BP-Tricks

How to let CBOX install and setup BuddyPress and BBPress for you

bowe — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 15:10:57 +0000

This quick tip comes in quite handy for those who are having issues with setting up BuddyPress 1.6+ and the BBPress 2 Forums. The Commons in a Box plugin is meant to make setting up your BuddyPress powered social network a snap. The plugin contains some code written by BuddyPress core developers Boone and R-A-Y which automatically sets up your BBPress Group Forums with BuddyPress.

The CBOX plugin does a ton more than that, but just in case you’re running into issues setting up your forums with BBPress 2, this might be the solution you’re looking for. Here’s all you’d need to do:

Install the Commons in a Box plugin
Activate the plugin and follow the steps presented to you
Enjoy your BBPress 2 forums inside your BuddyPress Groups

As one of the CBOX Developers I’m really proud on how the team handled this, and it’s one of the little touches that make the plugin so easy to use and helpful for many site admins who are new to all of this. You can read more about Commons in a Box on the official website and on our PressCrew site.

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading How to let CBOX install and setup BuddyPress and BBPress for you on BP-Tricks.

Add Recent Topics to your BBPress Forums homepage

bowe — Mon, 14 Jan 2013 15:59:06 +0000

Lately I’ve had a couple of people ask me if it was possible to show the most recent topics on the forum homepage of their BBPress Forums. This is quite easy by adding the following snippet to functions.php of your active (child) theme.

You can see this in action on our PressCrew Community Forums. Enjoy!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Add Recent Topics to your BBPress Forums homepage on BP-Tricks.

Balance: A Responsive Premium BuddyPress Theme

bowe — Fri, 27 Jul 2012 09:33:59 +0000

Usually BP-Tricks is dedicated to bringing you tips and tricks related to BuddyPress but today we’re going to do something different. We’ll give you a quick tour of our latest Premium BuddyPress Theme called Balance! (Spoiler Alert: it’s the theme that is powering BP-Tricks right now)

Completely Responsive design for your BuddyPress Community!

Balance has a completely responsive design, which means that it looks great on all devices. Whether your visitors are viewing your site on an iPad, iPhone or any other mobile device, your site will look great. We’ve carefully gone through all the BuddyPress components

BuddyPress 1.5 and BBPress 2.0

Loaded with BuddyPress options, this is truly the most powerful BuddyPress Theme available. We’ve gone the extra mile and included lots of useful features that make setting up your BuddyPress community a snap.

Works out of the box with ALL BuddyPress 1.5 Compatible Plugins!
Upload Default Avatars for your Members and Groups
Activity Stream Tour: Give your new members a guided tour (watch the video!)
BP Component Introductions: Easily insert a introduction text, advertisements or notifications on all the BuddyPress directory pages!
Private Community: Turn your community into a private community with the tick of a box.
Facebook Connect Integration – We’ve integrated support for the awesome WP-FB Autoconnect plugin for one-click Facebook sign-ups.
Social Sharing – Easily enable social sharing buttons for BuddyPress Group and Profile pages.
BuddyPress Specific Sidebars: With a unique sidebar for every BuddyPress component you put the right content at the right place easily.

BBPress 2.1 is not forgotten!
Since BuddyPress and BBPress will be working closely together in the near future we’ve gone ahead and spend a considerable time on making your BBPress 2 forums look prettier then ever. It blends in perfectly with the rest of your community really tying your community together like a forum should.

Multisite Blogging Networks

Multisite support often seems an afterthought for themes. With Balance we’ve created a theme that can be easily used by the bloggers in your Multisite network. create a cohesive network of blogs all powered by Balance. Just take a look at our Theme Playground to see how Balance is used to power the main BuddyPress community AND the blogs in our network.

Your bloggers can change color schemes (or choose a custom color), upload their logo, background images and customize the entire look of their blog through our powerful control panel. Just look at our example member blog to see how easy it is!

View the full Feature list

Pretty nice huh? Use the coupon code BPTRICKS for a 20% discount!

To celebrate the launch of Balance we’re giving our readers a 20% discount during checkout. All you have to do is use the coupon “BPTRICKS” during your checkout and you’re good to go! If you have any questions just speak up in the comments!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Balance: A Responsive Premium BuddyPress Theme on BP-Tricks.

