Every week last year we brought you links from around the web on a Friday and we’re going to carry that on.

Jeff Sayre has some interesting thoughts in ‘The HyperWeb: It’s All About Connections’

Boone Gorges looks into how he built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. ‘Group Announcements tab in BuddyPress is a great read and insight.

Sarah over at wpmu.org looks at ‘How to Write a WordPress Plugin: 12 Essential Guides and Resources’

Siobhan has really sparked off conversation around her informative post ‘Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else’

Last up for today we have some eye candy links for you from Bp Inspire:

esse community

Operation HQ

Design moo

It’s over to Paul Gibbs for today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress.  Lets meet Paul first in his own words from his profile at BuddyPress.org:

” I’m a Core Developer on BuddyPress. I enjoy speaking at WordCamps, crafting code, and helping people.

I provide consultancy on projects and design custom plugins for your site;

contact me at paul@byotos.com, in #buddypress-dev on freenode, or on twitter as @pgibbs.”

A powerful tool in a WordPress developer’s arsenal is the ease and flexibility of creating a widget. Introduced in WordPress 2.8, the WP_Widget widget class abstracted most of the complexity involved in writing a widget, giving developers a framework to build on and prevent time being needlessly spent on, for example, building custom option panels. Widgets remain a great way for a PHP developer to become familiar with the WordPress platform and API features such as actions and filters.
BuddyPress’ Groups component has a similar extension architecture to widgets and we’re going to look at how existing WordPress developers, who haven’t written for BuddyPress before, can get started.

Introduction to BuddyPress components

BuddyPress is a single plugin, but internally it is subdivided into distinct parts, almost into separate plugins, which BuddyPress calls components. The core components are Activity Streams, Blog Tracking (for multisite), Forums, Friends, Groups, Private Messaging and eXtended Profile (xprofile). A plugin developer working on BuddyPress would either extend one of the core components or create a new component. An example of extending the Private Messaging component would be to add support for file attachments to messages, and a new component would be best for brand new functionality, such as a photo album.

At the moment, the Groups component has the best API for developers, so we’re going to be looking at John James Jacoby‘s BP Edit Group Slug plugin as an example. Download it and look at its source code whilst reading this article. The BP Edit Group Slug plugin allows you to change the group’s slug, which is part of the group’s permalink. You might want to use this if you decide to rename the group after creating it and want to update the permalink too.

Hooking into BuddyPress safely

Like with widgets, a group extension requires you to extends BuddyPress’ BP_Group_Extension class. To tell BuddyPress to load your group extension, use bp_register_group_extension(). However, be aware that John’s plugin is slightly out of date about how third-party plugins should hook into BuddyPress; the correct way is documented on the BuddyPress codex. We advise creating a loader.php file and putting in the following:

// Only load code that needs BuddyPress to run once BP is loaded and initialised.

function my_plugin_init() {

require( dirname( __FILE__ ) . '/my-plugin.php' );
}
add_action( 'bp_include', 'my_plugin_init' );

All of your code which is dependant on BuddyPress can then be put into the my-plugin.php file. This will make sure your plugin won’t break someone’s website if they were to deactivate BuddyPress before deactivating your plugin.

About BP_Group_Extension

In your class, there are six functions which you can choose to implement.

• BP_Group_Extension::create_screen() — implement the HTML for the create screen, as seen when users create a new group.
• BP_Group_Extension::create_screen_save() — handle saving of options from the create screen.
• BP_Group_Extension::edit_screen() — implement the HTML for the edit screen, as seen when the group admin(s) edit their group.
• BP_Group_Extension::edit_screen_save() — handle updating of options from the edit screen.
• BP_Group_Extension::display() — implement the HTML to display output from your group extension in the group.
• BP_Group_Extension::widget_display() — invoked when the user is on the front page of a group (by default, the activity stream page).

You are not required to implement all of these functions in your class. For example, as John’s plugin is only used for the group admin(s) to change the permalink, there is no need to display anything to regular visitors. In addition to these methods, there are a few helpful class properties:

• $enable_create_step, $enable_nav_item, $enable_edit_item — booleans. Set these if you want to display your extension on the create/edit screens, or add a nav item. Optional (all default to true).
• $create_step_position, $nav_item_position — integers. Use to change the order of where your extension displays on the create scree and the navigation bar. Optional (defaults to 81).
• $name, $slug — strings. The title of your grope extension, and the slug for its permalink. Both required.
• $nav_item_name — string. Set to use this instead of $name in the navigation bar. Optional.
• $visibility — string. Controls whether this extension will be visible to non-members of a group? Options: “public” or “private” (defaults to “public”).
• $display_hook — string. ADVANCED. Defaults to ‘groups_custom_group_boxes’.
• $template_file — string. ADVANCED. Defaults to ‘groups/single/plugins’.

$display_hook and $template_file are two advanced options which will give you more control over which template is used when you display() your group. You don’t need to worry about these as the defaults will be appropriate most of the time.

Where to get help

Using John’s plugin as an example, I suggest that you spend an afternoon over this Christmas period learning to implement your own group extension and seeing what you can come up with. If you need any help, please leave a message on the BuddyPress Community site where I’ll be happy to help you learn how to develop with BuddyPress. Merry Christmas!

