Buddy Dev » Buddypress Premium Plugins

Introducing BP Testimonials

Brajesh Singh — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 20:31:32 +0000

BP Testimonials is a plugin which allows your users to leave recommendations/testiomonial for other users on your BuddyPress based social network.

Purpose:-

Allow users recommending other users
Can be used as in Linked In recommendation feature or orkut testimonial feature(Or may be as review)

This plugin uses custom post types in optimized way and will be easy on databases.

Screenshots:-

User Testimonials

Writing Testimonial

After writing Testimonial

Pending Testimonial

Local Notification:

and the mail notification settings for testimonials

I hope the screenshots are enough to convey the working and the features.

Please note this is a premium plugin so you will need to have BuddyDev premium membership to download it.

Download Link:

http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-user-testimonials/

Looking forward to hear your thoughts on it.

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BuddyPress Ajax Registration Plugin: Allow users to quickly register on any page of your website and increase participation

Brajesh Singh — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 20:01:18 +0000

BuddyPress Ajax registration plugin allows your users to register quickly on your website. User can register from any page of your website. The plugin not only registers them but also logs them to the website automatically.

Features:

Easy Registration using Ajax
Users can register from any page of the site
Automatically logs the new user to website
Will increase the participation of users(As they can register and login on a specific page without any redirects)
Allows you to control which xprofile fields/groups are shown(programatically)
Developers/Designers have full control over layout(Yes, you can theme the popup as you want and also control the template if you want)
Compatible with BuddyPress on WordPress(standard) as well as WordPress Multisite(Including blog registration)

I will like to thank @Greg for the Idea. He mentioned it a couple of time for our global forum plugin and increasing participation in the forum topics a few months ago. I got some time recently and created the plugin.

Credit: This plugin uses the jQuery modal plugin by Richard Scarrott

It is a flexible and will allow you to control the layout/look and feel.

Screenshots:

Let us see some screenshots first

Here is the registration screen

If there is an error, the user will be notified immidiately as shown below

And if the registration is successfull, user sees the welcome message and is then logged in to the current page

The message will appear for 1 second(You can control it from the javascript file) and then the page will be refreshed to make the user login.

The plugin automatically filters BuddyPress standard signup links(In the admin bar, sidebar) and activates the modal . So, once you have installed it, you are ready to go.

If you want to show the registration popup box on any other link, just give it a class ‘bp-ajaxr‘ and the the modal box will automatically work for that.

Customizing the Layout template:-

I have included a registration page(register.php) in the plugin. If you want to use your own registration page, you can create a register.php in your theme and It will load automatically.

Controling which Xprofile fields/groups are shown:-

Use the filter ‘bpajaxr_xprofile_args’ to filter on Xprofile loop arguements. Let us say if you want to show all the fields from xprofile field group 2, you can use it in your functions.php /bp-custom.php as below


add_filter('bpajaxr_xprofile_args','my_custom_registration_fields');

function my_custom_registration_fields($args=''){

return 'profile_group_id=2&hide_empty_fields=0&hide_empty_groups=0';

}

Download: http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-ajax-registration/

I hope this plugin will help you all. Looking forward to hear your feedback from you

Note: this is a premium plugin. Also, if you are using BP Autoactivate Autologin plugin, please download the version 1.2.6 which is compatible with it.

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Introducing Facebook Like User Activity Stream(Home activity feed) for BuddyPress Based Social Network

Brajesh Singh — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 01:27:01 +0000

We all love BuddyPress. It’s an awesome plugin which brought a new era in social network development(partially because of the popularity of the WordPress platform and mostly because of the awesome core developres/community). Since the philosophy of BuddyPress is centred around openness, It does not limit the activity to your personal preferences(like showing all the relevant activity on a single page(friends/ user’s /user’s groups activity). It does show them, but they do not give a feel of stream you see on most of the social networks(like Facebook home page, or your orkut home page etc).

In past, many of the members here(as well as I got some mail with suggestions) to streamline all the relevant activity content for a user on a single page.

Today, I am introducing the plugin Facebook Like User Activity Stream for BuddyPress. It is a step towards the right direction. You can use it with a few other plugins to make a social network just like the famous ones. It simply aggregates all the relevant activity for the users on a single page. Right, you can see your updates/your friends update/Your groups update on the same page(as is the case of facebook feed for user).

