I’ve just released the second public beta of Commons In A Box, version 1.0-beta2. Read more about this release.
Category: Plugins and Extensions
Commons In A Box – 1.0 beta 1
After nearly a year of development, the CUNY Academic Commons development team is proud to offer a first public beta of Commons In A Box.
Commons In A Box, funded by a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, is a WordPress plugin that helps you to set up a powerful community site in no time flat. We’ve taken BuddyPress and packaged it with a number of the plugins that enhance the BuddyPress experience; bundled it with a brand-new theme based on the Infinity theme engine; and provided an installation experience that downloads, activates and configures these various pieces in just a few clicks. No more scouring Google and the wordpress.org plugin repository for BuddyPress plugins. No more wondering whether an upgrade to BuddyPress or one of your other plugins will break your site. Commons In A Box takes care of these aspects for you, so that you can spend your energy where it really counts: in fostering your community.
As you might gather from the name of the project, the impetus for Commons In A Box was the CUNY Academic Commons itself. Since launching in 2009, the Commons team has fielded countless inquiries about how we managed to pull together the site: what plugins are we using, what’s our theme called, where can I download the package. All sorts of organizations – and especially academic, educational, and non-profit institutions – have been realizing that a focused community space can enhance engagement both online and off, and the Commons has often served as a successful model. So, as we set out to put the Commons infrastructure into an easy-to-install-and-maintain package, we looked carefully at the technical aspects of the Commons that help to make the site a success. Commons In A Box represents what we think is an elegant set of tools that can help even those with modest technical skills go from zero to a functional site with as little hassle as possible, while also maintaining the flexibility and power of the free software platforms at the core of the package.
Our first task was to select a list of plugins that would replicate some of the best functionality of the CUNY Academic Commons. At the core of the package is BuddyPress, which provides extended profiles, groups, and the other social features that form the foundation of the Commons community. We also included a number of tools that have been custom-developed by the Commons development team over the last few years, ranging from collaborative document editing tools to widgets for featuring outstanding community content to the ability to respond to site content without leaving your email inbox. The package is rounded out with a number of third-party plugins that have proved crucial to the success of the Commons as a community platform, such as discussion boards and blogs linked to BuddyPress groups
Knowing which plugins to install is one barrier to entry that Commons In A Box aims to lower. The next is knowing which plugins are compatible with each other, and keeping them up to date. That’s why Commons In A Box features an installation and upgrade manager. For all plugins that are shipped with Commons In A Box, we remove the corresponding entries from the WordPress plugin screens, and centralize them on a single Commons In A Box admin panel. When you install Commons In A Box, we install recommended plugins on your behalf, making it that much quicker to get up and running. When upgrades are available for your CBOX-related plugins, we send you a single upgrade notice, and you can be totally up-to-date with a single click. We take care of making sure that the latest versions of each plugin work with each other. And we provide documentation that serves as a centralized resource for learning about BuddyPress components and add-ons.
Beyond the raw functionality of the Commons, we’ve worked tirelessly to make sure that our site’s design is professional and inviting, functional and fun. This work is reflected in Commons In A Box through the CBOX default theme, which echoes some of the more successful design considerations from the Commons. The theme includes a flexible, widgetized homepage template like you see on the Commons. We’ve packaged a large number of widget areas, making configuration a breeze. The Commons In A Box theme is powered by the Infinity Theming Engine, which strikes a perfect balance for the Commons In A Box project: it makes it easy for admins of any skill level to configure their site’s appearance, while also providing tools for designers and developers to create a truly unique community hub. Any BuddyPress-enabled WordPress theme will work well with Commons In A Box, but we think that our default theme will be a great starter for a large number of use cases.
The Commons In A Box team is hopeful that the Commons In A Box package will put BuddyPress-powered community sites within the reach of a far greater number of people than is currently the case. We’ve set up a community site where you can seek out help, talk with others who are using Commons In A Box, and share your own experiences setting up your own CBOX-powered community. And if you’re a developer and want to contribute to Commons In A Box itself, the project’s development home is github.com/cuny-academic-commons/commons-in-a-box.
Download Commons In A Box today, in the Plugins > Add New interface of your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading directly from the wordpress.org plugin repository.
BuddyPress Docs 1.2
Today I’m releasing version 1.2 of BuddyPress Docs, the popular collaborative writing plugin for BuddyPress. Version 1.2 is a near-complete rewrite of BuddyPress Docs, with a number of notable new features.
