Group Forum Subscription v1.3

I’ve just put version 1.3 of Group Forum Subscription into the WordPress plugin repository. Lots of cool stuff has been fixed, added, or improved:

  • Localization complete. Shipped with four translations: French, German, Russian, Spanish
  • Dashboard menu moved under BuddyPress section
  • Forum Subscription notification block added to BP’s forum index.php pages
  • Forum subscription notification block removed for non-logged-in users
  • Fixed bug that subscribed non-confirmed users to forums created in standalone bbPress
  • Admins can choose whether posters receive notifications of their own posts (off by default; not togglable in standalone bbPress)

I got a TON of help from some readers of this blog, who were diligent about bug reports and extremely generous with their translations. Thanks so much for your help!

Displaying the BuddyPress admin bar in other applications

By popular demand, here’s the method we used at the CUNY Academic Commons to get the BuddyPress admin bar to appear on the non-WP/BP portions of our site. In our case, that means MediaWiki and bbPress, but theoretically this method could work for any kind of software out there.

I should note that I did not devise this method. It was invented by the inimitable Zach and Lucas of Cast Iron Coding.

The concept is as follows. A bit of jQuery looks for a div of a certain ID on a page and, when it finds it, opens a dummy WP page that contains essentially nothing but the BP admin bar loader, which then appears on your page. Download the zip file containing the necessary files (admin-bar-integration) and follow these steps to make it happen.

  1. Upload the file page-component.php to your WP theme directory.
  2. Create a new page in WordPress. The page should be blank. In the Attributes box, select the Template called “Component (do not use)”. Name the page bpnavslug and publish it, making sure that you take note of the permalink. You’ll need that URL (relative to your site’s webroot) in step 4.
  3. If any part of your site creates a menu or a list of your WordPress pages, you’ll want to exclude this empty page from those listings. Find the function call wp_list_pages in your theme (often in header.php or index.php) and add an exclude argument. For example, if the page number of bpnavslug is 4, make sure all references to wp_list_pages read wp_list_pages('exclude=4').
  4. Open the file bp-bar-integration.js. On line 3, you’ll see the path /bpnavslug/. Replace it with the path to the bpnavslug post you created in step 2.
  5. Upload bp-bar-integration.js to your server. For the sake of argument, I’ll put mine at /wp-content/js/bp-bar-integration.js.
  6. Now let’s turn to the application where you want the admin bar to appear. Open the theme file that contains the </body> tag. In bbPress, for example, this is usually footer.php.
  7. Immediately before the body close tag, paste the following code:
    <div id="bpContainer">
    </div>
  8. Next, open the template file that contains the document head (header.php in bbPress, for instance). Make sure that jQuery is also called somewhere in the head. If it’s not, the following code will call up jQuery on a standard installation of WP:
    <script type='text/javascript' src='/wp-includes/js/jquery/jquery.js?ver=1.3.2'></script>
    Now paste the following line somewhere in the head (make sure it comes after the call to jQuery):
    <script type="text/javascript" src="/wp-content/js/bp-bar-integration.js"></script>
    Be sure to replace the src attribute with path from your upload in step 5.
    Finally, you’ll have to include the CSS for the admin bar. On a default installation of BuddyPress 1.0.3 or less, the following code will work:
    <link rel='stylesheet' id='bp-admin-bar-css' href='/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-core/css/admin-bar.css' type='text/css' media='screen' />
    On a more recent version of BP (1.1+), the admin bar stylesheet has been rolled in with the rest of the styles. Either create your own stylesheet containing just the admin bar code, or import the entire stylesheet:
    <link rel='stylesheet' id='bp-admin-bar-css' href='/wp-content/themes/bp-default/style.css' type='text/css' media='screen' />

A note: This method appears to be incompatible with the Google Analytics WP plugin (which appends Google’s JS to the footer of every WP page, and thus into bpnavslug, and ends up gumming up the works). You could probably get around this with some creative if-statements in the GA plugin itself.

Good luck. Because of the diversity of people’s setups, I can’t guarantee that this method will work for everyone, nor can I provide support to everyone who tries it. But I do encourage you to post whether you’ve been successful in the comments, and to help each other figure things out.

Translate Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress

With a lot of help from users, Group Forum Subscription is becoming pretty stable (and widely used!). I’ll be releasing the next version 1.3 within the next few days, and one of the new features is localization. If you’re using the plugin for a site in a language other than English, I encourage you to have a go at creating a translation and, if you’d like, providing it to me for release with future versions.

Never translated a WordPress plugin before? Neither had I, until the other day when I put my rusty French to work on this plugin. The process is quite easy. There are two ways to do it:

  1. If you think you’ll find yourself translating often, I encourage you to follow the instructions at http://urbangiraffe.com/articles/translating-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/. The program PoEdit that the author recommends is (once you get it installed) very, very easy to use, and it remembers your translations of commons words and phrases for future use. If you take this route, please send both the .po and the .mo files to me or to cunycommons@gmail.com, and don’t forget to include your name in the email, blog comment, or .po metadata, so that you receive credit for your work. Make sure you use the trunk version of the plugin, available at http://svn.wp-plugins.org/group-forum-subscription-for-buddypress/trunk/, as the stable version does not contain the localization code.
  2. If you’d rather not install a program, you can download my French translation group-forum-subscription-fr_FR and edit it in a plain-text editor (like Notepad or TextEdit – not Word!). The lines beginning “msgid” are the original English. The lines beginning “msgstr” are the translations. Replace the French translations with translations in your language and post/send the file to me.

Thanks for your help!

Group Forum Subscription v1.1

If you’re using Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress, you might like to know that I’ve just pushed out v1.1. There’s nothing new in terms of functionality, but a lot of small bugs have been fixed, as well as a fairly large bug that was affecting automatic subscription on the joining/leaving of BP groups. Download the latest version through your WP Plugins panel, or download it from wordpress.org.

Thanks to r-a-y, MarkS, WestPointer, and other users for helping me to spot and squash those bugs!

New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription

BuddyPress and bbPress connect nicely, giving BuddyPress groups a handsome forum interface, but the software has no native ability to allow users to receive email when their favorite discussions are updated. Without this functionality, it can be hard for users to keep up-to-date with forums, and subsequently the forums are less active than they otherwise could be.

Subscription panel on group home page
A panel on each group home page lets users know whether they'll automatically receive email notifications of new discussion activity in the group

Group Forum Subscription is a set of plugins I’ve written (mostly on the BuddyPress side, with a small bbPress trigger plugin) that adds the missing forum notification functionality. GFS allows members of BuddyPress communities to subscribe to email notifications of new discussion activity. Subscriptions can be managed on a topic-by-topic or group-by-group basis.

Users can subscribe or unsubscribe from entire groups on the Notification Settings page
Users can subscribe or unsubscribe from entire groups on the Notification Settings page

The plugin also has some administrative settings. Notable among these is the ability to set up email notifications for the first time after the plugin is installed, so that users are automatically subscribed to topics in their groups without having to set it up manually. This is a setup process that we’ll be running in the upcoming days here on the CUNY Academic Commons.

Group Forum Subscription will currently work only on 1.0.x versions of BuddyPress – the brand-new BP 1.1 is not yet supported. I’ll be working on the upgrade very soon. Read more about the guts of the plugin or download it for yourself.