Features:-

Aggregating and Providing a familiar page to users where all the relevant activity are aggregated
Clicking on Username automatically redirects to His/Her stream
And yes, It limits the view to logged in user for their own network, just like the other social networks do

Here are a couple of screenshots to demonstrate its use:-

Visiting Own Profile:-

You can see the stream link as well as the activity of a private group being shown on his/her profile

Here is what you see if you visit other user’s profile(This is just normal, I am trying to show the difference of the visibility of private activity)

and another screenshot where the updates from groups are shown on the same page even if the users(whose updates are visible) are not friends of the logged in user.

It is most useful if your users are coming from one of the existing social network. they will find it much more intuitive.

My screen shots may not give you the feel of actual potential of this plugin, Installing and using it yourself will give a much better idea of what it can do.

Download &Installation

http://buddydev.com/plugins/facebook-like-user-activity-stream-for-buddypress/

Looking forward to hear your feedback and help you further.

P.S.: Currently this plugin is available to the BuddyDev premium members only. Thank you all for your generous support.

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Introducing BuddyPress Message Privacy Plugin

Brajesh Singh — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 19:00:05 +0000

Ever wished to give your users the control of private messages. Have you wondered how facebook and other social networks allow users to have fine grained control over who can send the message ? Want to give your Users full control over their private message.

Well, Here I am presenting you the BuddyPress Message Privacy Plugin. BuddyPress Message Privacy plugin will give your users complete control over who can send a private message to them.

Features:-

Each user can control Who can Message Him/her
A User can opt for receiving message from everyone, friends only or specify a custom list of users from whom he want to receive messages
Users can create custom list for other users who can send him/her message
Users can create custom blacklist of users who will never be able to send him/her the message
Super Admin can always send message to anyone

I hope, that tells a lot about the plugin. Let us see the settings page for more details:-

Screenshots:-

Users Privacy settings Screen

Privacy In action:-

As you can see from the first screenshot, The user can opt for one of the three privacy level. In addition to that, A user can create a list of white listed users/blacklisted users. The allowed users will always be able to send him/her a message regardless the settings.

Same goes for the banned Users. Regardless of the privacy level, if a user is listed in the banned list, they won’t be able to message him/her.

Download & Installation:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/buddypress-message-privacy/
Please note this plugin is a premium plugin.

Let me know what do you think of this message privacy component and the new functionalities/updates you want. Looking forward to your suggestions.

PS:- A couple of new plugins(and Interesting ones) are coming very soon, so please make sure to subscribe to the feed or please keep visiting the site.

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Introducing BuddyPress Facebook Connect+: Advance Facebook login/registration Plugin for your BuddyPress based Social Network

Brajesh Singh — Tue, 17 May 2011 04:38:16 +0000

Last week went into almost inactivity. I kept fighting with myself, and introspecting about the productivity issues I have been facing recently. Anyway, In the end, I just committed myself to be more active in future.

The past is gone, and I am concentrating on future now. So, here I present you the most advanced Facebook connect plugin for BuddyPress, I call it BuddyPress Facebook Connect+(plus)

Basic Features:-

It allows seamless login/registration on BuddyPress site using Facebook as the authentication source
It works with WordPress Multisite as well as WordPress Standard, with BuddyPress enabled.
It allows Importing users Facebook data to BuddyPress profile
Site Administrators Can map Facebook profile fields to BuddyPress profile fields
Completely localized(not just BuddyPress, but also the Facebook connect sections are localized)
It uses new Facebook api, so obviously It is very lightweight

So, the question you must be thinking is why is it advance or so called plus(+) or premium plugin? Right, This is the first of its kind which allows you to map the BuddyPress profile fields to Facebook profile data, that gives an extra advantage. Also, I don’t remember a Facebook connect plugin working very well with the multisite+Buddypress install. It also leaves a very small footprint in memory. And the use of localized version of Facebook login wizard(well, I haven’t seen any plugin doing that yet).

Let me start By Showing some screenshots.