The biggest change is that Docs functionality is no longer limited to Groups. Previously, Docs could be created only within the context of groups, with the interface for browsing, reading, and creating Docs located within the group interface. In BuddyPress Docs 1.2, Doc creation and viewing is moved into top-level templates, which gives you more breathing room when viewing and editing. This makes your URLs more attractive, too (though old, group-based URLs continue to work, through redirection). Most of all, this change makes it possible to create Docs that are not linked to a group at all.
Hand in hand with group-independence is the new Docs tab in user profiles. Here you can see the Docs that a user has created, and those that he has edited. This is a great way to get a sense of what a member is up to around the site, and also is very handy for users to keep track of changes that they themselves have made. You’ll also have access to a fully functional directory of sitewide Docs – just add a link to /docs/ to your nav menu.
There are some nifty changes under the hood, as well. The data schema for associating Docs with groups has been overhauled and simplified. And a new function, bp_docs_has_docs(), lets you initiate a new Docs loop wherever you’d like, querying according to a number of handy parameters.
If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress Docs, you’ll see an admin notice, right after upgrading, asking you to run a short migration process. Make sure you do so right away.
This rewrite has been a long time coming, and far more complex than I’d first imagined it would be. Still, it’s likely that there are some bugs. If you find problems, please post an issue at Github.
Reintroducing the CUNY Academic Commons Featured Content Widget
For the past two years The CUNY Academic Commons has used a plugin that allows our site administrators to feature specific content from across our community on our home page. This plugin was originally written by Michael McManus of Cast Iron Coding, and served its purpose perfectly. However, as it is with all software projects, updates to the WordPress core in general and to our site specifically, began to wear on the plugin’s internal structure and features. My first assignment upon joining the Commons development team was to bring this plugin back into conformance with WordPress best practices and coding standards, and to add some long awaited features that our admins had been patiently waiting for.
I am happy to announce today that the first version of this rewrite (v1.0.0) is available in the WordPress plugin repository, and I’d like to introduce you to some of the new features and functionality.
Continue reading “Reintroducing the CUNY Academic Commons Featured Content Widget”
Introducing BuddyPress Reply By Email Beta!
As we’re ramping up to the release of version 1.4 of the CUNY Academic Commons, the team here is working feverishly on some exciting, new features.
One of those features we’ve been working on is a Reply By Email (RBE) plugin for BuddyPress.
If you’ve ever used a similar reply-by-email feature in Basecamp or in Facebook, then you’ll find yourself right at home with RBE and BuddyPress.
Today we’re pleased to announce that BuddyPress Reply By Email is available immediately for public beta testing. Read on to find out how you can try out RBE on your own BP site.
How it works
Usually, BuddyPress will send out an email notification to you when you’re @mentioned, when someone replies to one of your activity comments or when you receive a new private message.
What RBE does is hijack the email notification generated by WordPress to add a custom “Reply-To” email address as well as a reply marker in the body of the email.
The “Reply-To” email address is an IMAP email address that supports address tags. An address tag basically allows a single email address to support various email addresses under one inbox. (eg. [email protected] can also support [email protected], [email protected].) In the screenshot, we used a GMail address since it both supports IMAP and address tags.
Once a reply is sent to this email address, the address tag allows RBE to distinguish what type of BuddyPress item the email is corresponding to such as an activity comment or a private message.
RBE, then, logs into the email address to check if any new replies were received. If replies are successfully parsed by RBE, they will be automatically posted to your BuddyPress site.
That’s not all!
For those BuddyPress sites that rely on the Groups component, we’ve also made it possible for group members to post new forum topics via email and when combined with another popular plugin, BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, subscribed group members can also reply to group forum posts as well.
That sounds dandy! Where can I download it?
You’re in luck! RBE is now available for testing.
Download BuddyPress Reply By Email Beta 1 here.
Beta means we’ve tested it locally and deemed it to be almost ready, but could use some real-world external testing and feedback from BuddyPress site owners before public release.
We recommend testing on BuddyPress 1.5.6 or higher.
A couple of useful links can be found below:
If you encounter a bug and you’ve read through the troubleshooting guide, please report it here.
This goes without saying, but, like any beta software, please test this locally and not on your live production site!
Members here on the CUNY Academic Commons can expect to see the feature in action in a few weeks, when we release version 1.4 of the Commons.