BuddyPress Group-O-Matic: Adding members to groups based on profile fields!

bowe — Thu, 05 Jul 2012 11:11:19 +0000

I think it’s safe to say that the Groups Component in BuddyPress is the most powerful component within BuddyPress. There are countless plugins available that extend the groups component, and I use Groups for pretty much every BuddyPress project I do. What has been missing though, is a flexible and powerful solution for BuddyPress site owners to streamline the group joining process.

For lots of communities you want to add your members to groups as soon as they sign-up for your site. Or maybe you want to put extra focus on certain groups because they are crucial to your community. BuddyPress Group-O-Matic is the newest plugin we (PressCrew) developed for BuddyPress communities and offers site administrators some really powerful ways to achieve exactly this.

So what does the BuddyPress Group-O-Matic Plugin do?

In a nutshell it adds a new set of options to the BuddyPress Profile Fields screen that allows you to put your members in groups based on the selection or answer they have given for that field.

Sounds cool… How do I set it up?

Good question! Let’s start with the basics!

Download BuddyPress Group-O-Matic from the plugin repository

1: Create your super duper xProfile field

For this example we’ll pretend that we have a community based around the movie director Guy Ritchie, and we want to put our members into the group that corresponds to their favorite Guy Ritchie movie.

So we’ll create a new xprofile field in the BuddyPress profile field screen in our WP Admin.

Choose your favorite movie using the Dropdown field below
* Snatch
* Sherlock Holmes

You’ll probably already notice the new BuddyPress Group-O-Matic box below, but don’t touch that yet. We’ll get to that later! You should have something like this (click the image for full size)

2: Create your super duper Groups

Now that we’ve created our possible selections, we’ll create the groups using the exact name* as we’ve named our profile field selection options. For our example we’ll create a group called ”Sherlock Holmes” and a group called “Snatch”. Like this:

As stated before, make sure your group name matches exactly.

3: Use Group-O-Matic magic to link them together

Go back to your “Favorite Movie” profile field you created in step 1. It’s time to set up the Group-O-Matic box at the bottom of the screen. Here’s all you need to do:

So what does this stuff mean? In plain English this is what we’ve done:

“See if the Group Name (Attribute) has the exact name as the answer that has been given by your members (Pattern). Then automatically join the user to this group.”

If you’ve ever looked at your WordPress Permalinks or the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast, you’ll see that Group-O-Matic lets you put in some funny looking code in the “Pattern” box. Don’t get confused, the %answer% input just lets Group-O-Matic know you want to use to the exact answer given by your users, and let Group-O-Matic put the user in the group with that name. Because we’ve given our profile dropdown options and our group names exactly the same name, this works great.

Marshall (the plugin author) has also made a quick video guiding you through this process.

Note: The Premium version of Group-O-Matic gives you much more flexibility in this aspect. You can use wildcard matching so your profile fields and groups names do not have to match exactly. This is great for when you have groups with weird names or slugs. For example your group could be named “Snatch Movie Fan Club” and your profile field option could just be called “Snatch”.

Check out the brilliantly designed screenshot mock-up below (ahem!)

Awesome right?! You’ve now mapped a profile field to a BuddyPress Group. Every member that goes through the registration process will now automatically be put in the group based on that xProfile field selection. You can do this for multiple profile fields and have fine grained control over your community. Some ideas for profile/group mapping;

Language
School
Department
Age range
Skill Level

The possibilities are pretty much endless!

Stay tuned for another tutorial related to BuddyPress Group-O-Matic Pro

In the next tutorial we’ll take a look at how you can force your users to select a certain group after they’ve registered for your community, and how you can add the Group activity as a main Activity Stream Tab. This is all done with the Pro version of the plugin which is available in the PressCrew shop. Check out the screenshot below for a preview of showing Group Activity under a Activity Stream tab:

Check out BuddyPress Group-O-Matic Pro

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading BuddyPress Group-O-Matic: Adding members to groups based on profile fields! on BP-Tricks.

