[Boone Gorges]

I know that email notifications for forums is coming up in a future version of BP, but it’s important enough to my BP community that I wrote a plugin to make it work now. Here it is: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/group-forum-subscription-for-buddypress/ (more info here http://teleogistic.net/2009/09/new-buddypress-bbpress-plugin-group-forum-subscription/).

Probably won’t work with 1.1 (we won’t be upgrading for a little while and we needed this functionality now, which is why I developed in 1.0.x) but I’ll be fixing that soon. Hope it’s useful to someone out there.

[Boone Gorges]

Wow, I’m fast. New version of Group Forum Subscription that works with BP 1.1: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/group-forum-subscription-for-buddypress/installation/

[r-a-y]

Boone… great work as always!

Still on < 1.1 myself, and was thinking we needed something like this for group forums in the interim.

Just a few suggestions:

– maybe add the admin options page under the “BuddyPress” admin menu?

– is there an action that will show the “Forum subscription” block on the group forum index page instead of the group homepage?

[abcde666]

is this feature going to be included into the Core-Code of BP 1.2

?

[Boone Gorges]

@r-a-y – Two great ideas. Next time I push out an update I will implement both. Maybe an admin option with checkboxes for where you want the subscribed/not-subscribed messages to appear (on the group home page or on the group forum index page or both). I might get to this next week – earlier if I find bugs and need to update anyway

@Erich73 https://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/ says it’s coming in v1.3 core. That might not be for a while, though.

[abcde666]

probably earlier if you provide your coding to Andy ?

[r-a-y]

Hey Boone,

Just trying out the bbPress companion trigger plugin and I’m encountering this problem when creating new topics:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user ‘www-data’@’localhost’ (using password: NO) in /var/www/example.com/forums/my-plugins/bb-group-forum-subscription.php on line 22

Warning: mysql_select_db(): supplied argument is not a valid MySQL-Link resource in /var/www/example.com/forums/my-plugins/bb-group-forum-subscription.php on line 24

Replying to already created topics works fine.

There’s also a noticeable delay when posting with the bbPress plugin; I’m guessing it’s the database queries that the plugin is doing.

[Boone Gorges]

Hi Ray,

Here’s what I think is going on. When you create a new topic, bbPress has to go to the BP tables to find out who’s in the topic’s group and then subscribe them to the new topic. It looks like I wrote the code with the assumption that your BP db is accessible by the same mysql user as your bbPress db. I guess that’s probably not the case in some situations. That could be the problem.

On the other hand, the fact that your error says “using password: NO” suggests that no password is being sent at all, i.e. that $bb->user_bbdb_password is coming up blank. I’m not sure what that’s about.

In either case, a quick workaround is to hardcode your bp mysql db username/pw into the plugin. In

$con = mysql_connect(“localhost”,$bb->user_bbdb_user,$bb->user_bbdb_password);

replace $bb->user_bbdb_user with the user and …password with the pw.

Hope that works.

[r-a-y]

I’m going to try and use the BBDB_USER and BBDB_PASSWORD constant variables from bb-config.php into the $con variable to see if this will fix the problem.

Will report back.

[Mike Pratt]

Perhaps we should join forces, Boone but my partner in crime Brent Layman (westpointer) and I have a working plugin that does the same thing (albeit w/o the elegant options you have)

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypressbbpress-email-notification/

Are you aware and maybe we can share code.

[r-a-y]

Boone:

These lines will fix the problem I was having in the bbPress trigger plugin:

$con = mysql_connect("localhost",constant("BBDB_USER"),constant("BBDB_PASSWORD"));

mysql_select_db(constant("BBDB_NAME"), $con) or die(mysql_error());

This will work for all bbPress installs; no more assumptions

To be safe, you could probably switch out “localhost” for constant(“BBDB_HOST”).

[Boone Gorges]

Hi Ray,

I’m glad you got it figured out. The reason I didn’t do this in the first place, though, is that BBDB_USER and those other global variables refer (if I’m not mistaken) to the bbPress db credentials, not the BP credentials that are necessary. If you’ve got the two installed in the same database, it’s not an issue and the globals will work. But I’m running bbPress and BP in separate DBs. $bb->user_bbdb_user and the like store the WP db info that the admin enters in the bbPress admin > WP integration settings.

So I guess all this is to say that I’m glad you got your situation figured out (I think I already said that ) but the very same solution might not work for all installations.

@Mike – Yes, I noticed the other day that Brent had posted the plugin, and I thought it was hilarious that we had come out with the plugins at almost the exact same time. Please feel free to pick apart my code, as I’m planning to do with your code in the near future, so that we can communicate about the best way to merge, or at least not unnecessarily duplicate work. I’ve got some ideas for making the plugin better in the future (daily digests in place of individual emails would be a big improvement but is probably pretty difficult) and we should definitely help each other!

[r-a-y]

Funny I was talking about assumptions and I assumed that your bbPress install was sharing the same DB

[Mike Pratt]

@Boone – Cool. Brent and I have decided to go with your version for our interim rollout tonight. Yours just implements users options much better. However, we are going to redo the user sent email on notification as we don’t think it steers novice users well to action 9from experience) Not a big deal and I hope you aren’t offended. It involves a few extra variables and copy tweaks. I’ll post you when it’s done.

Mike

[Boone Gorges]

Excellent, Mike. Not only am I not offended, but I would love to see the improvements that you make to the email notification itself. It was (funnily enough!) one of the last things I did when I put together the plugin, so I didn’t feel like putting a lot of time into it. If you come up with something more flexible and/or better for a wider audience, I would love to have it, and with your permission patch the plugin.

Boone

[Mike Pratt]

@Boone – We’ll have it ready NLY this weekend and send the patch your way. It’s nothing ground breaking but does focus on making the email look as simple, easy to consume as possible and with clear actions (for ex. changing “To view this message” (recipient already is!) to “To reply to this message” kind of thing. Prior to doing that, i can’t tell you how many users tried replying by actually replying to the email . We’ll also be adding the Topic as a ref (missing) to put the message into better context.

[r-a-y]

I already have the topic implemented in the title of the email on my custom version of Boone’s plugin, as well as changing the email address to “noreply”.

Looking forward to your changes, Mike!

[4972826]

Great work on the plugin guys. Just one question (which may or may not be directly from this plugin) but is there any way to change what email address the notifications come from?

At the moment, notifications to my users come from the email linked in to my hostmonster account and servername. Slightly weird!

http://freelancerunplugged.com.

[jordashtalon]

Thanks for your work on this, exactly what i’m looking for.

[Dwenaus]

there is a new version of this plugin that a bunch of us are working on that might supersede the one listed above:

https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-group-email-subscription/