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Buddypress Plugins

February 21, 2012 By Leave a Comment


For Groups Management:

  • BP Group Hierarchy: ” group creators to place a new group under an existing group. There is currently no limit to the depth of the group hierarchy.”
  • BuddyPress Group Email Subscription:” allows people to receive email notifications of group activity, especially forum posts. Weekly or daily digests available. Each user can choose how they want to subscribe to their groups. “
  • BP Group Management:  ”..site admins can manage BP group membership by banning, unbanning, promoting and demoting current members of any group, adding members to any group, and deleting groups.”
  • BuddyPress External Group Blogs:  ”Give group creators and administrators on your BuddyPress install the ability to attach external blog RSS feeds to groups. Blog posts will appear within the activity stream for the group. New posts will automatically be pulled every hour, or every 30 minutes if someone specifically visits a group page.”
Filed Under: Computing, Tutorials, Uncategorized, Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

Creating you own Social Network with Buddypress on WordPress

February 14, 2012 By 2 Comments


 

I get  pretty ecstatic when I find a open source program that is versatile and user friendly.  So I while exploring options for creating a membership based site I’ve come across BuddyPress. After playing with it for a few days and toying around with other options (Dolphin, Elgg, etc.. ), I have determined that BuddyPress is the best fit for me.

What is BuddyPress?

BuddyPress is:  

  •  a free, open source  Wordpress plugin,
  •  for creating a social network using through Worpdress,
  • written mainly in PHP and MySQL,

Features of the BuddyPress Plugin

The following are just the basic features BuddyPress, all of which can be disabled and modified.

  • User Profiles
    • Activity Streams
    • Personal Sections
    • Avatar Uploads
  • Group Creation
    • Forums
    • Group Page
  • Friend System
    • Adding
    • Messaging
  • Theme
  • WordPress Blog Per User

Undisputedly Facebook has become the standard for a social network. However, this doesn’t mean that you cannot create your own unique social network online. I mean besides modifying BuddyPress to look like a much earlier version of Facebook you can also add plugins or modify this plugin for a variety of other things:

    1. Shopping site,
    2. Online Course,
    3. Information gathering,
    4. Small Business,
    5. Sporting Competitions,
    6. Recipe site,
    7. paid memberships,
    8. Educational (for safe online student interaction),

So basically any community driven site…

You can make such sites without programming or prior experience with BuddyPress. How?  The other great thing about an open source projects (a good open source project) is that there are always talented and generous people who make plugins to help you modify your WordPress experience. Not only is other WordPress plugins compatible with BuddyPress, but there is also 700+ plugins that are BuddyPress specific. A lot of them help you manage your groups, make your social network private, multi user account creation, mass email to your users, create levels of memberships, create an hiearchy of private or public groups, assign tasks and control over groups and forum, event planning, database collection etc… And if you honestly, cannot find what you are looking for there is a Buddypress plugin that is a skeleton to writing your own Buddypress plugin.

 

Why should you use BuddyPress?

Still not convinced? Well, to start off with,  Wordpress is a solid foundation to build your site on, the user interface is direct and flexible to the point where non-programmers can use the site without resorting to a face-to-desk meltdown.  Buddypress is the nice house with solid framework built upon the solid foundation of WordPress. Buddypress, itself, has the very basic foundations of a good social network (activity stream, user profile, groups, private messaging, forums). Unless you intend on building the next “it” social network, then Buddypress is a good starting point for you to grow your business, community, or friends.

 

Showcase of sites using Buddypress: BPinspire

Plugins for BuddyPress: BuddyPress.org

Stay tuned for an upcoming article on a list of useful and powerful plugins for Buddypress! 

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

How to Disable Comments on All Images in WordPress

November 1, 2011 By 2 Comments

WordPress has long had a major problem, that has yet to be solved by the development team. Namely, the fact that there is no way to globally disable commenting on certain types of posts or pages – most notably images and media files.

Spammers have been attacking blogs for a very long time and targeting image and media file attachment pages. If you wonder what I mean by that, click on the thumbnail image above. You’ll see that it takes you to a page with a bigger embedded version of the image. Normally, those pages allow you to leave comments (you’ll notice that here on OMB it doesn’t).
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Filed Under: Photography, Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Pods CMS Gets A Kickstart

September 15, 2011 By 1 Comment

Pods CMS LogoWordPress, you know it… you love it. But a big part of what makes WordPress so awesome is it’s ecosystem of passionate users, theme and plugin developers. In the case of theme and plugin developers, they’re essential to making it easy on the rest of us to get WordPress to do the things we want it to with relatively little effort and cost.

While it’s impressive how many add-on’s are available for the WordPress platform for free, the reality is that everything comes at a price. Usually it’s the developers time, but it can also come at a price to the community. When a theme or plugin we rely on crosses a certain threshold of complexity and need for support, it can become difficult or even impossible for the developer to keep up with; and when they can’t we all loose.