Easily hide specific tabs on BuddyPress member and group pages

bowe — Fri, 10 Feb 2012 18:07:38 +0000

Today I received a question on Twitter from @Calzo:

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/calzo/status/167981462283501568]

I’d thought I’d share the solution with everyone, in case someone else would like to know! We’ll be using some simple CSS to quickly hide any profile or members tabs we don’t need. “Why would you do this?” I hear you ask. Well if you’re building a custom theme or forking BuddyPress templates, you might change up your navigation which could make certain tabs not needed anymore. A good example for this can be seen in my latest BuddyPress Theme called Balance. It comes with a simple member widget that makes the “Profile” tab unneeded when being used:

Hiding the unneeded tabs with some CSS

So how would we hide the tabs we don’t need? Simple we’ll use some CSS to hide them! Luckily every tab has it’s own unique ID, so we can easily target them. Let’s start with the profiles.

Hiding Profile Tabs

/* Hide Certain Profile Icons  */
#user-activity {
	display: none;
}
#user-xprofile {
	display: none;
}
#user-friends {
	display: none;
}
#user-groups {
	display: none;
}
#user-profile {
	display: none;
}
#user-settings {
	display: none;
}
#user-messages {
	display: none;
}
#user-forums {
	display: none;
}

Those are all of them, and if you’d use this code you’d lose all tabs. So remove the CSS of the ones you’d want to keep. If you’re done and you know some CSS, you can combine them into one declaration.

Hiding the Group Tabs

/* Hide Certain Group Icons */
li#members-groups-li a {
	display: none;
}
li#forums-groups-li a {
	display: none;
}
li#admin-groups-li a {
	display: none;
}
li#invite-groups-li a {
	display: none;
}
li#home-groups-li a {
	display: none;
}

And that’s it! Add this CSS to the stylesheet of your child theme, so you don’t lose these changes on BuddyPress updates, and you’re golden!

Bonus Tip: Hide tabs added by 3rd party Plugins

If you’d like to hide tabs added by third party plugins, you can use FireBug to quickly find the CSS you need to target. Simply open up your Firebug/Chrome inspector and inspect the tab you want to hide. You get something like this:

Copy the name of the ID you’d like to change and set a display none on it, using the CSS examples given in this trick. That’s how easy it is!

[tweet https://twitter.com/#!/calzo/status/167993468310917121]

Got any BuddyPress tricks you’d like to see answered?

Leave a reply in the comments and I’ll do my best to answer them in an upcoming trick! Also you can follow me on Twitter to receive the latest BuddyPress news. It’s good to be able to share some tricks with you again!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Easily hide specific tabs on BuddyPress member and group pages on BP-Tricks.

Creating a custom email template for your BuddyPress emails

bowe — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 11:12:31 +0000

Let’s face it, the standard WordPress/BuddyPress emails suck. They are boring, confusingly formatted and have no branding whatsoever. For a regular WordPress site this isn’t that bad because usually your visitors do not receive your emails that often. With BuddyPress your users get loads of emails for all the notifications they receive. Creating a good looking email template does wonders for the feel of your network, and really gives it a more unique feel. Can you imagine Twitter of Facebook sending out completely text based email notifications to you? That is so 90′s! Let’s get started!

Install the awesome WP-Better-Emails plugin

This is one hell of a hidden gem on the WordPress repository. If it wasn’t for Sarah Gooding her post on WPMU I’d probably would have never found it. This plugin gives you a great looking email template to work from, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.

Changing the email template into something more BuddyPress worthy

WordPress Blue? Screw you! BuddyPress red is what we want! So when you’ve installed the plugin visit the Email Options page under Settings, can then click on the Template Options tab. Here you can modify the template that get’s sent to your users, and below is the code I’ve used to give it a nice BuddyPress feel:

















													%blog_name%

													%blog_description%






%content%







													
 Email sent the %date% @ %time%
 For any request, please contact %admin_email%

Upload the BuddyPress Logo to your uploads folder

We’re almost done, the only thing we need to do now is upload a nice BuddyPress logo to the uploads folder. The template I made already reserved a spot for the logo in the footer, so all we need to do is upload it. Save the logo below to your hard drive and upload it into wp-content/uploads/

Of course you can replace this logo for any logo you like, actually I’ll advise you to do that.

Check the results

This template is based on the BP-Default color scheme, but you can adjust the template with a code editor with some basic html/css knowledge. Change the background color, text color and images and you have a completely custom email template going out to your users!

Have fun creating your custom email template. If you’ve made any cool ones be sure to show me in the comments!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Creating a custom email template for your BuddyPress emails on BP-Tricks.

