BuddyPress plugins running on the CUNY Academic Commons

Cross-posted on the CUNY Academic Commons dev blog

A few people have asked recently for a list of the plugins installed on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the spirit of Joe’s post, here I thought I’d make it public. I’m going to limit myself to the BuddyPress plugins here, for the sake of simplicity. (I’d like to write a series of posts on the anatomy of the CUNY Academic Commons; maybe this will be the first in that series.) Here they are, in no particular order other than the order in which they appear on my plugin list.

  • BP TinyMCE. This plugin is messed up, and I have part of it switched off, but I still use the filters that allow additional tags through, in case people want to write some raw HTML in their forum posts, etc.
  • BP Groupblog. Allows blogs to be associated with groups, displaying posts on that group’s activity feed and automatically credentialing group members on the blog. I did some custom modifications to the way the plugin works so that clicking on the Blog tab in a group leads you to subdomain address rather than the Groupblog custom address (thereby also ensuring that visitors see the intended blog theme rather than the BP-ish theme).
  • BP MPO Activity Filter. This plugin works along with More Privacy Options to ensure that the new privacy settings are understood by Buddypress and that blog-related activity items are displayed to the appropriate people.
  • BuddyPress Group Documents. This one is crucial to our members, who often use the plugin to share collaborative docs.
  • BP Include Non-Member Comments makes sure that blog comments from non-members are included on the sitewide activity feed.
  • BP External Activity – an as-yet unreleased plugin I wrote that brings in items from an external RSS feed and adds them to the sitewide activity feed. We’re using it for MediaWiki edits.
  • BP Group Management lets admins add people to groups. Very handy for putting together a group quickly, without having to wait for invites.
  • BP System Report. We’re using this one to keep track of some data in our system and report it back to members and administrators.
  • BuddyPress Group Email Subscription allows users to subscribe to immediate or digest email notification of group activity. Right now we’re running it on a trial basis with a handful of members, in order to test it. (Here’s how to run it with a whitelist of users, if you want)
  • BuddyPress Terms of Service Agreement, another as-yet-unreleased plugin (this one by CAC Dev Team member Chris Stein) that requires new members to check TOS acceptance box before being allowed to register.
  • Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress allows users to customize the way that their profile interests become links
  • Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets. Lets the admin decide the default state of BP widgets on the front page.
  • Forum Attachments for BuddyPress. Another of our most important BP plugins, this one allows users to share files via the group forums.
  • Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress. This is our legacy email notification system, which is going to be in place until I get back from my honeymoon and can replace it 🙂
  • Invite Anyone lets our users invite new members to the community and makes it easier to populate groups.

Questions about any of these plugins or how they work with BuddyPress? Ask in the comments.

8 thoughts on “BuddyPress plugins running on the CUNY Academic Commons

  1. Sarah Gooding

    Wow that seems a lot leaner than I imagined for that site! Are there a lot of custom functions that you have included in other files so as not to have to load up on plugins? Do you have double that number in WPMU plugins running on there?

    Reply
  2. Boone Gorges Post author

    Sarah – There is a pretty good amount of custom functionality built into bp-custom.php and our theme’s functions.php. Nothing huge, though. bp-custom.php defines a modified “Who’s Online” widget, reproduces a couple of old bbPress functions, and does this stuff. functions.php contains a language domain definition, fixes of a couple BP core quirks/bugs, registers a few new sidebars, modifies a few plugins, and tweaks the body classes a little bit. Our theme is a child of bp-default and probably overwrites about 1/4 of bp-default’s template files. I think I have some minor jQuery spread through those files to make various things work.

    As for WPMU plugins – there are a bunch running but most are not really integral to the way the site works (contact form plugins, video plugins, etc).

    In general I’ve tried to stick pretty close to BP’s core setup, which was especially important during the first few stable versions of BP – BP’s core code was changing very quickly and I didn’t want to be at the whim of other plugin devs for key functionality.

    I guess we must be doing something right if it looks to the outsider like there’s some magic behind the scenes 🙂

    Reply
  3. Mark Schafer

    hey Boone, it’s been a while. Congrats on the wedding/honeymoon thing. I’m wondering how the GroupBlog is performing for you. For a while now (weeks, maybe months), I’ve lost the automatic credentialing of group members on the blog. And the making a groupblog during initial group creation fails (i’m using subdomains). Groups can only either be associated with an existing blog Or a groupblog can be created from scratch through the group admin (as long it’s after the Group has been created). Are either of these items issues for you? Mariusooms has acknowledged the problem with the creation of groupblogs during the initial group formation (on subdomains). Did you edit the plugin so that it no longer gives the option for a group blog during the creation of a group? Until this is fixed, it seems to be less confusing than prompting for an action that won’t work at this time. If you did edit the code on the plugin to remove the option of creating a groupblog during group setup, please pass on your fix for this and for the automatic credentialing issue mentioned above.

    Reply
    1. Boone Gorges Post author

      Hi Mark, Thanks for the congrats! I haven’t noticed any problems with Groupblog specific to a recent update. What versions of WP/BP/GB are you running? I have to do some cleaning up on my production installation in the next few days, so if I stumble across any problems or fixes I will certainly pass them along.

      Reply
  4. April

    Hi Mark,

    I’ve always enjoyed the openness of your site and the content you provide the larger community. I find myself wondering, though, if there is a plugin or fix for BP Forums that would allow a better (or any) type of text editor for both forum posts and replies. You noted above that the TinyMCE editor does not work well and that is the only option I’ve been able to find. Do you have any suggestions on workarounds?

    Thanks!
    April

    Reply
  5. April

    Thanks, Boone. I’m not thrilled at plain text posts in the integrated forums and it may be asking too much of my users to use shortcode. WYSIWYG would be a great help for them. I look forward to any solution you may come up with.

    ~April

    Reply

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