CUNY Academic Commons Development Blog
building CUNY Communities since 2009
I’ve just released version 1.4.10 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.4.10 is a bugfix release, with the following improvements:
For complete details, see the 1.4.10 milestone.
I’ve just released version 1.4.9 of the CUNY Academic Commons. 1.4.9 is a bugfix release, with the following improvements:
For complete details, see the 1.4.9 milestone.
I’ve just released version 1.3.4 of the CUNY Academic Commons. Version 1.3.4 is a bugfix release, resolving about 10 issues. Highlights:
For full details on this release, visit the 1.3.4 milestone.
I had a request or two to explain how I built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. Here goes.
Brief background: When the Commons was upgraded to BuddyPress 1.2, we got the benefit of interactive activity streams everywhere, including groups. This caused some confusion, however, as users were uncertain where conversation best fit into the Commons’s architecture: in the Forums (where it had been traditionally), or in the activity stream. In some communities this kind of fracturing might be okay or even welcome, but in ours it was confusing. At the same time, we wanted a way for group admins and mods to send important notices to the members of their groups. By taking the group activity updates and repurposing it as a Group Announcements section, I was able to kill two birds with one stone: providing an announcement space for mods, while focusing extended discussion in the forums.
You can download the CAC Group Announcements plugin here.
I’m not putting this in the repo at the moment because I don’t want to build a proper admin UI and support it 🙂 For that reason, here is a primer on how the plugin works – if you want to customize or maintain it, you’re on your own, buster.
CAC_Group_Announcements class is an instance of the BuddyPress Group Extension API. It is responsible for creating the Announcements tab markup and adding it to the nav. You’ll notice that the majority of the markup is created by including bp-default’s activity-loop.php and post-form.php templates. You could customize this more if you wanted.bp_is_group_announcements() is a little template tag that can be used to test whether you’re looking at a group announcements page. This is needed for the activity filter, in step 3.cac_set_announcement_filter() adds a filter to the bp_has_activities query string when you are looking at an announcements page, so that it only displays activity items of the type activity_update. In other words, when you are looking at the regular activity stream for the group, you see all of the associated group activity items (new members, forum posts, etc) but when you’re on the announcements page you only see activity updates (which, remember, have been repurposed as announcements).As I look at the code, I see that there are things I would definitely change if I were going to make this into a distributed plugin. If you want to make those changes, be my guest. You’re welcome to help each other in the comment section, but I won’t be formally supporting this, as it is a very basic hack that should happen at the theme level anyway. Good luck!
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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/.