Basic setting Screen:-

You can see the Settings screen for the plugin by Visiting Dashboard->BuddyPress->BuddyPress Facebook Connect+ as shown below

You will need to enter the Facebook App id and Facebook App secret for your website. Please see the documentation section on how to configure this plugin.

Mapping BuddyPress xprofile fields to Facebook Data

Once you are done with the configuration section, you can start mapping BuddyPress xprofile fields to available Facebook fields, as shown below

You should check the BuddyPress fields you want to import from Facebook and then select the appropriate Facebook field data which should be imported to that profile field of user. The Facebook profile fields are shown as the drop down as below

Some of the available Facebook fields are:- name, username, First name, last name, About the use, User bio on facebook, favorite quote, birthdate, school, Pass out year, School type, Hometown, current location, Work details(employer/position etc), Movies liked, books liked and many more.

here is a screenshot of Non localized version of Facebook Login wizard

The Facebook login wizard will be localized(a feature of Facebook internationalization), depending on your current locale(What you set for WordPress). For example, I changed the WPLANG in my wp-config.php to Dutch – Nederlands(nl_NL)

And here is my localized login button

And the localized Login Wizard

and finally, the last feature of this plugin, it creates better usernames for the user logging in with Facebook. Nothing like the user124356566 or xyz. It first tries to check if the user’s Facebook username is available on the site, if yes, uses that. In future, It will use first name/last name combination or may be a prompt to user to allow selecting a username.

Demo site:-

http://plugins.bpdemos.com

Download & Installation/Configuration:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/buddypress-facebook-connect-plus/
Please note this is a premium plugin and will be only available to the BuddyDev Premium members.

Hope It will help you all. Please do let me know if you find any issues or you have suggestions for the further improvement in the comments.

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Introducing the first stable version of Global Forums Plugin

Brajesh Singh — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 21:10:48 +0000

After 3 weeks of introducing this plugin as beta, I am glad to put it as stable today. There have been many enhancements and bugfixes based on the feedbacks of everyone at forum. special thanks to @Greg for reporting the bugs and asking for features.

If you don’t know what global forum is, please read this post of mine which introduced it. Still, to make the things easy I will be listing the features again here.

Global Forums allows you to create Sitewide forums just like a standard bbpress forum but these forums can share a single installation of bbpress with group forums.

Features:

Standalone sitewide forums
Allows you to create subforums(You can go upto any levels of sub forum)
Support for category forum*
Oembed support(you will need to have oembed for buddypress by r-a-y installed)
Forum posts/topics feed for global forum
Forum topics/posts feed for individual forum
Fully templatable
Breadcrumb support for forums/topics
Favorite topics for user
My Topics view for user
Unreplied topics view for user
templatable admin section for forum management
Posting to activity stream can be enabled/disabled
Full tag support(add tag/delete tag)
WordPress 2.9.2/wordpress mu 2.9.2/wordpress 3.0/wordpress Multisite 3.0 support
SEO urls
Full bbpress text formatting support(Including posting the code using backticks(`))
And most of the thing which you expect from bbpress is available.

So the feature list has grown tremendously from the very first release. And In the end of this post, I will let you know my future plans for this plugin too .

Screenshots:-

Here is one screenshot.

For More screenshots, please check this post

Download:

Current Version: http://buddydev.com/plugins/global-forums/

Version 1.0.2: http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/global-forum%201.0.2.zip

version 1.0.2 fixes a bug showing mysql_serverinfo

Version 1.0.1: http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/global-forum-1.0.1.zip

Version 1.0 fixes two minor bugs with oembed and group forum exclusion.

Older Version:

Version 1.0: http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/global-forum-1.0.zip

Installation and Upgrade

http://buddydev.com/plugins/global-forums/installation/

Found a bug, help us to improve

Bug Tracker: http://buddydev.com/bt/index.php/global-forums/

Need more support:-

Please ask a question in the forum if you need more support.

Please Note, This is a premium plugin and you can download it instantly after joining our premium club. Just click access buddydev premium link on the top and you will be redirected to the joining page. It costs just $30 for 3 months and It gives you complete access to all of our plugins, support forums .

