Category: Plugins and Extensions

New BuddyPress plugin: BP External Activity

Here on the CUNY Academic Commons, we have an installation of MediaWiki which runs alongside our WordPress/BuddyPress installation. Without some additional coding, edits on the wiki don’t show up in the Commons News feed, and as a result they tend to get a little lost in the shuffle. This new plugin, BP External Activity, addresses this issue by allowing the administrator of a BuddyPress installation to specify an arbitrary RSS feed whose items will be regularly imported into the activity stream.

The plugin imports RSS feeds every hour. You may find that you need to decrease your Simplepie cache time to make it work:
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$a', 'return 600;') );
reduces the RSS cache to ten minutes, for example. Put that in your bp-custom.php file if you are having problems with the plugin.

At the moment, the plugin uses the Author field from the RSS feed to look for a matching author in your WP database. If it doesn’t find one, it uses the unlinked text ‘A user’, as in ‘A user edited the wiki page…’.

Thanks to Andy Peatling, whose External Group Blogs served as the inspiration for a good part of the code.

Visit the plugin homepage for more details.

BuddyPress plugins running on the CUNY Academic Commons

A few people have asked recently for a list of the plugins installed on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the spirit of Joe’s post, here I thought I’d make it public. I’m going to limit myself to the BuddyPress plugins here, for the sake of simplicity. (I’d like to write a series of posts on the anatomy of the CUNY Academic Commons; maybe this will be the first in that series.) Here they are, in no particular order other than the order in which they appear on my plugin list.

  • BP TinyMCE. This plugin is messed up, and I have part of it switched off, but I still use the filters that allow additional tags through, in case people want to write some raw HTML in their forum posts, etc.
  • BP Groupblog. Allows blogs to be associated with groups, displaying posts on that group’s activity feed and automatically credentialing group members on the blog. I did some custom modifications to the way the plugin works so that clicking on the Blog tab in a group leads you to subdomain address rather than the Groupblog custom address (thereby also ensuring that visitors see the intended blog theme rather than the BP-ish theme).
  • BP MPO Activity Filter. This plugin works along with More Privacy Options to ensure that the new privacy settings are understood by Buddypress and that blog-related activity items are displayed to the appropriate people.
  • BuddyPress Group Documents. This one is crucial to our members, who often use the plugin to share collaborative docs.
  • BP Include Non-Member Comments makes sure that blog comments from non-members are included on the sitewide activity feed.
  • BP External Activity – an as-yet unreleased plugin I wrote that brings in items from an external RSS feed and adds them to the sitewide activity feed. We’re using it for MediaWiki edits.
  • BP Group Management lets admins add people to groups. Very handy for putting together a group quickly, without having to wait for invites.
  • BP System Report. We’re using this one to keep track of some data in our system and report it back to members and administrators.
  • BuddyPress Group Email Subscription allows users to subscribe to immediate or digest email notification of group activity. Right now we’re running it on a trial basis with a handful of members, in order to test it. (Here’s how to run it with a whitelist of users, if you want)
  • BuddyPress Terms of Service Agreement, another as-yet-unreleased plugin (this one by CAC Dev Team member Chris Stein) that requires new members to check TOS acceptance box before being allowed to register.
  • Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress allows users to customize the way that their profile interests become links
  • Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets. Lets the admin decide the default state of BP widgets on the front page.
  • Forum Attachments for BuddyPress. Another of our most important BP plugins, this one allows users to share files via the group forums.
  • Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress. This is our legacy email notification system, which is going to be in place until I get back from my honeymoon and can replace it 🙂
  • Invite Anyone lets our users invite new members to the community and makes it easier to populate groups.

Questions about any of these plugins or how they work with BuddyPress? Ask in the comments.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP System Report

One of the goals of the Community Team behind the CUNY Academic Commons is to figure out how members are using the site, so that we can make it a better place for meeting and collaborating with each other. With a system like BuddyPress, though, it’s a bit hard to get a general sense of what’s going on on the site. BP System Report is a new plugin meant to address this issue.

BP System Report records regular summaries of statistics related to your BuddyPress installation. You can then compare any two snapshots using the built-in comparison tool, which calculates percentage differences. The information currently gathered by the plugin:

BP System Report
BP System Report
  • Members: total number, number active during report interval, percent active, total friendship connections, average friendships per member
  • Groups: total number, number active, percent active, total group memberships, average group membership
  • Public/private/hidden groups: total number, number active, percent active, total membership, average membership
  • Blogs: total number, number active, percent active

The plugin is quite beta, so still might be buggy. Please feel free to report problems.

Future versions of this plugin will include:

  • more analytical data collected
  • CSV export
  • better admin control over report frequency

Regarding this last point: the BP System Report defaults to twice-daily reports. If you’d like to adjust it manually, deactivate the plugin, edit the line
wp_schedule_event( time() + 30, 'twicedaily', 'bp_system_report_pseudo_cron_hook' );
in bp-system-report.php to say ‘hourly’ or ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ (or some custom time you define in bp_system_report_more_reccurences() )

Download BP System Report here.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Group Management

BuddyPress has great group administrator functions – the ability to invite members to groups, to promote them to different statuses, the ability to ban certain member, and so on. But unless the sitewide administrator is also the administrator of the group, the site admin does not have the same abilities. On some sites – like here on the Academic Commons, where it’s frequently desirable to add members manually to groups – this limitation for sitewide admins can be somewhat restricting.

This plugin, BP Group Management, creates a new administration panel to the Dashboard, accessible only by the sitewide administrator, which does the following:

  • provides a sortable list of all groups (public, private, and hidden) with their created-on dates and ID numbers
  • allows admins to delete groups easily
  • allows admins to view lists of current members, and to promote/demote/ban them
  • allows admins to add any member of the site directly to the group, skipping the need for invitations

Download the plugin here.