Pods CMS – WordPress Plugin

I make a considerable portion of my living from WordPress work and know its themes, frameworks and plugins well. One of the most amazing plugins built for WordPress is Pods CMS built by Scott Clark. Pods serves to extend WordPress’ CMS functionality and take it to the next level. So as WordPress usage grows and we continue to push it into new places, the need for the functionality that Pods provides becomes ever more important.

Pods is not a lightweight plugin and is probably best served in the hands of an experienced developer to get it to do what you want, but if you’ve ever heard someone say “WordPress” can’t do that, think again, it can, and there is a good chance Pods can help it get there.

One of the more interesting examples of Pods capabilities is the scheduling system Scott and Matthew built for OpenCamp 2010. It’s all Pods! But Pods doesn’t stop there, when you look at the Pods showcase and get a sense of the companies that use it you’ll want to explore the ways it can work for you.

Pods 2.0 

Because of it’s complexity, the development effort has grown to a point where it needs a little help. Pods 2.0 is about to come out with a major overhaul of the UI (and much more) and we want to help Scott push it over the finish line.

In order to wrap up 2.0 over the next couple of weeks, Scott has made Pods a Kickstarter project to raise funds so he can focus exclusively on finishing it up.

If I had my way we would raise so much money that Scott would never have to do anything again but keep developing and supporting this amazing plugin. If you’ve not used Pods, be sure to check it out at PodsCMS.org. If you have benefitted from Pods then I would encourage you to step up and make a donation to push 2.0 over the finish line.

If you have a project that’s used Pods leave us a comment and link below, we would love to see and hear what you’ve done with it.

Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , ,

WordPress PLUGIN: Enable REL= and Other HTML in Author’s Field (for Google+ and Google Search Listings)

July 5, 2011 By 31 Comments

Avatar in Google Search Results

Avatar in Google Search Results

Google is beginning to roll out the ability to have your Google Profile linked to search results. This is an awesome new feature that my friend Trey Ratcliff worked with them on setting up. Do a search for “HDR Tutorial” and you can see what I’m talking about.

In attempting to get this working with my various sites I quickly discovered that WordPress is stripping all of the REL= language from any Author field. In other words, you go into your USERS area and try and enter rel=”author” along with a link in one of the Author Bio areas, but WordPress leaves the link and removes the “REL=” part.

Now, it does this to try and protect you from users entering malicious code in their bio area. But if you have a blog where you implicitly trust all of your authors you might want to enable the ability for them to put in a link to their Google+ profile. For this reason I’m releasing a very simple plugin that will “fix the glitch”.
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Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

The New WordPress User Association Launch

December 2, 2010 By 14 Comments

I know that a lot of you have your own blog, and I’m willing to bet that the majority use WordPress to run it. So I’ve got some exciting news for you. Just yesterday we launched the new WordPress User Association to bring together resources and provide a place for those of us who use WordPress to get together and share ideas and information.

Here’s a little video introduction to explain what this is all about:

In less than 24 hours we have nearly 1,000 members! In fact, we were averaging over 100 new members per hour for most of the working hours of the day, so thanks to everyone for joining and supporting the community!
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Filed Under: News, Wordpress Tagged With: ,

How Woopra Catches Drive-by Comment Spammers

November 20, 2010 By 3 Comments

Today someone left the following comment:

Now, it caught my eye for two reasons:

  1. They left a URL in the comment. I’m constantly on the lookout for that because I don’t want YOU guys (my real readers) to be subjected to spammy comments.
  2. They claim to be a long time reader who visits constantly.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Wordpress, Work Tagged With: , ,

One Week Till OpenCamp! Here’s a Little Video…

August 20, 2010 By 4 Comments

Well, we’re a week away from OpenCamp. Love it or hate it, OpenCamp has definitely impacted my ability to publish to my own blog. I’m looking forward to being done with all of that for a while so I can focus on my own projects again.

That is not to say that I am not finding OpenCamp to be an incredibally rewarding experience! It’s definitely worth every minute spent on it! I’ve made lots of close friends and had amazing experiences already. And I know that OpenCamp will change some people’s lives!

We have a lot of interesting stuff going on, and one of those things is that Dr. Nico Martini’s students from UTD will be attending OpenCamp as a mandatory part of class! So for a little fun Cali and I put this video together for them. Though everyone might get a kick out of it…
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Filed Under: OpenCamp, The Man's Videos, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,

Tutorial: Manually Take WordPress Out of Maintenance Mode

August 4, 2010 By 23 Comments

Today while performing a WordPress upgrade on another blog the update failed! Grrr. If that wasn’t enough of a problem, when I checked the site it was stuck in “Maintenance” mode – meaning that no matter what you tried to do the only thing that showed up was a page telling you the site was in “Maintenance Mode”.

I Googled like a madman, and searched the WordPress site too, but there is no documentation as to what to do to get it out of this mode! So, I fired up my FTP browser and manually performed a complete upgrade of WordPress. Still no luck!
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,
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