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress is brought to you by Bowe Frankema.  So who is Bowe?

BuddyPress fanatic and Freelance Theme Designer.

Loves to use awesome in every sentence. Also been described by people as a Treehugging hippie.

Proud founder of BP-Tricks.com.

A few weeks 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!

BuddyPress.org changes and a chance to get involved.

After the recent blitz lead by Boone B.Gorges over at the main BuddyPress site there is a call for action here. There are many ways you can get involved:

* Fill in a stub page. Some pages, like http://codex.buddypress.org/buddypress-site-administration/deleting-buddypress/, are empty. If you’ve got experience – even just a sentence or two’s worth – don’t be shy. Share!
* Edit existing pages. If you see something incomplete, incorrect, or out of date, please feel free to change it.
* Copyedit. Even if you’re not a BuddyPress developer, many pages could use some cleanup.

BuddyPress dev chat this week

There was a short BuddyPress dev meeting this week mainly the topics were the every approaching 1.2.6 release and future release cycles. There was coverage of potentially looking at the spam issue at BuddyPress.org and also about the already mentioned changes lead by Boone at the main BuddyPress.org sites. You can read Paul Gibbs’ summary right here.

Releases and roundups

Over at rich! ramblings the BuddyPress Restrict Email Domains Plugin was announced.

Pail Gibbs’ has an Achievements 2.0 October update – the big news being once 1.2.6 drops so does this highly anticipated plugin.

Boone B.Gorges announced the release of BP Lotsa Feeds. This basically does as the name suggests and is a great solution for activating RSS Feeds for just about everything in BuddyPress.

This week in wpmu.org

Sarah had some great posts as usual this week and here are 2 highlights:

BuddyPress Showcase: 11 Brilliant New Social Networks.

Introducing BuddyStream: A Social Network Synchronization Plugin for BuddyPress

We will be updating our themes as soon as we can to take advantage of 1.2.6 and will post as we update them with which ones have been updated. This is just a bug fix release from the BuddyPress team, but rest assured we will be updating our themes to it as soon as possible.

BuddyPress Album becomes BuddyPress Media

What’s in a name? A lot it seems as BuddyPress Album becomes BuddyPress Media and gets hosted on google code. You can read all about this right here in a post by Francesco Laffi.

Achievements 2.0 update

Paul Gibbs has got an update on the Achievements Plugin. This is a great plugin we think can really add to any installation and this new version makes us really excited to see this release that is coming very soon according to the post.

Anthologize is born from the One Week – One Tool

Anthologize was announced by Boone Gorges. This one isn’t specifically to do with WordPress but we think it’s one everyone should be aware of. Sarah over at wpmu.org also explored this great new plugin in Publish you own book with WordPress and the Anthologize Plugin

BuddyPress Humanity – your signup spam weapon

Sarah over at wpmu.org looked this week at BuddyPress Humanity: The Newest Weapon to Fight Signup Spam. This is a new plugin that basically adds a security question that you can customize – we think it’s a great option in the spam fight.

BP Move Topics – move topics at once

Ever wanted to move a large number of BuddyPress forum topics? Sarah has the answer over at wpmu.org with the feature of the Bp Move Topics plugin. Be careful with this one though as once you do it you can’t undo – however it’s a great ‘get it done’ plugin.

Well that’s it with quite a packed Friday Find this week. We’re always interested in trying out new plugins so let us know through the comments or contact of any plugins you think rock your BuddyPress world. If you are a plugin developer we’d love to test out some so just let us know.

Buddypress blogtastic

Over at wpmu.org Sarah posted a list this week entitled 15 Excellent BuddyPress Blogs You Should be Reading – thank you for the mention Sarah. We’d suggest it’s well worth checking out as there are some great gems over there. For this week’s Friday Find I thought it was worth taking a look at a few of the blogs listed and doing a roundup of their latest topics.

Jeff Sayre has an interesting post entitled ‘The Growing Panoply of Speciality BuddyPress Developer and Administration tools’

Boone Gorges has a great article on ‘Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X’

Francesco Laffi delivers an nice tutorial entitled ‘Add confirm email field in BuddyPress signup page’

These are just some links but any of those blogs listed are well worth following some update more than others but worthy of a place in any BuddyPressers list of reading.

In wpmu.org this week

Wpmu.org as always was busy this week so here’s a nice selection of links from over there relating to BuddyPress:

‘Maximize WordPress and BuddyPress Performance With W3 Total Cache’

‘Daily Tip: Limit Groups Per User With New BuddyPress Plugin’

‘Keep them Clicking: How TO Increase Your Site’s User Interaction With Cubepoints For Buddypress’

Releases a gogo

This week’s also been fairly busy with WPMU DEV chucking out a fair few plugins:

Random Theme on Signup
Rebranded Meta Widget
There was also a major update to BuddyPress Group Calendar

We’ve also been busy here at BuddyDress with the release of our free Bp Colours: Colour Pack for the BuddyPress Default theme.

As always if you’ve got anything you think we may like to include in a Friday Find just drop us a line.