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.
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.
RBE in action!
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. john.doe@gmail.com can also support john.doe+test@gmail.com, john.doe+whatever@gmail.com.) 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.
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.
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!
The CUNY Academic Commons is delighted to welcome two new members to its development team: Raymond Hoh and Dominic Giglio.
Raymond Hoh is one of the most respected members of the WordPress and BuddyPress community. Known around the WordPress community as r-a-y, Ray is a frequent contributor to the BuddyPress project, the developer of a number of popular plugins for WP, BP, and bbPress, and a longtime forum moderator at buddypress.org. Ray brings to our team a depth and breadth of BuddyPress experience that is practically unparalleled. Follow @ray_i_am on Twitter or r-a-y on Github.
In truth, Ray is not exactly a new member of our team – there was a period last year when Ray did a bit of BuddyPress-related work for the Commons. As we’ve begun to ramp up work on Commons In A Box, we’ve invited Ray back on board to play a major role in turning CBox into a powerful platform. Among other responsibilities, Ray will be playing a leading role in building: a reply-by-email feature for BuddyPress; a variety of improvements to BP forums and profiles as they appear in Commons In A Box; and an overhaul to upload handling in BuddyPress that will bring together into a simple API uploads associated with groups, forums, and BuddyPress Docs.
Dominic Giglio is the most recent addition to the Commons dev team. Dom is a student in Computer Science at BMCC. He’s known in the WordPress world for a popular blog post explaining the WP initialization process, as well as for his contributions to the WordPress section of Smashing Magazine. Dom’s experience doing development along the whole LAMP stack – from WP theme building to hardware work – promises to round out our team in an invaluable way. Dom is on Twitter on @human_shell and on Github as humanshell.
For the time being, Dom will be focusing on improving the CUNY Academic Commons experience, and he’ll be picking up more responsibility on Commons In A Box as development progresses.
I’ve just released Commons 1.3.9.1. Version 1.3.9.1 is a security release, which fixes a potential security issue recently reported to the BuddyPress team. The security weakness is not known to have been exploited on the Commons or on any other BuddyPress installation.
I’ve just released version 1.3.9 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Version 1.3.9 is a bugfix release, which fixes a bug in PreziWP, applies some recent patches from BuddyPress, and adds some WordPress content importer plugins.
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.
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.
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.
The Unconfirmed Dashboard panel
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.
Email us at commonshelpsite@gmail.com so we can respond to your questions and requests. Please email from your CUNY email address if possible. Or visit our help site for more information:
) project for the Commons, to be implemented here soon.