What is more:-

I am thinking of following features to implement and will love to hear your ideas:-

Restricting access to individual forums(restrict users to access a particular forum based on his/her roles)
Porting some of the useful bb plugins for global forum

I hope this version address all the issues reaised, please do let me know your suggestions/views in the comments for the further improvement.

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Introducing Global sitewide forums plugin for Buddypress

Brajesh Singh — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 04:46:14 +0000

I am glad to announce the “Global forums Plugin” for buddypress today. It is available now and this post is aimed to show you what this forum plugin is meant for and what it can do.

The global forum Plugin allows you to create sitewide forums(as you see in bbpress) which are not linked to any group. It works just like standalone forum with the exception of a few things(like template/plugins). Thanks to @Greg for bringing the idea of global forum in buddydev forum and here we have it.

features:

Standalone sitewide forums
Allows you to create subforums
Support for category forum*
Fully templatable
templatable admin section for forum management
Full tag support(add tag/delete tag)
And most of the thing which you expect from bbpress is available.

Let me show an example from my dev system.

Forum Front End:-

Forum Home

Here is the home screen for the global forum

So, the home screen is just like a normal standalone forum where you get the list of all the forums/subforums and the latest discussion topics.

If you are an admin/mod you can see the tab which says admin. I will go into details of admin section later.

Users can create new topic from forum home or from any of the child forum screen.

Single Topic Page

Here is a thread/single topic view

You can post new reply/manage topic from here.You can make a topic sticky/unsticky, close it/open it and many more from any of the topic page. From the topic page, you can also add/delete tags.

Edit Topic:-

let us see the edit topic screen

Sub forum layout

If you go to a particular sub forum, It will list all the child forums of that forum and the most recent discussions in that forum as shown below

Tag Page

For each of the tag, we get a tag page which lists all the topics containing that tag as shown below

Search Page

And here is an example of the forum search result page

Forum Administrations:-

Now let us have a look at the admin screens. When you click on Admin tab at the top, you will be presented with the admin dashboard which shows a concise view of forum stats and let you perform various admin task. here goes the dashboard.

Admin Dashboard

From the admin screen, you can create new forum/manage forums, manage users and perform some other task.

Forum Management

here is a screenshot of Manage Forums

Forum Management page allows you to edit/delete/add new forum.

Edit forum:-

You can edit a forum title/description/parents from Manage forum. Click on Edit forum under the forum name and you will be presented with a screen like this

Delete Forum

If you decided to delete a forum, you can always move the topics to some other forum or just opt to delete entire forum andtopic.

here is the forum delete screen

Create Forum

You can add new forum from manage forum page or from the Create forum page as shown below

User Management:-

You can manage users from the user management page. you can ban a user, promote to mod/promote to admin and demote to normal users. Banning will stop the user from creating topic/posting replies. Here is a shot from my dev. You can see the banned user has a distinct color code.

Limitations of Global forum:-

Currently you can not manage users in Bulk(i.e Can not ban 10 users by checking the box, It is coming in next version)
Some of the features may not be perfect
~~Code is not organized well, I will be organizing them properly in next release which should be next week~~
~~And I forgot to include the rss feed support, so It may come tomorrow~~

Credit:-

Thanks to bbpress team for creating the wonderful peace of software
many thanks to Andy Peatling, I have used most of his code from bp-forums component
Thank to all of the members of Buddydev.com for their support for all the time
special thanks to Mercime, Greg, Chris, Patrick, Roy, Serafettin

Download and Installation:-

Date 11th July 2010:

Stable Version: http://buddydev.com/plugins/global-forums/

Check for new features here http://buddydev.com/buddypress/introducing-the-first-stable-version-of-global-forums-plugin/

Old version:-

1.0 beta 1:- http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/bp-global-forum.zip

Please have a look at the installation documentation here http://buddydev.com/documentation/installing-global-forum-plugin/

Bug reports

http://buddydev.com/bt/index.php/global-forums/

What’s upcoming:-

Well, since I am almost done with global forums, I will be putting the bp-chat(yes, I had promised long ago, but could not put online because of some personal issues, sorry for that) by 11th (Most probably tonight/tomorrow). And remember Bp-chat will be free. So, please make sure to check back on 11th.

