Allow users to add their RSS feed to their profile with the external blogs plugin!
The first plugin that will be released on BP-Tricks is a great plugin created by Marshall Sorenson (most people might know him as MrMaz the BuddyPress core developer) which allows members to attach their external RSS feed to their profiles. This is a great way of adding meaningful content to your BuddyPress activity stream and it can be used for numerous (awesome) occasions. Readers of BP-Tricks can start using this plugin before it get’s added to the WordPress repo. See it as a nice gesture to give you our early visitors something extra!
[button link="https://bp-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/external-member-blogs.zip"]Download the External Blogs Plugin[/button]
So how does it work?
Every user now has a new page on their profile where they can fill in a RSS feed to attach to their profile.
They just fill in a valid RSS feed url and press the submit button and that’s it! New posts are now added to their profile stream automagically! How easy can it be?
How does the plugin work?
The plugin checks the feed of the user every 60 minutes OR when someone visits their profile directly. This way the entries are always up to date! When a feed is added for the firs time it fetches the three latest feed items and imports them to the user’s activity stream.
Can I customize some of these settings?
Yes you can! You can do this by editing your wp-config.php file in your domain root folder. settings are very easy to change so don’t worry about messing things up! Just open up wp-config.php and add one of the following lines of code:
define( 'BP_MEMBERBLOGS_MAX_FEEDS', 1 ); // the maximum amount of feeds a user can add. keep at 1 to avoid spam problems define( 'BP_MEMBERBLOGS_INITIAL_POSTS_TO_FETCH', 3 ); //initial amount of posts loaded from feed. define( 'BP_MEMBERBLOGS_MAX_POSTS_TO_FETCH', 1 ); //Max amount of posts the fetch at once.
Are there any known issues?
Not that we are currently aware of. But if you find anything be sure to let us know!
Can I make the plugin even more awesome?
Of course you can! If you have added additional features to this plugin please let us know so we can add it to the plugin.
Is there a Demo available?
Just like BP-Tricks uses the BP-Slick Theme for it’s design, we use this plugin to add relevant BuddyPress posts from across the community to the Stream. If you create something awesome, why not use it? For me that’s the biggest advantage of running a tips and tricks community on BuddyPress about Buddypress. You can eat your own dogfood! Just check out the Stream to see the plugin in action!
That’s about it for now. We hope you enjoy using the plugin and that it can increase the activity in your community!
Looking for quality BuddyPress hosting? We will guide you through all the available hosting options and help you find the best webhost for your next BuddyPress project!
Something about bowe
BuddyPress fanatic, WordPress Theme designer and MultiSite community builder. Proud co-founder of PressCrew. Loves to use awesome in every sentence. Often described as a Dutch Treehugging Hippie.
Can we make a list of users external blogs’ and use as directory?
Hi,
I don’t see any new pages appearing on profiles when I activate the plugin – is there anything else I need to do?
Thanks,
Dave.
Hi Dave,
The RSS setting page should appear on settings > external blogs. on your profile page. Are you sure it’s not there?
How to show the feed in templates such as the profile page?
You can show the external posts on someone’s profile by visiting someone’s profile and choosing “External Blog Posts” in the activity filter. They are all added as stream items so you don’t need a template to easily list/view them
Bowe,
Great plugin.
Any way to get the links to open in a new window?
And, any way to add a excerpt?
Thanks!
Hi Greg,
Glad you like it! The entry for new items is added through the following file: wp-content/plugins/external-member-blogs/bp-member-externalblogs.php
Open up the file and find line 270.
then add “target=”_blank” to the link that takes you to the blog post. That should do the trick! If you need more help let me know!
The excerpt is being added automatically, so that should work fine
“Open up the file and find line 270.
then add “target=”_blank” to the link that takes you to the blog post.”
I’m not a coder and would like to know the complete code to open external link in a new window on line 270. Thanks!
Thanks Bowe – made the change and it works great. I added nofollows as well…
I did find an error though. If you add a feed then later delete it, the feed still imports. There is no way to import no feeds after you’ve chosen one – the old one stays there and actually re-populates the field on the settings page.
Hi Greg,
Please redownload the plugin: https://bp-tricks.com/wp-content/uploads/external-member-blogs.zip
It should be fixed
for anyone who couldn’t get the settings page to display on the menu….(from the above comments) I also couldn’t get them to appear and it turned out I had another bp plugin occupying the same nav position ’40′ , I changed my other plugin’s position to ’50′ and it worked.
Any way to over-ride the settings for an individual user?
I want my members to have 1 feed, but my admin to have perhaps 5-10.
Ok..opening in a new window isn’t working. Here’s what I’ve got:
$activity_action = sprintf( __( ‘New external post %s from the blog %s for the member %s’, ‘buddypress-memberblogs’ ), ‘‘ . attribute_escape( strip_tags( preg_replace( ‘/\s+/’, ‘ ‘, $post['title'] ) ) ) . ‘‘, ‘‘ . attribute_escape( $post['blogname'] ) . ‘‘, bp_core_get_userlink( $user_id ) );
Code can’t be pasted in comments yet.. can you put it on pastly so I can take a look? Remember that old entries do not get updated, so you’ll see when it works when a new entry is added to the stream.
About overriding the settings:
Certainly something that will be added to this plugin, we have some plans for extending it in the near future. I’ll ask @MrMaz to add it in a future version..
Sorry about that Bowe…
http://pastebin.com/MJp0kvK6
Hi,
Great plugin !
