BuddyPress and bbPress can be plugged into each other such that BuddyPress groups get their own discussion forums, which are powered by bbPress. Adding Burt Adsit’s bpGroups means that private and hidden groups can have their discussion forums private too. But a major hurdle is email notification: Certain kinds of BP communities simply won’t get rolling if there’s no easy way for users to get email notification of new discussions. There are solutions out there to assuage this problem within bbPress (notably Thomas Klaiber’s Post Notification, which served as the inspiration for the mechanics of my own plugin), but email notification remains hidden in bbPress favorites, instead of in an out-front toggle.
Group forum notification is coming in a future version of BuddyPress, but it’s important enough that I needed it now.
This set of plugins, called Group Forum Subscription, fixes that. Features:
- Users can subscribe to individual discussion topics from within BuddyPress
- Users can subscribe to topics on a group-by-group basis – that is, one can subscribe to all existing and future topics associated with a particular BuddyPress group
- Users are automatically unsubscribed from a group’s discussions when they leave the group
- Administrators can subscribe all users to the appropriate forums with a single click (potentially handy for first-time setup
- Administrators can toggle whether email notification is turned on by default.
- Administrators can determine whether the topic links in the notification emails will point to bbPress or to the BuddyPress forum interface
Installation instructions
- Download the package
- Upload the BuddyPress plugin bp-group-forum-subscription.php to the plugins directory of your main WPMU blog and activate it
- If you prefer for the members of your community to use the BuddyPress posting interface for discussions, add the following hook:
<?php do_action( 'groups_forum_topic_custom_content' ); ?>
immediately after
<div class="info-group">
in /[your bp theme dir]/groups/forums/topic.php
- If you plan for your users to use bbPress for forum reading and posting, upload the bbPress trigger plugin bb-group-forum-subscription.php to [bbpress-install-dir]/my-plugins/ and activate it through the bbPress admin screen. Please note: the bbPress plugin changes the (IMO somewhat opaque) “Add to favorites” link on each topic page to a more straightforward Subscribe/Unsubscribe. If you like this change, open up [bbPress-theme-dir]/topic.php, and change
user_favorites_link();
to
user_favorites_link( array('mid' => __('Subscribe to this discussion')),array('mid' => __('Unsubscribe from this discussion')));
You can configure the plugin on the admin page (Group Forum Subscription under Dashboard Settings. Members of your BP community can tinker with their subscriptions either on the individual topic pages (in bp or bbpress) or on their BP Settings > Notification page (where they can subscribe/unsubscribe to entire groups).
I’m in the process of setting up BuddyPress 1.1, which was just released today. Once I’ve got a dev instance of it up and running, I will do the necessary fixes to make the plugin run on the new version. (I don’t think it will be too hard, given the number of craptastic workarounds I had to do in this version because of the absence of all the nice 1.1 hooks.) Stay tuned.
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12 Comments
This is excellent Boone, I am going to have to try this out, it will work with pre1.1 version? I’m running 1.0.3.
Hi Jim. I originally wrote the code for 1.0.3, and only afterward retrofitted it for 1.1. I have not done super extensive testing to make sure that it still works with 1.0.3, but it should. I’m running it on the production version of the Academic Commons, which is running 1.0.3, so I hope it works, anyway :)
Hey Boone,
The bbPress instructions listed in this post wasn’t in the readme.txt of the plugin package.
PS. I like what you did over at the CUNY BP site – how you are redirecting BP group forum posts to their bbPress equivalents.
I’ve copied your method on a test BP < 1.1 install and it works beautifully! I can't believe I didn't think of this method before! (I did have to hack some core files to do this though!)
Hi Ray,
Thanks for the comments. Yeah, I think I deleted the bbPress instructions from the plugin package when I went to 1.0, but I should put them back.
I have been meaning to write up the process by which I redirected BuddyPress forum traffic over to bbPress, but I got lazy and didn’t do it. Glad you figured it out on your own! I remember it took some weird hacks to fix all the links. I should really write about it one of these days, before the knowledge leaves my head forever.
How to Integrate WordPress and bbPress in 3 Simple Steps
Boone, you got to watch the spambots!
Har har har, thanks Ray. I’ve been having issues with Akismet and my server config today. Sorry if I have bespoiled your feeds.
I enjoy reading that you are very fond of BuddyPress, however BP being integrated into WP/WPMU merge would not be the future of the WP/WPMU merge.
The whole idea of having the ability to have plugins is so that people can have a choice.
All of the functionality of BuddyPress can be done with Plugins. This gives people like myself have the ability to choose how they want it shown and displayed or even have the functionality in the first place.
- Phil
This comment was originally posted on bavatuesdays
I agree Phil, and I see no need for BuddyPress to be a core feature at all. I just thing it will be key to the direction of WP in terms of thinking through some of the other syndication stuff I am obsessed with. Sorry to make it seem I was advocating for BP as a core feature, that wasn’t really my take. But I am arguing for some robust syndication features like FeedWordPress and the like to be built in, it just makes sense to me. But then again I am blinded by my own use cases.
This comment was originally posted on bavatuesdays
It’s likely aggregation won’t be rolled in as core, since it’s more a feature not everyone woudl use / need. Thus plugin territory.
The simplest explanation is a merge gives everyone less code to work with. WP.com is the business, and the way changes have been rolled in recently is like this:
- wp.org gets updated
- wp.com gets updated with the changes
- wpmu gets updated
Now, way way back, the process had those last two steps reversed a bit. After the merge, the work goes like this:
- wp.org gets updated
- wp.com gets updated with the changes
See the difference?
Donncha has said from the get-go, multiple times, that existing sites will be able to upgrade. (Duh, wp.com still has to run) Really, the only huge change is the name. Which Matt has said he’s never liked.
This comment was originally posted on bavatuesdays
Hello, Mr. Groom,
Just wanted to ask: given that the functionality you describe has been around in Drupal for, say, the last 18 months (being conservative here – it’s probably been around for longer) why aren’t you looking at Drupal for this?
Toss in some Solr Search goodness, and it’d be tasty!
Cheers,
Bill
This comment was originally posted on bavatuesdays
Hey Bill,
Good to here your Drupal voice here, was beginning to think that the whole application had been discontinued More seriously, we did try to think through a social element of UMW Blogs using Drupal, but quite honestly we get a whole lotta functionality for over 3000 users with a simple plugin. And while BuddyPress is far from perfect, it gives us a number of options simply by dropping in a plugin. The larger question independent of WP or Drupal, is whether a social network in a community using either application will work—their seems to be so many other options out there, that I have actually not been pushing the social networking part at all. And the groups in BuddyPress—though quite underdeveloped compared to Drupal’s Organic Groups, provides some interesting ways to think about classes, but that is all still conceptual. I am taking BuddyPress low, and seeing if it has as much potential as I first imagined. I guess we’ll see, but the use of it is pretty much born of the fact we are using WPMu for this already.
This comment was originally posted on bavatuesdays
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