Tag Archives: BuddyPress

Google Summer of Code, WordPress, and BuddyPress

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I’m extremely pleased to announce (after weeks of keeping mum until the official word was released!) that I’ll be co-mentoring several projects for Google Summer of Code and WordPress. For those of you who don’t know, GSoC is an initiative by Google to support summer coding projects by undergraduate and graduate students working on various established open-source projects. WordPress has 15 projects this year, several of which are related to BuddyPress. As a mentor on two of the projects, I’ll be helping to hone the project scopes, do code reviews, and in general lend a hand where I can to my two mentees. Here they are:

I am very excited to get started working with these great students!

More Import from Ning goodness – ( Ning to BuddyPress / WordPress )

As promised in my last post, I’ve reworked the Import from Ning WordPress plugin so that it is BuddyPress-aware. That means that, if you run the plugin on a blog where BuddyPress is activated, additional steps will be added to the import process, allowing you to automatically import whichever profile fields and data you’d like from the Ning export.

I also got rid of the pesky copy-and-paste requirement in favor of a direct .csv file upload.

Check out the plugin at its new homepage.

Importing Ning users into WP

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Today Ning announced that it would be ending its free social networking service. I tweeted something to the effect that this event is a wake-up call: When you use closed-source, third-party hosted solutions for something as valuable as community connections, you are leaving yourself open to the whims and sways of corporate boards. It’s not that Ning is evil or anything – it goes without saying that they need to make a profit – but their priorities are importantly different from those of their users. In the same way that Ning moves from a freemium model to a paid model, Facebook could start selling your crap, Twitter could crash, Tumblr could go out of business, etc.

All this is a good argument to be using software solutions that are more under your control. Like – drumroll – WordPress and BuddyPress.

Enough moralizing. I whipped together a plugin this afternoon called Import From Ning that will allow you to get a CSV export of your Ning community’s member list (the only content that Ning has a handy export feature for, alas) and use it to import members into a WordPress installation.

As of right now, it does not have any BuddyPress-specific functionality. But the data that it does import – display name, username, email address – are enough to populate at least the beginnings of a BuddyPress profile. The next thing to add is the auto-import of certain profile fields. I might try to do this tomorrow. The plugin is based on DDImportUsers – thanks!

Instructions:

  • Download the zip file and unzip into your WP plugins directory
  • Look for the Import from Ning menu under Dashboard > Users (unless you’re running a recent trunk version of BuddyPress, in which case it will be under the BuddyPress menu)
  • Follow the instructions on that page

Download the plugin here.

Big new version of Invite Anyone for BuddyPress

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My BuddyPress function Invite Anyone has always been misleadingly named. It expanded on BuddyPress’s default setup, which only allows members to send group invitations to people who they’re friends with, by allowing individuals to send invitations to anyone in the entire installation. This only qualifies as inviting anyone on a, er, very austere ontology of personhood. The new version of Invite Anyone, version 0.4, adds a new tab to BuddyPress profile tabs that allows invitation both to groups and to the site in general via email. It’s a big update, both in terms of features and in terms of sheer code (pretty sure the number of lines of code is close to triple what it was before).

And now you know what I did on my spring break.

If you know what’s good for you, you will Check It Out.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Group Management

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Another day, another plugin for BuddyPress. In BP < 1.2, it was impossible for site admins to manage group membership in groups where they weren't also the local admin. This is good in a lot of situations, but in some applications of BP it can be a pain – the system administrator needs more power in order to correct problem, wreak havoc, and so on. In BP 1.2+ the situation is better – admins can manage groups more – but it's still not all that easy to see everything in one place. This plugin rectifies the situation by allowing site admins to manage the members of groups across their BP installation from a single screen.

Read more about it.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Import Blog Activity

I wrote a BuddyPress plugin today that is very ugly. It imports activity into BuddyPress from blog posts and comments that occurred before you had BuddyPress installed. It’s ugly because it’s sloppily coded and extremely inefficient and likely to hit PHP memory limits every time you run it. But it does the job, so I thought I’d post it and share it with others.

Read more about it, along with a bunch of warnings, here.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP MPO Activity Filter

In the past I and others have experienced some problems with the way that More Privacy Options for WPMu interacts with BuddyPress – or, to be more exact, with the way that the two don’t recognize each other. Blogs marked as private via MPO were getting plastered all over the public activity streams. In the past I have suggested some unpleasant but more or less functional core hacks, but now I’ve developed a plugin that does the job in the right way. It’s called … drumroll … BP MPO Activity Filter.

Check it out here.

New BuddyPress plugin: BP Include Non-Member Comments

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I wrote a plugin this afternoon that solves a small but potentially annoying limitation of BuddyPress: its inability to show comments from non-members in the sitewide activity stream. In a streak of extreme creativity, I dubbed the plugin “BP Include Non-Member Comments”. Read more about it, and download it for your own use, here.

2009 by the numbers

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What’d I do in 2009? Some of my numbers are paltry and lame, but here they are anyway.

I posted 51 posts to this blog, teleogistic.net (and a handful of posts in other places). Those posts brought 183 legit comments. 3,299 unique visitors stopped by from 84 countries and 49 US states (WTF South Dakota?). The most popular search terms that led people here were: 1) read it later kindle, which led people to this post, 2) os x migration “less than a minute remaining”, which led people to this post, and 3) boone gorges, which led people to my beautiful face. The most popular posts on this blog were 1) Help me alpha test BuddyPress Forum Attachments (which is listed as the help page for a BuddyPress plugin I released, and so probably gets a lot of confused eyeballs), 2) Displaying the BuddyPress Admin Bar in Other Applications, which got added to StumbleUpon and, appropriately enough, contains hacks that did not originate with my paltry brain, and 3) Hub-and-spoke Blogging with Lots Of Students, which was interlinked with a lot of other great posts on the issue of classroom blogging. Not terrible for the first year of a blog, considering that BLOGS ARE DEAD.

I learned a lot about coding during 2009. When 2009 started, I knew quite a bit about HTML and CSS, as well as a smattering of PHP. I opened my first WordPress code file in about March. Since then I have released seven WordPress/BuddyPress plugins, a MediaWiki extension, and a handful of smaller hacks through the GPL, comprising some 4300 lines of code (about half of which was modified from existing code, and half of which is more or less from scratch).

I tweeted around 3300 times this year.

I racked up somewhere in the neighborhood of 180 hours of time this year commuting to and from work. Less impressively, I ran a pathetic 675 miles.

As some of you know, I do lots of crossword puzzles. According to my back-of-the-envelope calculations, I did around 1,960 crosswords this year, a number that is made up mostly of the first 13 puzzles listed on this page. I made a pledge at the beginning of the year to do my crosswords with pencil and paper (rather than on the computer) to improve my lackluster performance at ACPT. I stuck to that pledge: I can remember doing about three crosswords on the computer this year, as the rest were done on paper. We’ll see how all the practice pans out in February.

Here’s to a better 2010!