I before adding nex feed url, I want to check if the feed does not exist yet. How could I make this ?
Thanks.
Guillaume.
Good question. That is currently not possible. The plugin only checks to see if it’s a valid url, so checking the url for duplicates is not yet possible. We’ll add this to the list of features though
It’s a great plugin. Thanks! I would also like to be able to remove the feed too.
Hi Mike,
Please redownload the plugin, you should now be able to remove a Feed by leaving it blank
seems really nice and could be used for various occassions.
in my case i would like to have the feeds posted in a special groups stream and not in the man activity. is that possible?
best regards
roman
yeah, really great plugin! Im looking for something else even so:
Short scenario description: scientists of different fields forming workgroups. Collecting and presenting really different scientifical articles (rss) to each other. Those rss have to be structured.
We are using the external group blog plugin until now, which allows to add rss-feeds to a certain group. In our case the possibility to classify rss-feeds by certain groups is really necessary and a must have. even though this is not going far enough. im looking for the possibility to allocate external rss-streams to sub-blogs or sub-forums of a certain group so that the flood of information is again more structured. Any hint? May is put it on xmas-wishlist, or am i on the wrong track with your extension, because its very user dependent and not group-organized?
sorry for the long text! again: great work (including that page
!
roman
Experimenting with this plugin, I found that imported the most recent item in the external feed, and that’s it. A new post went up this morning, but the corresponding item in the activity stream hasn’t appeared yet, even on visiting the profile page.
Any thoughts on what might cause that?
Hi Tyler,
That’s weird! The plugin is active here on bp-tricks and it fetches new posts fine.. Could you try with a different feed which is updated often, and see what happens? This problem has not been reported before.. What type of feed is it?
I added this to my theme’s functions.php file to restrict it to editors only:
So far, looking okay.
I’m having a similar problem to @tyler. On our site, it has only updated each author a single time.
Okay, if your feed has characters like & or : in the URL, it doesn’t work right. Interesting.
What makes loader.php run? I don’t see any cron job or anything that would make the script run. I just uploaded the plugin. Do I need to add something somewhere to get this cron job created?
Bowe,
Having the same issues as the others. It works initially then stops. Strangely, if I go to a member’s profile and refresh the activity, the new posts show up.
Somehow whatever is supposed to trigger the import isn’t working right.
Hey Bowe, Great Plugin, it’s a feature I’ve been looking for.
Now I was wondering if we can associate feeds with a certain group or category – kind of how Digg member feeds work (they require you to choose a category). We would like members to choose a group or category where all feeds would post in. Please let me know if this is possible or something you may consider as a feature.
Ditto for me as well! First item was imported and then nothing.
Bowe and Marshall,
It would be great to get the import properly refreshing every hour. This function could be a core element to my community if we could get it working right.
Is there anything that I can do to help?
Thanks!
How and why you find time to create and maintain such awesomely useful stuff for the world is an amazing mystery. Thank you so much. Couldn’t find this in the WordPress plugin repository though – shame that.
It will be added to the plugin repo in the future!
Happy to donate to get this jump-started again.
Hi Greg,
It’s weird it does not work for you (the cron/update stuff). Hopefully Marshall will be able to take a look at the plugin soon, we just need to finish up other stuff first. I’ll ask Marshall to take a look at this thread, and maybe give some pointers
I actually tried using it on another project that is very simple and uses almost no other plugins and it works great. But considering that I’m not the only one with this issue, there is probably a common conflict – plugin, caching, hosting, etc.
I’m happy to provide admin rights if Marshall wants to take a look.
Thanks guys.
So, I just upgraded to wp3.1 and BP 1.2.8 and now it works perfectly. Thanks for a great plugin guys!
That is great news! I knew that the plugin was working here, but it always sucks if you hear it’s not working properly for someone else. My best guess is that that cron jobs where not coming through. I talked to Peter from the BuddyStream plugin and he told me that a lot of installs had this problem. Glad it works again Greg
Hello, we started working with this plugin, and now looking to extend it in a good way.
I was wondering if we can associate feeds with a certain group or category – kind of how Digg member feeds work (they require you to choose a category). We would like members to choose a group or category where all feeds would post in. Please let me know if this is possible, something you may consider working on, or some hints on how we could work on it from here.
Thanks for your good assist with this.
- Jeff -
hi Bowe,
great plugin! any chances to get some function to limit external posts titles in bp activities (have one for bp post titles, but have no skills to implement it with activities)?
thanks.
I keep getting this error with this plugin which says:
Warning: strtotime() expects parameter 1 to be string, on line 35
Hi Bowe, great plugin!
I’m quite new to php, what would you say about new plugin “yd-buddypress-feed-syndication”, is it the same feature in other implementation, or there is something new in there?
thanks.
Bowe,
I checked this for 1.5 compatibility and it does not work properly… will you please update it so it continues to work? Pretty Please…
I’m getting the same error as Christopher Terterian.
Warning: strtotime() expects parameter 1 to be string, on line 35
Okay, I may have a fix, but I’m not a PHP developer. Replace line 35 with these two lines:
$last_refetch = date( "Y-m-d H:i:s" , $last_refresh);if ( empty( $last_refetch ) || strtotime( gmdate( "Y-m-d H:i:s" ) ) >= ( strtotime( '+30 minutes' ) + strtotime( $last_refetch ) ) )
Hope this is updated for 1.5!
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