The version of the plugin in the repository only works for versions of BuddyPress 1.2 and greater. For a mostly functional version of the plugin that works with BP 1.1.3 (no guarantees on any other versions, but it should work down to BP 1.1 at least), click here.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP-TinyMCE

I threw a little something together today to add WYSIWYG editing to BuddyPress, using TinyMCE. I want to be careful about the tags I allow, so I’m whitelisting, which is a bit tedious. As a result, there are only a few buttons available: a, em, strong, ul, ol, li. It’s a start, though.

Seems to work everywhere in BP: forums, wire, messages, profile pages.

A note about TinyMCE: WP ships with TinyMCE, and I thought it made sense to use that version instead of attaching one to this plugin. I think that the path to TinyMCE (line 18 of the plugin) should work on all installations, but you may have to tinker if you don’t see it popping up in the head of your BP pages. Moreover, the language files for WP’s version of TinyMCE are misnamed, which means that they don’t work right out of the box (at least for me they don’t). You may need to change the name of wp-includes/js/tinymce/langs/wp-langs-en.php to en.php in order to get the hover and help text in the TinyMCE box to work.

Download the plugin here. Don’t use in a production environment unless you are very certain that you are satisfied with the security of this plugin!

New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone

In my view, the most powerful feature of BuddyPress – the feature that powers the core goal of the CUNY Academic Commons, that of collaboration – is groups. By default, BuddyPress only lets you invite other members of the community to your group if you and the member are already friends within BuddyPress. In some communities, this feature probably prevents a lot of spam. But in other communities, like the one here at the Commons, the friendship requirement adds a sometimes inconvenient extra step to the process of getting a productive group up and running.

Invite Anyone in action
Invite Anyone in action

This new plugin, Invite Anyone, does just what its name claims: it alters the group invitation process to allow group creators and administrators to invite anyone from their BuddyPress installation, not just their friends.

Like so often happens, though, solving this one problem made another one pop up: Scrolling through a list of your friends to find potential invitees is one thing, but scrolling through a list of every member of the site is another thing entirely. Most communities, including the CUNY Academic Commons, will simply have too many members. To make things easier, I’ve taken the autosuggest feature from the Compose Message screen in BuddyPress and retooled it to work on the Send Invites screen as well. Start typing the name of the user you’d like to invite, and with each letter you type, BuddyPress will make better and better suggestions as to who you mean. Just hit enter or click to add the suggested user to the invited list.

Download the plugin here. As the plugin is built using the BP Group Extension API, you’ll need at least BP 1.1.

After I’ve done a bit more testing with our custom theme here on the Commons, I’ll activate the plugin on this site, so that members of the Commons community can take advantage of the new feature.

A technical note: I tested the plugin in a variety of different environments (different browsers, different themes, different servers) and stumbled upon a few issues, in particular with the autosuggest AJAX in Chrome for Mac. If you find similar issues, or have any other feedback, please leave a comment.

Streamlining Group Blogs

Rodney Blevins and Marius Ooms wrote a fantastic plugin for BuddyPress called Groupblog, which allows BP groups to easily create a blog associated with their group. The killer feature of the plugin is the ability to add all group members to the blog (as authors, editors, subscribers, whatever you’d like) in a more or less automatic fashion – a far, far easier task than adding users manually through Dashboard > Add User.

I found, though, that the process wasn’t quite as automatic as I’d like. They’d based the code for adding users on a plugin by Burt Adsit called Community Blogs. Community Blogs only triggered the user adding process on a one-by-one basis: members of a group weren’t added to the group’s blog until they visited the blog. This is problematic for a few reasons. First, it’s an added step that creates some confusion among group admins and members, who assume that community blog membership should be automatic. Second, we’ve enabled various levels of privacy for blogs at the CUNY Academic Commons, and group members who were not yet members of a private group blog couldn’t really visit the blog to kick start the process. (Strictly speaking, that’s not true: the add user process was hooked to a process that took place when the blog’s login screen popped up, which happens when you persistently try to visit a blog to which you don’t have access. But this is extremely confusing.)

I took a bit of time today to rework how Groupblog handles the add user process. With the new setup, every member of a group is added to the group blog at once. The process is put into motion when the blog’s administrator updates and saves the group’s Group Blog settings. Other members of the BP community who join the group after the initial blog setup are added automatically to the blog as well, in accordance with the settings that the admin has determined for member permissions.

All the changes I made to the plugin are found in the main plugin file, bp-groupblog.php. You can download the modified file here: bp-groupblog.php.txt (don’t forget to make sure that the file is named bp-groupblog.php to make the plugin work). Just replace the stock version of the file with this one to make the changes. I intentionally did not clean up the plugin – all the original code is deactivated but still present beside the new code – because I wanted users to be able to differentiate what I had written from what the original authors had written (at least for now).

Group Forum Subscription v1.4

If you use Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress, you should upgrade to the most recent version, 1.4, released today. This version fixes a bunch of bugs, including one important bug that causes automatic subscription to fail for some members of large groups.

As always, if you have any issues with the plugin, please let me know. I plan to include some big new features for the next release, so stay tuned.

EDIT: I almost forgot to mention that this release also marks the inclusion of several new translations. Many, many thanks to those who have translated this plugin:

  • German: Markus Schubert
  • French: Daniel H
  • Italian: Luca Camellini
  • Russian: slaFFik
  • Spanish: Admin at dominicana.net.do
  • Traditional Chinese: Levin

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.