Happy social networking with Buddypress and do not forget to leave you comments/suggestion for the improvement of the plugin.

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Pretty Photo Gallery plugin for Bp-Gallery

Brajesh Singh — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 00:18:19 +0000

We have another addon for the Bp Gallery ready today, and I am sure you will love to use it.

PrettyGallery plugin is a gallery viewer plugin using the well know Pretty Photo jquery plugin from Stephane Caron of No Margins For Errors. This is one of the best lightbox script available using jquery and after a few members asked me about viewing gallery using lightbox, I liked the idea to show it using Pretty Photo.

This plugin allows viewing of all the images in gallery using Pretty Photo. No need to go to the gallery page, simply clicking on gallery link opens the images in the viewer. It also allows to view the phots in activity stream, directory and almost everywhere using the lightbox.

What it does:

Shows the gallery photos in activity stream in lightbox
Shows the gallery photos in directory using lightbox
Shows all the Images of a gallery In pretty Photo

How It works

When a user clicks on a gallery thumb/link, It finds the gallery id from document.
Using ajax, It checks whether some photo exists in the gallery or not, and do the user have the permission to view those set of photos.
If Photos are present in the gallery and the user has permissions to view photos(Say if a gallery has 10 public photos and 20 private photos, then a non logged in/non owner will only be able to view the 10 public photos), a JSOn object containing the image details are sent back
We parse this JSON object and activate PrettyPhoto using the PrettyPhoto API.

Here is an example screenshot

How to Use it

Install it and visit the settings via Dashboard->BuddyPress->PrettyGallery settings.

Installation

Download pretty-gallery from here http://buddydev.com/plugins/pretty-gallery/
unzip it and upload pretty-gallery to wp-content/plugins directory
Login to WordPress backend
Go to Dashboard->Plugins->Installed
Activate Pretty Gallery “sitewide”

Usage

Login To WordPress backend.
Dashboard->BuddyPress->PrettyGallery settings and save appropriate settings.
If you want to use the widget, Go to appearance->Widgets, Add the “SiteWide Pretty Photo Galleries” to the widget area as shown below
Once you have added the widget, make sure to check the widget settings as shown below
Click save and you are done, you can restrict the gallery type to “Only Galleries from User”, or from “Groups” or all Galleries

Check your site again. Try clicking on a gallery thumb listed by the widget, you will see a new lightbox is opened which shows you all the images from the gallery.

I am done, Now It’s your turn to use it, find bugs and helping me improve it
Do not forget to let me know the enhancement/suggestion in the comment.

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Branded Login Plugin for your Buddypress Powered site

Brajesh Singh — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 22:43:07 +0000

Welcome to the era of damn cool social networking with Buddypress. So you have got everything from Buddypress, all the components which builds a social network.

What matters the most in a social network is reflecting the uniqueness of your network, so you do custom theme, a lot of plugins and everything to make your social network unique. But what happens, when someone forgets his/her password, damn!,[s] he has to see the not so themable wordpress login/password reset page. It is something which every webmaster will hate to confess, but the truth remains, you don’t want your user to see the login screen/password reset screen provided by WordPress, or do you ?

Well, here I present you the Branded Login for Buddypress plugin to solve your problems. It allows you to theme your login page, password reset page as you do in your buddypress theme. Is’n that cool! Each unique theme have their own login/reset and everything screen. And the best of it, the user will never see wp-login.php even if [s]he tries too. [s]he will be always redirected to the themed login page on the front end of site . cool, heh!

Well, let me show you what it does for you

Templatable Login page(yes, you can put the login.php in your theme/blogin and it will pick that)
Templatable Password reset page(same, put resetpass.php in your theme/blogin and it will pick that one).
Redirect user to front end login, i.e yoursite.com/login when they try to access wp-login.php
Redirect User to yoursite.com/resetpass if they try to access the reset password option.
Customize your Login slug/reset password slug
Customize the password reset messages to send the user to onsite page
Frond end logout, i.e complete replacement of wp-login.php, if you use this plugin, you even don’t need to use wp-login.php

And more, I have added a function to remove the buddypress login menu with the custom menu to point to your on site login page, not the wp-login.php.