We’re really excited to bring one of the most-requested BuddyPress features to fruition under the awesomeness that is open-source. We also can’t wait to hear how you’re going to use the plugin and how it fares out in the wild! So let us know! 🙂
New WordPress plugin: Add User Autocomplete
Site admins on a WordPress Network can add existing network members to their site on the Dashboard > Users > Add New panel. But the interface requires that one know either the email address or the username of the user in question. My new plugin, Add User Autocomplete, makes the Add Existing User workflow a bit easier, by adding autocomplete/autosuggest to the Email Address/Username field. Just start typing, and the plugin will return matching users; arrow down or click on the intended user to add her to the Add User list.
A few additional bonuses provided by the plugin, aside from autocomplete:
- In addition to return email address and username matches, the plugin also checks against the display_name and user_url fields. So if my username is ‘admin’, and my email address is ‘[email protected]’, but my display name around the site is ‘Boone Gorges’, you’ll be able to find me by searching on ‘Boone’.
- You can add many users to a blog at once. Search for one user, select and hit Return, and then search for another.
- Prettier success messages. When you submit the Add New User page, your success message will give you a list of the users invited, instead of a generic “Invitations have been sent” type message.
Add User Autocomplete requires WP 3.1 and JavaScript. The plugin was developed for the CUNY Academic Commons. Check out the plugin at wordpress.org or follow its development at Github.
New BuddyPress plugin: BP Better Directories
BP Better Directories is a new BuddyPress plugin that will turn your (kinda boring) member directories into something a lot slicker. Site admins select which fields they’d like to be filterable in member directories. Site visitors can then use a nice AJAX interface for narrowing search results.
This plugin is being developed for the CUNY Academic Commons, and is in early beta. Don’t use on a live site. There’s also a pretty good chance that the technique I’m using in the guts of the plugin won’t scale all that well without proper caching. You have been warned! (Also, it requires at least BP 1.5.1.)
BuddyPress support for YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter
I’ve just added support for BuddyPress to the YOURLS: WordPress to Twitter plugin, which enables WP and BP integration with the YOURLS URL shortening software. This development was done for a secret (though maybe not so secret anymore 😉 ) project for the Commons, to be implemented here soon.
BuddyPress Docs 1.1: Doc History
I’ve just released version 1.1 of BuddyPress Docs, my collaborative editing software for BuddyPress.
The big new feature in version 1.1 is the History tab. After upgrading, you’ll notice that what used to be a single Edit button has been reorganized into three tabs: Read, Edit, and History. History allows you to brows the entire revision history of a document, to compare the differences between two revisions side by side, to view a single revision, or to restore to any point in the document’s history. Access to the History tab can be limited in the same way that access to the Edit tab can be, on a doc-by-doc basis.
This new feature will, I hope, bring some of the best qualities of wikis to BuddyPress Docs, and make Docs an even better way to collaborate.
The feature will be live on the CUNY Academic Commons in the upcoming weeks.
Download BuddyPress Docs from the wordpress.org plugin repo or follow development at Github.
New WordPress plugin: Unconfirmed
If you’ve ever been responsible for supporting an installation of WordPress Multisite with open registration, you know that the activation process can be a significant source of headaches. Sometimes activation emails get caught by spam filters. Sometimes they are overlooked and deleted by unwitting users. And, to complicate matters, WP’s safeguards prevent folks from re-registering with the same username or email address. This can result in a lot of support requests that are not particularly easy to handle. Aside from reaching manually into the database for an activation key, there’s not much the admin can do to help the would-be member of the site.
My new WordPress plugin Unconfirmed eases this problem a bit, by providing WPMS admins with a new set of tools for managing unactivated registrations. (By naming it “Unconfirmed”, I fully expect that the plugin will join some great movies and books in the pantheon of Important Cultural Objects.) Unconfirmed adds a new panel to your Network Admin Dashboard (under the Users menu). When you visit the Unconfirmed panel, it gives you a list of all pending registrations on your system. The list is easily sortable by registration date, username, email address, and activation key. For each unactivated registration, there are two actions that the admin can perform. “Resend Activation Email” does exactly what it says: it sends an exact duplicate of the original activation email, as created by the WordPress core activation notification functions. “Activate” allows admins to activate a pending registration manually, which will trigger the activation success email to the user.
At the moment, Unconfirmed is compatible with WordPress Multisite (aka Network mode) only. In the future, I may expand the plugin to work with non-MS installations of WP. Unconfirmed works with BuddyPress, too. The plugin was developed for use on the CUNY Academic Commons.
Download Unconfirmed from the wordpress.org repo or follow its development on Github.
