As a secondary to this – the live notification plugin no longer works with any theme as of BP 2.1.1.
I have contacted the developer, waiting for a response.
Hi @style960
Email notifications are fired off instantly (unless queued by your mail server). Web notifications (as you’ve noticed) need a page refresh by default. Ajax would need to be put into place in order for them to become ‘live’. You can request this feature over at Trac but there’s no guarantee the functionality will make it into core.
Hope that helps!
Hi @henrywright
Thanks for the quick reply. I’ll put a request in on Trac shortly. At present, I’m probably going to be forced into using my second choice as a theme just to have these feature. From a regular users point of view, I find it unlikely they’ll even bother to acknowledge new email notifications, whereas live web notifications are standard, even expected in other widely used applications, both personal and workplace.
Thanks for your help.
From a regular users point of view, I find it unlikely they’ll even bother to acknowledge new email notifications,
Agreed but I think it depends somewhat on the community. I can see email alerts being highly useful in some communities and not so useful elsewhere.
BuddyPress is first and foremost a platform. It puts foundations in place for people to build on (hence why we have plugins and themes). The Live Notifications plugin is a good example. It makes use of the bp_notifications database table put in place by BuddyPress. If a webmaster wants to have ‘live’ notification functionality, then they can use that particular plugin. Keep in mind some webmasters may have no need for live notifications and may not want them on their site. Each (WordPress) AJAX request makes a call to admin-ajax.php – which results in a very slight delay in page load speed due to the extra processing required. This delay might not be very noticeable on sites with low activity or extremely powerful servers, but could be very noticeable on a site using a clunky hosting infrastructure or on a site with tons of activity. Imagine packing feature after feature into core by default – it would bloat the plugin unnecessarily.
@henrywright
I think the usefulness or desirability of email notifications depends more on the environment than the community. If you took the view that there’s a good chance the majority of users will use a tablet or mobile device, the friendliness of email notifications decreases greatly, while the opposite would be true of live notifications.
The problem I have is the Live Notifications plugin doesn’t work with BP 2.1.1, and the problem isn’t theme related. If the plugin was regularly updated to become compatible, I’d be happy with that 🙂
Do you know what exactly isn’t working with the plugin? Great that you’ve contacted the developer – it’s worth providing as much info as you can – the less investigative work they need to do to diagnose the problem the better, and the more chance there will be of them fixing it 🙂
@henrywright
The plugin is meant to trigger the notifications bubble in the toolbar – since 2.1.1 this just doesn’t happen. I’m not sure how to diagnose it to be honest. I’ve switched themes, and tested on a vanilla install with just that and BP installed, no joy. I will go backwards with BP versions tonight, pretty sure 2.1 was good.
Yeah, if you can identify the last version of BP and WP the plugin worked with, that will be a great start.
2.1 and 4.0 are fine, just tested. I’ll pass that on when I get a response.
I can pass that information on, but I’m no developer myself 🙂