I heard someone saying a picture says a thousand words, so why not we should see some pictures then

Here It is enabled on one of my test site wpknight, and I have captured a few screenshots to show it in action.

Themed Login Page

This page is completely themable, I have added the template files for default BuddyPress theme. Note the url in the location bar. It is mysite.com/login, not the backend.

Well, If you enter some wrong user name and password, what do you expect, you should be redirected to wp-login.php, hey come on, you won’t. Here are a few combination of wrong username and password and the screenshots for them.

On Invalid password

And If you leave user name empty and put some password. You will get something like this

And if you entered both correctly, then man! you will go to the home page of the site.

Reset Password

Now let us see some reset password thing, you see there are links at the bottom, well, you can use them to point to reset password page.

Here is the mystery unfolded and the whole process illustrated:)

Reset password screen

So, if you enter invalid username/email, you will be presented with our damn cool red marked screen as below

Cool, ahh yes, I know

And in case you decided to enter correct username/email, you will see our green signal here

Hopefully your server decides to send the mail then you will be greeted by a mail in your inbox which shows the divine way to reset the password. Here is what I got.

About the black line, someone told me, brajesh, you should never show the keys they are secret to the door, so I have hidden it for now.

Make sure to notice the url, It points to yoursite.com/resetpass/validate/?key=some secret key&login=the damn cool user name

When you click on this link, you will get a greeting again like I got here

And that’s not all. You will need to check your mail again in order to get the not to be memorable password for you. I too got some cool password, but again blacked(Now I hope you know the reason why )

Make sure to see the url for login. It links to our front end login page.

So, I hope, you have got some clue about what this plugin does, and If not, you can continue reading this post until my server says please pardon me

Ok, enough fun, now coming back to the topic.

This plugin is built of two things. One is plugin core file and another is template. The plugin handles all the actions and processes them accordingly and the template files which you can theme in anyway you want, is used to present the user with the various screens.

There are two template files

blogin/login.php:- to show the login screen
blogin/resetpass.php: to show the Password reset screen. If you need another screen too, then do let me know in the comments.

And what is more cool that I decided to replace the BuddyPress top nav login link, which points to wp-login.php with the link which points to on site login page. So, once this plugin is activated, the link will automatically point to out custom login page. Further, all the relevant urls which point to wp-login.php will be redirected to our login/passwordreset/retrive password pages, logout link will be corrected automatically using filter to point to yoursite.com/logout.

Now That’s all for me, It is time for you to grab this plugin and make sure your site is now have a branded login.

Download

Get the plugin from here http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-branded-login/

version 1.1.2 (A simple fix for redirecting to the previous page)

http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/bp-branded-login-1.1.2.zip

Version 1.1.1(fixes the redirect problem on comment pages when comments requires login).

http://buddydev.com/download/bp-branded-login1.1.1.zip

version 1.1(added a tweak to catch the url generated by site_url(“wp-login.php”) to generate url http://yoursite.com/BP_LOGIN_SLUG

http://buddydev.com/download/bp-branded-login%201.1.zip

Older Version

http://buddydev.com/download/bp-branded-login.zip
Please Note, This is a premium plugin and you can download it instantly after joining our premium club. Just click access buddydev premium link on the top and you will be redirected to the joining page. It costs just $30 for 3 months and It gives you complete access to all of our plugins and upcoming themes(yes, there is one which can come any time, I call it Bp Mag Theme).

Installation

Unzip bp-branded-login.zip
Move blogin folder to your current theme
Upload bp-branded-login folder to wp-content/plugins directory
Login to WordPress backend
Go to Dashboard->Plugins->Installed and look for “Branded Login for Buddypress”
Click Activate and you are done.

If you are not using bp-default theme, then take a look at the blogin/login.php and blogin/resetpass.php, these two files contains two simple forms, just copy the form to your template and replace login.php/resetpass.php with your template having the same name.

And keep yourself tuned for my upcoming next plugin today/tomorrow which will allow to perform global search on single page in BuddyPress. You know what I mean, yes, on a single page, you will have all the results for the search term from groups, members, forums, blogs and all, that’s cool, is’nt it. And that plugin is free, so make sure to visit and grab the global search plugin for buddypress

And as always, I will be glad to see you as a member whether you get a basic account(which does not cost anything) or a premium account starting with $30 for 3 months membership.