Add @mentions auto-complete to your BuddyPress site with the BP Labs plugin

bowe — Sun, 19 Jun 2011 21:07:55 +0000

One of the things that I really love about the new Twitter app for Mac and Facebook is the auto-complete function when you’re mentioning someone. This allows you to quickly notify a user that you’d like to have involved in the conversation. BuddyPress has had this functionality since BP 1.2 but sadly until now it was a feature that used to confuse the heck out of certain people, and thus it was often disabled.

BuddyPress Core Developer Paul Gibbs has been working in semi-secrecy on the solution to this problem, and released his BP-Labs plugin in just before the weekend. This plugin adds Twitteresque (I love to make up new words) username auto completion to BuddyPress. Like to try it?

Download the BuddyPress Labs Plugin

When you’ve installed the plugin just start typing the (user)name of the person you want to mention and this happens:

Crazy awesome right?! The plugin also adds a nice Group Management tool to the front-end of your BuddyPress network. When you’re logged in as an admin, just visit the Group Directory and hover over a group to see some quick links to the group administration pages. Here’s another preview:

The BP-Labs plugin will be updated in the future to add more experimental UI functionality to BuddyPress, so for those who like to stay on top of things, be sure to install the plugin.

What would you like to see added to the plugin? Let me (and Paul) know in the comments!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Add @mentions auto-complete to your BuddyPress site with the BP Labs plugin on BP-Tricks.

Less is more; Using the right BuddyPress tools for the job

bowe — Fri, 20 May 2011 11:59:29 +0000

Authors note: This article has been published before on BuddyDress.com a couple of months ago.

A while back I held a presentation at WordCampNL about BuddyPress, and I can’t believe how hard it was to explain what BuddyPress was all about in just 30 minutes. Overall I had a lot of fun doing the presentation, but I came to the realisation that BuddyPress has far outgrown the status of “just” a WordPress plugin, and that it had become a powerful social networking tool, which can be used for almost anything! And while this is a great thing, and you can quickly set up a community which uses all BuddyPress core features and awesome plugins to the fullest, it does not mean that your community will be successful if you just provide numerous ways for your members to interact with each other.

Just like Spidermans uncle said; “With great power comes great responsibility”. In our case that means that as BuddyPress community builders we need to take a close look at the functionality BuddyPress provides and which plugins we want to use to extend upon it, and NOT simply use every possible communication method available in BuddyPress. Because while that might seem tempting to do at first, it can lead to a community that never takes off, simply because of an overkill of ways to communicate. The problem of allowing people too much choices, is well-known in the restaurant and supermarket business;

expertly weeding out assortments leads to good results since it improves customers’ shopping experiences. Unilever’s director of marketing for household products, Rob Persiko, says, “Consumers have a hard time finding what they’re looking for because there’s so much on the shelf.” Isn’t that the best reason to reassess retail assortments? >>source

This exact same concept applies to your BuddyPress community. You have to take a close look at what your members want, and how experienced they are in the world of social networking. Here are three things I always do when I work on new BuddyPress projects for myself or clients;

1: Think back to the time you’ve just discovered BuddyPress and remember what confused you: also take into consideration that as a community builder you’ve probably already became familiar with a lot of standard social networking features well before you started using BuddyPress. Try to look at your community with a complete blank and “unexperienced” point of view.

2: Find out how your potential members communicate: Does your target audience hang out on forums, twitter of Facebook? If they communicate in a more traditional way (forums, mailing lists etc) you might want to put the focus on Groups and Forums and strip the activity stream from Status Updates and comments on forum topics. If they hang out with the cool kids on Twitter and Facebook you might want to put all your focus on the stream, and get rid of forums and groups entirely!

3: Do a closed beta test before launch: If you think you’ve got everything set up right, it’s time to unleash a wild bunch of diverse people out on your project. You’ll be surprised on the amount of feedback you’ll get, and how the most trivial things can confuse the heck out of your members. But it’s essential to the success of your community, and take time to listen to the feedback you’ll get and tweak where necessary.

If you use other methods to fine tune your community to your target audience, just let me know by leaving a comment, and good luck with setting up your BuddyPress powered community!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading Less is more; Using the right BuddyPress tools for the job on BP-Tricks.

