Thoughts regarding Buddypress 1.2

BuddyPress is a social feature plugin for Wordpress.

Buddypress 1.2 was recently released this winter (2010), and I've spent the last couple weeks trying to use it. This post isn't a review or a list of features, but instead my thoughts about this update. I have been running buddypress on my main visual art website, http://visualartgifts.com. It is a small community and marketing site for visual artists of all kinds and people who love art are also welcome to join for commenting and feedback.
I was pretty happy with the progress in 1.1, but there are still quite a few issues for BuddyPress to fix before I want to run it on other sites.

Upgrading to BuddyPress 1.2.x

I followed the instructions on the BuddyPress website for upgrading from 1.1.

Essentially you have to:

1. Deactivate BuddyPress and plugins that work with BuddyPress.
2. Update BuddyPress in the plugins page using the upgrade link by the plugin list. (or manually do it by FTP)
3. Delete old BuddyPress theme files from the server. (Previous themes don't work )  OR install a compatibility plugin.
4. Activate the default theme or make a child theme of it and activate it instead (first in the site options then in appearance-themes)

I admit that having to yet again change themes bothered me since I use my own customized theme for Wordpress and for external pages and scripts linked to Wordpress. I live having my different website components blend as much as possible.

Site Wide Recent Posts broke

The sitewide recent posts widget was broken completely in this version and I did let them know in a trouble ticket. I don't use the "activity streams" component since I don't want my site to be like Facebook or Twitter. I want it for blogging, forums, and messaging.   With activity streams off, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget disappears COMPLETELY.

When I turned that feature set back on, the Sitewide Recent Posts widget reappears, yet there are no recent posts displayed on site.

This really bothered me since that widget worked perfectly with BuddyPress 1.1 with Activity Streams off.  I understand that sometimes things break while improving other areas, but I always considered Site wide Recent Posts to be essential to a multi-blog community site.

I'm hoping that this feature will be fixed and working properly with version 1.3 when it comes out.

BuddyPress Profile Syncing

I really don't remember if the BuddyPress profile and the Blog ID #1 profile data synced in earlier versions, but it doesn't seem to be working right now.   It became important to be when I added extra fields to my profile info using the new feature in Wordpress 2.9.2.

Those fields don't appear in Buddypress's profile list nor profile page. I'm sure that this is complicated, but it is a sticking point for me.  If a user is a guest author/blogger, they have to be told to edit their "other profile" in the main blog. There really should be a way to truly merge them or at least add the variables to the Buddypress profile and have them saved twice.

New Default Theme for BuddyPress

The new default theme for BuddyPress is another case of one step forward and two steps back.  The default buddypress theme for 1.1 was quite attractive with separate widgets for the homepage and other main blog post sidebars.  It was easy to get those sitewide posts in the main widget and everything just worked.

The new default theme for 1.2 really seems to be dumbed down. You have just one widgetized sidebar to work with so you can't say what should go there for the homepage vs. blog pages.  There just isn't room there for multiple BuddyPress widgets and those look really strange on post pages!

What I did about the theme...

I knew that I had to "yet again" make another child theme of the default theme. I just don't believe in running plugins for compatibily. I figure that perhaps in version 1.5 there will be yet another make over and the compatibility plugin would just bloat more.

What I had to do was edit the functions.php and add new widgets and then edit the theme files to point to those widgets. I did that in a "child theme" basically you create another css file and save it in another directory in your theme folder while pointing to the theme it is based on. Next you just have to go in and edit each file in the default theme you want to modify and save each in the new folder.  To use the child theme you have to activate it in Site Admin -- Themes then activate it in Appearance - Themes.

You need something like the following at the beginning of your child theme's style.css:


/*

Theme Name: BuddyPress Your Theme Name


Theme URI: http://yourwebsite.com/themes/yourtheme/

Description: Your Theme Name theme for BuddyPress.