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Introducing Bp-gallery Rc4 for Buddypress: Time to get stable in next week now :)

Brajesh Singh — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 04:49:04 +0000

hi All, I am really very glad to introduce Bp Gallery Rc4 today. We have been working on the gallery for the last 4 months and have gone through several release from alpha, beta1, beta2, rc1, rc2, rc3 and n ow here comes Rc4.

I am heartily thankful to all the members of Buddydev community for keeping faith in me and helping me in putting this work online. Gallery would have never been the same where it is now.

When I started developing, I had a basic idea, develop a media component for Buddypress which allows easier uploads of photos, yes, that was it.

But with time and the suggestions of all the nice and helpful people around, The idea became more versatile, develop a media component for buddypress which handles all sort of media. And we dropped all the code back in November to start with a fresh codebase and develop the gallery which should be capable of supporting all the medias. It is not perfect yet, but we have a got a thousand things to show you what we have done.

And before I go into details, I would like to thank a few people here, specially Mercime, Bowe, Roy, Chris, Patrick, Mike, Nick, and all the buddydev community. Their feedback/codes and support were invaluable and they helped in almost all the aspects, so If I say, I developed this plug in, It is just inappropriate, The gallery Rc4 which you see today, is a combined effort of all of our members here. Thank you all for all your supporting me, all these time

Now, let us come to Rc4:

Features at a glance

User Galleries
- Unlimited Gallery
- Each gallery can have any number of media(Photos/audio/videos)
Group Galleries
- Unlimited Gallery
- Any Member of group can upload
- Only group Admins can create Gallery
Multiple types of media Supported
- Photo Gallery
- Audio gallery
- Video gallery
- Can be extended with few code to support any time of media you want
Privacy
- Fine grained Privacy control for gallery/media
- User gallery/media can have the status private/public/friends only
- Group gallery can have status public/private
Multiple Uploads
- Upload multiple files without any extra effort, just select and click upload
- There is no limit on upload size, It depends on the size you set in gallery settings and/or The maximum upload size allowed by your web host
Uploading and Sharing from Activity stream
Publishing to Activity stream or not is in your hands, you can publish multiple images/videos etc to the activity stream and it will appear as single entry
Shortcode
- For embedding Gallery to your blog posts
- Embedding Photo/Audio/video to your blog
Widgets
- Sitewide gallery widgets
- Sitewide media Widget
Directory where all the public galleries are listed, you can search them, filter them by Audio/video/photo
Security:- I can vouch for gallery being 99% secure, the rest one percent is always uncertain
Object caching: If you enable persistence object caching, you can reduce upto 90% database queries
100% Buddypress aware, disable Buddypress, the Gallery will not cause any issue/error.
Modular and decoupled
- decoupled from Group(If group is disabled, gallery will still work)
- decoupled from Activity(If you disable activity, gallery will work, but support for commenting and publishing to activity stream will be no more available)
- decoupled from Friends(The privacy features will work even if you disable friends component)
Extra addons
- WordPress Plugin for TinyMce to insert gallery/media to your post/page(Thanks to Phillip)
- Widget to show sitewide listing of gallery/images(Thanks to Phillip)
- Highslide Slideshow for showing Images (Thanks to Phillip, will be coming soon)
- jQZoom Plugin to show case site wide Public Photos
Site Admin settings:
- Control which media types are allowed, enable/disable galley types,i.e you can enable/disable Photo Gallery/Video Gallery/Audio Gallery
- Set maximum upload space per user
- set maximum upload file size
- Enable Disable gallery Link
- Enable/disable upload from activity stream
- Show the remaining/used space to users
- got an issue, enable debug mode of gallery to see what’s going inside
- Set Image sizes for Thumbnail/medium/Full size
What Is Coming In future:
- FFMPEG Support for Video Galleries
- Face Detection/Tagging(OpenCV extension will be required)
- Gallery from Youtube/picass/flickr/vimeo etc
- Various CDN Support
- Decoupling of Video Player to allow you use various players to choose from
Upcoming Addons:- atleast 4-5 slideshow widgets to showcase the gallery media(Including supersized,mooflow and more)

