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.

New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets

BuddyPress comes with several WordPress widgets, among which are the Groups and Members widgets that you see on the CUNY Academic Commons home page. This plugin makes those widgets a little more customizable, allowing users to specify which of the three tabs (Newest, Active, or Popular) they’d like to be each widget’s default view.

enhanced-bp-widget

If you’ve got a blog on the CUNY Academic Commons, you can start using this feature right away. Just look in Dashboard > Appearance > Widgets. Be sure to select the Groups/Members widgets whose descriptions say “Enhanced”.

You can download the plugin for use on your own installation of WPMU/BP here: enhanced-buddypress-widgets. It’s also available from the WordPress plugin database: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/enhanced-buddypress-widgets/.

New BuddyPress plugin: Remove Previous Comment Edits From BuddyPress Activity

UPDATE: BP Dev Andy writes in a comment to this post that this bug will be fixed in BP core soon. If you’re running a recent version of BP, it’s likely that you won’t need this plugin. Please make sure you can reproduce the issue before installing.

This plugin fixes a small but potentially annoying quirk in BuddyPress. If you, as a blog owner, edit a comment that appears on your blog, BuddyPress adds an entry to the sitewide and individual activity streams – but it doesn’t delete the old entries. As a result, if you end up (for example) editing your own comment a few times in a row, you’ll see multiple items on the activity feed.

This plugin fixes the problem by checking whether a submitted comment is an edit, and if it is, by deleting previous versions of the comment in the activity stream.

Until the plugin is in the WordPress repository, I’ve made it available in a zip file here. Just load bp-activity-skip-comment-edits.php into your /wp-content/plugins folder, activate in Dashboard > Plugins (sitewide, if you’d like), and you should be good to go.

Making Sitewide Tags work

Sitewide Tags is a cool plugin by Donncha O Caoimh that pulls blog posts from all over a WordPress Multi-User installation – like the one here on the CUNY Academic Commons – into a supplementary catch-all blog. The power of this plugin is that, with all sitewide blog posts aggregated into one place, you can begin to see the kinds of topics and trends that emerge from the community of bloggers. More specifically, Sitewide Tags allows you to create a tag cloud that reflects blogging activity across the entire community. (See the tag cloud at WordPress.com for a sense of what this looks like.)

I’ve got Sitewide Tags up and running here on the Commons – see our tag cloud (scroll down the page) and our aggregated blog. Getting things running seamlessly took a bit of tinkering though, and I thought it might be useful to share some of the tinkering here.

Read on for more of this (unexpectedly!) long process.

Continue reading “Making Sitewide Tags work”

New MediaWiki extension: BuddyPressActivity

One of the most interesting vantage points from which to monitor goings-on around the CUNY Academic Commons is the BuddyPress activity feed. The sitewide feed – located on the Commons’s News page – lists all the activity happening the blogs, groups, and profiles around the site. There are activity streams for individual users and for those users’ friends as well – you can mine, for instance, here.

wiki-activity

Until recently, though, these streams did not include information the activity taking place in the wiki portion of the site. I’ve developed a extension for MediaWiki (the software that powers the Wiki section of the Commons) called BuddyPressActivity that rectifies this shortcoming. For websites – like the CUNY Academic Commons – that have integrated our homegrown MediaWiki/Wordpress MU integration, this extension will update BuddyPress activity streams to include edits to pages within the wiki, thus better reflecting the extent and variety of the action on the site.

You can find out more about the extension – and download the code for use on your own MW/WMPu installation – at http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:BuddyPressActivity.

Updated version (0.2) of Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress

I’m releasing a new version of my Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress plugin. The initial version, described here, gave BuddyPress users more control over which terms in their profiles become linked to a community-wide profile search. The new version gives BP administrators the ability to tweak these links even more. Here’s what’s new:

  1. Some profile information – phone numbers, IM handles, and so on – is unique to the individual user. Thus there’s no real need to have this information linked to a community-wide search. Using this plugin, administrators can specify certain profile fields that will remain non-linked. By default, profile fields called Skype ID, Phone, and IM will not be processed as links, but you can tweak this to be whichever fields you want. See readme.txt and custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress.php for more information.
  2. Other fields, especially those social networking sites where each user’s handle is attached to a profile page, can be more usefully linked to those user profiles than to a search of the community. For example, it makes more sense for the contents of the Twitter field to link to an individual’s Twitter page rather than to other users in the community who have the same Twitter handle (hopefully no one!). With this plugin, administrators can specify that certain fields will turn the user’s social networking ID into a profile link. By default, the plugin recognizes fields called Twitter, Delicious ID, YouTube ID, Flickr ID, and FriendFeed ID. See custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress.php for more information and to change these settings.

I also added a little bit of code to make sure that BuddyPress can recognize email addresses with periods before the @-sign.

You can see some of these things at work in my profile here on the CUNY Academic Commons: https://commons.gc.cuny.edu/members/boonebgorges. You’ll notice that the Twitter field shows a link to my Twitter profile, even though I just entered my handle in the Edit Profile screen.

Grab the latest version from the trunk http://svn.wp-plugins.org/custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress/ or download it here: custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress-v02.zip