Buddy Press – Initial thoughts post-installation

Murder by Death
2021-10-05

 


Ok, I’ve got Buddy Press installed and here are my thoughts as I flip through the settings (which are both directly off the plug-in itself, and sprinkled throughout the other Admin menu settings).

Plug-in settings and Admin Settings:  This has 3 tabs (the last one is just a credit page).
Components: the only two I didn’t turn on are Friend Connections, because we’re a small group anyway (though if everyone would want it?) and Site Tracking, which will “Record activity for new posts and comments from your site” – I left it off because it says “tracking”, though it might be something else entirely.

Options: There are heaps of settings here, all of which I turned on except for “Allow registered members to invite new members to join this network.”  I left this off because it was mentioned earlier that we’d want invites to be at the consensus of the group.

Pages: This tab allows us to associate pages to 3 categories:  1. Members (might be our “about me” problem solved?); 2. Activity Streams, and 3. User Groups.

Users Menu:  It adds several additional tools to this menu, but all save the last one are concerned with User Registration, which we have turned off for the site because – private.  The last setting though is Site Notices, which are notices shown at front end of your site to all logged-in users.  That could be really handy.

It also adds a new tab to Users Profile called Extended Profile.  This is very simple at the moment (just name and avatar), because we need to add custom fields for it under the Profile Fields sub menu.  This might give us an About Us option that we’ve been discussing.

Groups Menu (in Admin):  Allows us to create groups: Public, Private, Hidden.  If nothing else, this might make planning for future games easier, as we can create private groups for discussion.  There’s also a “Group Type” screen where it looks like we can create new group types (beyond hidden, public, private?).  Not sure what that’s about.

Emails Menu (in Admin):  This looks to be a list of templates you can use to send various emails, or that are used as notifications for users if they choose to received them.

I think that’s it – at least that I’ve been able to find.  I noticed that there’s a new notification thing on my Admin tool bar, which I’m hoping will work.

How to see the Admin Toolbar: Under User profile, look for the checkbox that says “Show Toolbar when viewing this site” and check it.  Save settings.

Question for MBD about Book Database

Christine; October 4, 2021

I left this on your blog as well, but it maybe makes sense to talk about it here because it impacts our decisions about the Book Database vs the UBB plugins (or using both). I added the Book Database to my blog by transferring to a new host (which has caused me a whole shit ton of problems that I’m trying to resolve, btw, but that’s another issue). I tried to write my first review today on a book that I added to my database.

Your reviews are always so nice on your blog, with hot links to authors, etc. Does that information import to your post automatically with the Book Database function or are you doing something to make it happen? Because even though I have linked my review with the book in the database, it isn’t bringing over the cover image/author/etc. at the top of the post, which is what I expected to happen. I’m annoyed and frustrated.

Also … because we can if we want to …

BuddyPress is a plugin that will give the site PM/Chat, groups, etc.

The best way to describe it is to go to their site:

BuddyPress

Is this something we’d be interested in doing?  Being that we’ve agreed on a private site, we have the security to consider these types of things.

I’ve never used it so I have no idea if it would be too much, or if we could just pick/choose what we want to include.  I went looking just because I thought it would be good to have a private way for Admins to communicate without relying on email.

Images in comments: good or evil?

Themis Athena and I, as always when we’re let loose on something together, have been madly going back and forth discussing the various details of posts/projects/pages/tags/catgories/menus.

I needed her to see a screenshot and didn’t want to have to create another post that would make NO sense to anyone else, so I found a plug-in to allow images in comments.

  • It allows us to embed images and sound files (also video and heaps of other stuff, but I turned that off;
  • It embeds video links into the comments for YouTube, etc. (though that too can be turned off);
  • It uploads the image from your computer to the media library;
  • Once comments are deleted, either by the Admin or by the user, the image is deleted from the media file.

Did I unleash a monster?