Introduction:

Bp Gallery is the ultimate gallery plugin for your Buddypress powered site. It Gives you complete control over the media. Since the files are stored on your server, so you have full control over the media and you don’t have to worry about giving your private data to anyone else.

here are some screen shots of the most recent release to show you, what It is like

Gallery Creation:

When a user is at his/her home, they will see the gallery link. Clicking on it brings a screen which looks like this

Click On Create gallery button, or Create gallery link, a new page will be loaded using ajax which looks like this

here you can select the type of gallery (i.e You want to create Photo gallery/Audio gallery/Video gallery), enter some title for you gallery , description is optional, and click save, the request will be submitted asynchronously and if gallery is successfully created, you will be redirect to a new page where you can upload media(depends on the type of gallery, if it is a photo gallery, you can upload multiple photos, if video gallery, then you can upload multiple videos). here is a screenshot of upload screen

Select as many files as you want to upload and click open.

The files will be listed as shown below

Click Upload and save Button and file will start uploading.

Screen shot of Upload progress screen

When all the upload is complete, you will be presented with the screen to edit media details(there is no page reload, It is accomplished via ajax).

here is what you will see

Bulk Media edit

You can change the title/descriptions and set the privacy level here. Once you are done, click save and you are done. You can visit the gallery by clicking the navigation above which says back to “gallery name”.

Drag and drop reordering of media inside gallery

In case you want to change the display order of the photos/videos, click organize tab, and you will be presented with a screen like this
Drag and Drop Photos to sort. Once you are done, click save and yes, you media is reordered.

Click, edit details tab, to edit gallery description, In case your gallery does not has a cover image and you don’t want to use ythe images from gallery as cover, you can upload a separate cover image here

Publishing to activity stream:

If you have uploaded multiple media and Want to publish them to activity, click the link above edit screen, which says publish to activity or click hide notification tab to hide the notification.

If you clicked publish to activity stream, the media will be published to activity stream.

here is how it looks like.

Activity Stream

for Photo gallery

And If published media were Videos, you will see an entry in activity stream like this

i.e, A Video Player with the playlist items.

Now, The post is getting too long, so I will just post a few more screen shots.

Video Gallery

here is how Video gallery page looks like

Media comments

Activity Comments are synchronized with media, so If someone leaves comment on media and It appears in activit and then someone leaves comment in activity stream, the comment will appear on single media page.

And here is what appears on single media page

And do not forget, we have Group Galleries too

Group Galleries

How about uploading from activity stream:

Uploading from Activity Stream

And How about a gallery page, where we can lists public galleries/ search galleries by title/description and filter by type(say Photo/audio/video)

Gallery Directory

And, don’t forget we have shortcodes for embedding galleries to Blog posts and widgets to list galleries/photos in sidebar.And here is my What I just did a few minutes ago, well, you can showcase the most recent public photos in sidebar and showcase it using jqZoom plugin

Faq

1. How many galleries are permitted: There is no limit. It all depends on you and your server. Every User/group can have any number of galleries with any number of medias inside(In their permitted space)

For the screen shots of Gallery Home page/media listing, please check this post. http://buddydev.com/buddypress/bp-gallery-beta-available-now-download-test-and-enjoy/

Downloads

Please Visit this link for the current status and download: http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-gallery

Download BP-Gallery Rc4 update 4-rev83: http://buddydev.com/http//buddydev.com/download/bp-gallery-rc4update4-r83.zip

jQZoom from here http://buddydev.com/download/bp-jqzoom.zip

Phillip’s BP Gallery Sidebar widget

Phillip’s Tiny MCe Plugin for Inserting Shortcodes

Installation

Please check this page:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-gallery/installation/

Please Note, This is a premium plugin and you can download it instantly after joining our premium club. Just click access buddydev premium link on the top and you will be redirected to the joining page.It costs just $30 for 3 months and It gives you complete access to the source code. You can do what you want to do with it without any restrictions.

So, Go ahead, register for a buddydev premium membership and download gallery now. The membership not only gives you access to gallery but may other premium plugins and our upcoming theme and not to mention the forums, a great place for asking questions/support.

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