Adding some cool “Call to Action” buttons to stream entries

bowe — Tue, 17 May 2011 17:50:38 +0000

When something happens within your BuddyPress Community, you usually want others to respond to this activity. That’s the whole core concept of Social networking. By default BuddyPress adds a “Reply” and “Favorite” button to activity stream items, and while this is cool, for some entries you would like the user to go somewhere. This simple snippet will add a additional button which points them in the right direction.

Add the following code to your Child Themes Functions.php or add it to BP-Custom.php in your plugin folder

/* Add Cool Buttons to Activity Stream Items */
function my_bp_activity_entry_meta() {
	if ( bp_get_activity_object_name() == 'blogs' && bp_get_activity_type() == 'new_blog_post' ) {?>
		View Blog Post
	
		View Blog Comment
	
		View Activity Status
	
		View Forum Thread
	
	    View Forum Reply
	
You’ll now have some neat buttons which call your user to action! Here’s an example for a blog post entry:


Credits
[bc_member name="etiviti" size="80" fields="About me,Website,Twitter Name"]
- - - - - - - -
You've finished reading Adding some cool “Call to Action” buttons to stream entries on BP-Tricks.

BuddyPress Shortcodes Plugin

bowe — Tue, 17 May 2011 14:13:52 +0000

A while back I thought about ways to make BuddyPress integrate with the regular posts and pages within WordPress better. I had no idea to properly display BuddyPress information in posts, sidebar or templates. So I came up with the idea to use WordPress Shortcodes to display BuddyPress related content anywhere.

Download Bowe Codes (BuddyPress Shortcodes)

So I approached iMath on Twitter can after some short Tweets send him a document containing all the shortcodes and their configuration options I had in mind. In record time he started worked on it, and decided to name the plugin after yours truly! I can die a happy man now.

So who is iMath anyway? Let’s use a shortcode and pull in his BP-Tricks information!

[bc_member name="imath" size="100" fields="About me,Website,Twitter Name"]

Shortcode used: bc_member name=”imath” size=”100″ fields=”About me,Website,Twitter Name”

It goes without saying that this makes creating custom BuddyPress related pages, widgets and even templates so much easier!

Available BuddyPress Shortcodes

Currently there are 10 shortcodes available:

Member: Display a specific member
Group: Display a specific groups
Members: A list of members
Groups: Displays a certain amount of groups
My Friends: Displays friends of the displayed or logged in user
My Groups: Displays groups of the displayed or logged in user,
My Messages: Shows messages and the notifications of a logged in user,
MultiSite Blogs: Allows you to show certain Blogs from your MultSite network
MultiSite Posts: Displays specific posts from your MultiSite Network

Installation

You can download and install The BoweCodes plugin using the built in WordPress plugin installer. Or you can also download the plugin manually:

Download Bowe Codes (BuddyPress Shortcodes)

note: make sure it is uploaded to “/wp-content/plugins/bowe-codes/” Renaming the plugin is not a good idea because stuff will break!

Activate Bowe Codes in the “Plugins” admin panel using the “Network Activate” (or “Activate” if you are not running a network) link.

Inserting the BuddyPress Shortcodes in Post and Pages

After you’ve installed the plugin you’ll know see a cool icon in the post and page writing screen.

This button allows you to easily and quickly insert your shortcodes. Every shortcode has several configuration option that allow you to customize the output easily. Isn’t that awesome? Anyways here are some of the things you can expect:

Avatar = Yes/No
Avatar Size = “60″
Type = “Features, Popular, New ” (Group and Member shortcodes)
Amount = “10″ (amount of items to show)
Class =”my_groups” (allows you to specify a specific CSS class to the output)

Just check out all of the options and experiment a bit.

Inserting the BuddyPress Shortcodes in Widgets and Templates

To enable the use of shortcodes in Text Widgets just add the following code to your (Child Themes) functions.php file

add_filter( 'widget_text', 'shortcode_unautop');
add_filter( 'widget_text', 'do_shortcode');

To output a shortcode in a template file just use this piece of code

Feature Suggestions?

You might have some ideas to improve this plugin or have questions about the usage. Just leave your ideas and suggestions in the comments. Finally be sure to thank iMath for his great work as well. For some crazy reason he does not take donations, but donations can be made to any other awesome BuddyPress project or Charity instead!

- - - - - - - - You've finished reading BuddyPress Shortcodes Plugin on BP-Tricks.