    <li<?php if ( bp_is_page( ‘home’ ) ) : ?> class=”selected”<?php endif; ?>>” title=”<?php _e( ‘Home’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>”><?php _e( ‘Home’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>

    <li<?php if ( bp_is_page( BP_HOME_BLOG_SLUG ) ) : ?> class=”selected”<?php endif; ?>>/<?php echo BP_HOME_BLOG_SLUG ?>” title=”<?php _e( ‘Blog’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>”><?php _e( ‘Blog’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>

    <li<?php if ( bp_is_page( BP_MEMBERS_SLUG ) ) : ?> class=”selected”<?php endif; ?>>/<?php echo BP_MEMBERS_SLUG ?>” title=”<?php _e( ‘Members’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>”><?php _e( ‘Members’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>

    <?php if ( function_exists( ‘groups_install’ ) ) : ?>

    <li<?php if ( bp_is_page( BP_GROUPS_SLUG ) ) : ?> class=”selected”<?php endif; ?>>/<?php echo BP_GROUPS_SLUG ?>” title=”<?php _e( ‘Groups’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>”><?php _e( ‘Groups’, ‘buddypress’ ) ?>

    <?php endif; ?>

    I guess these functions are being declared elsewhere but I’m not finding them, even in the functions.php. Any thoughts?

    Also, for plugin commander, it’s not so much the plugins that I’m worried about as much as I am wanting to set a standard widget configuration for all sub blogs that get created rather than have them blank on blog creation.

    also, on a side not, does anyone know what the wp_content_dir would be on a sub blog? I created a sub blog with a wordpress theme that created thumbnails automatically. The instructions say to upload some folders that it creates them in to wp-content/uploads but obviously there is no wp-content on a sub blog since the files are set to blogs.dir/6. If I put them in that folder, should that read it properly? Is there another variable that I should use to point that to blogs.dir/6/files?

    I looked at the bptest.org but I didn’t see anything like the front end I was looking for. Posthaste seems good I just wondered if it was easy/possible to actually put the post box on the site.

    Thanks again for all the help.

    @andrea_r

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    “I would like to keep the home and blog slugs pointing to where they are, but fix the members and rest of the links to point to my root domain slugs.”

    Then hardcode the full URL in the header above. No functions, just a web address. Easy. Works.

    @symm2112

    Participant

    14 years, 12 months ago

    I’m almost embarassed that I didn’t realize that. I’ve been so focused on trying to learn or at least understand php that I overlooked and was looking for functions and variables.

    Thanks.

Viewing 7 replies - 1 through 7 (of 7 total)
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