Version: 1.0

Author: Your Name


Author URI: http://yourwebsite.com/

Template: bp-default

Tags: buddypress, number of columns, keyword, blah

*/

If you want to use the CSS (style/layout settings) from the default theme, also add the following to the style.css file:

/* Inherit the default theme styles */

@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/default.css );

/* Inherit the default theme adminbar styles */

@import url( ../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/adminbar.css );

Adding my own special widget sidebars and widget areas to the sidebar was a little more complicated, but if anyone comments about it, I'll write a post with more information.  It isn't any different from adding widgetized areas to any other Wordpress theme.

Final thoughts about BuddyPress 1.2.x

I see great promise in BuddyPress and it is still the best way to add social features to a Wordpress install. It is also free which is amazing.  If you are thinking of going beyond comments on your Wordpress site, I'd suggest waiting a few more updates before giving it a try. The code base is still going through radical changes even though it is beyond 1.0.  Any customizations you make to BuddyPress now will most likely need to be redesigned or fixed in later 1.x versions.

Buddypress 1.1 Works

I've been following the development of Buddypress since it was first announced because I had been searching for a community solution that would have many of the features they announced would be included.    I had even tried an alpha version with horrible results last year.  At that point I had decided to wait until it was beyond 1.0.

qTranslate plugin incompatible

I was actually testing the 1.1 release candidate so I could help with some bugs and I did actually find one.  I also discovered that the current version of qTranslate the multilingual plugin I use totally breaks the new buddypress pages causing "page not found" or whatever your Wordpress 404 page says. This is due to something in the URL rewriting.  I reported it to the qtranslate forum on Monday, but now it is Saturday and there wasn't even a reply to my thread there. This is frustrating because Wordpress doesn't check language tags so pages that were translated display their content twice when the plugin is disabled.

The bug  I had discovered involved a Buddypress function being called when I had that feature disabled in the Buddypress configuration. I was happy to see that the if function exists check was added to the problem line of code the same day I reported it.

Buddypress adds several features and fixed one important problem.

Working Forums

The problem I had and any reader will notice is the integration of forums with wordpress. Wordpress's parent company started their bbPress forum software project before Buddypress but after Wordpress however my testing of the software over the last year only made me want to cry. It was never compatible with recent versions of Wordpress and for about a year there was always a message of it being just a month or two away of being up to date. Also the integration needed so that people wouldn't have to register and log in never seemed to work right.   When it was announced that Buddypress would use bbPress as the forum software I was brought to tears and I totally refused to try 1.0 since you had to manually install bbPress and I remember how much fun that was.

I had tried the SimpleForum software on my sites for several months and it was easy to install and configure, but when I updated my sites to Wordpress 2.8 the forums broke and no content would display even after following their instructions so that promising plugin lost my favor.

In Buddypress 1.1, special code was added so that the integration of the bbPress forum software was automated so you couldn't do it wrong. Additionally the display of forums is also handled so you don't need to log in to bbPress to edit themes and other frustrating tasks you'd want to avoid.  This is great because having to manage a separate theme for integrated forums just does not make sense.

Groups

Buddypress set up a group system which works like bbPress's main forums, but the difference here is that different users can join groups and start threads.  On a group page you can see who is part of the discussion group and the admin can manage it all there.

Friends

Being able to friend someone is fun, but the functionality is that you can invite your friends to join a group not any member.

Blog Directory and Member directory

I was surprised to discover that the system automatically added a directory of blogs (including blog 1) and a directory of members.  I thought I'd need a plugin for those, but they just appeared.

Sitewide Recent Posts

If you enable the Buddypress option to track posts, you'll discover a widget for displaying recent posts from all the blogs.  Before you needed a plugin to do that on Wordpress MU. I don't know when that was added, but I'm glad it was. It saved the installation and configuration of yet-another-plugin.

Buddypress still has much work to do even though it is officially 1.1 it still feels like a beta. Although it was announced from the beginning there still isn't a system for users to make a photo gallery.  You can use a plugin for that though.

There also isn't any way to set a membership level or be able to charge for features. (so you can pay for that dedicated server you'll need)  Since the plugin is for setting up communities, I think memberships really should be included as an essential core feature not something left for plugins.

In any case, I'm happy that the development of Buddypress is active and have great hope for Buddypress in the future.  It was nice to see that Buddypress took care of about half of my "wishlist" in the previous post.