Buddy Dev » Plugins

BuddyPress Simple Front End Post: A plugin to allow front end posting for the users

Brajesh Singh — Thu, 01 Dec 2011 18:13:49 +0000

BuddyPress Simple Front End post plugin allows developer to create unlimited post forms for the front end posting. The current release includes support for custom posts type and categories but not the custom taxonomies. I will include custom taxonomy support in future.

I created this plugin to use with Blog categories with groups plugin as I could not find a nice solution for the purpose. Currently this plugin is aimed as developers. It has a simple api to create forms and to use them in theme. All the nasty works are handled by the plugin, so a developer does not need to dive into the code. Instead just use two lines of code to create a custom post form for any purpose they like.

Here is a screenshot of it being used with Blog Categories for groups plugin

Features:-

Allows to create any number of customized post forms
supports custom post type
supports including a list of categories
has a very simple to use API for developers(I will show an example below)
It is very very Light weight

How to Use It:-

The basic philosophy is to allow developers to create an Instance of ’BPSimpleBlogPostEditForm’ class for each of their form. This class handles the view and behavior both. Once you create an instance, you will need to register it to the ‘BPSimpleBlogPostEditor’ class(which is implemented as singleton pattern). Ok, so that seems nasty, right? No worries, you don’t need to delve into that. There are two api functions which will do it for you. You just need to pass the form name(which should be a unique name, it can contain spaces etc) and the basic sdettings of the form(like post type, allowed categories, who can write, who will be attributed as the author of the post and the post status).

Registering a Form Instance:-

To create and register a post form(with settings), you will need to use the following code


$form=bp_new_simple_blog_post_form($form_name,$settings);

The above code creates an instanace of ‘BPSimpleBlogPostEditForm’ class and registers it to the editor. You can create any number of forms you want. The above code must be called on/before bp_init action priority 10.

Here is a working example with the details of allowed parameters.


add_action('bp_init','my_post_form',4);//register a form
//it will register a fomr
function my_post_form(){
$settings=array('post_type'=>'post',//which post type
'post_author'=>  bp_loggedin_user_id(),//who will be the author of the submitted post
'post_status'=>'draft',//how the post should be saved, change it to 'publish' if you want to make the post published automatically
'current_user_can_post'=>  is_user_logged_in(),//who can post
'show_categories'=>true,//whether to show categories list or not, make sure to keep it true
'allowed_categories'=>array(1,2,3,4)//array of allowed categories which should be shown, use  get_all_category_ids() if you want to allow all categories
);

$form=bp_new_simple_blog_post_form('my form',$settings);//create a Form Instance and register it

}

You can modify any parameter as you like. Even you can set it to allow non logged in users to submit post and save it to another user account.

The above code will register a new form with name ‘my form’ and you can retrieve it later at any point and show the form anywhere using the following code. We need to register the form on/before bp_init priority 10 to allow the controller to have access to this form. If you register the form after bp_init action, the controller will be unaware of the form’s existance and can not handle the save action.

Once a form is registered, you can show it anywhere you like using the following function.


//now let us  find the form and render it

$form=bp_get_simple_blog_post_form('my form');

if($form) //if this is a valid form
  $form->show();//it will show the form

You can use above code anywhere in your template to render the form.

Though registering the form on/before bp_init action may seem like a bad choice to some of you, It allows for server side validation of the credentials/authentication and thus helps from any misuse of the form.

It is a free plugin, please feel free to download it and use it on your custom projects. The Blog Categoris for groups plugin version 1.0.4 supports this plugin. You will simply need to activate this plugin and the plugin will work as the form handler for Bp Blog Categories.

Download Link:http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-simple-front-end-post/

Code Repository: https://github.com/sbrajesh/bp-simple-front-end-post

Looking forward to hear your suggestions for the improvement of this plugin

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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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BuddyPress Group Suggest Widget: Help your members to find new groups

Brajesh Singh — Tue, 26 Jul 2011 03:39:28 +0000

BuddyPress Group suggest widget is a small plugin which helps your users by suggesting them the groups of their friends. It works on the simple logic of finding the groups of friends of a user and then suggesting it. In the current release, I have limited the suggestion to the public groups of the friends only. My special thanks goes to @Gwu for nudging me constantly for the plugin

Like BuddyPress Friends suggest widget, this plugin allows users to hide the suggestions they don’t want to see in future.

Features:-

Suggest new groups to User based on their friend’s groups
Users can hide the suggested groups

Screenshots:-

Widget in the Available Widget section:-

Widget Settings:-

Download &Installation:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-group-suggest

Git Repo:

https://github.com/sbrajesh/bp-group-suggest

Please do let me know your thoughts and suggestions for the improvement. Looking forward to hear your comments.

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Introducing BuddyPress Simple Google Map Plugin

Brajesh Singh — Sat, 23 Jul 2011 22:38:16 +0000

Thanks to @Daniel for the suggesting this plugin. BuddyPress Simple Google Map plugin uses static google map api to add the Maps to groups. It is tested to work with BuddyPress 1.2.9 as well as BuddyPress 1.3(bleeding).

In the current version, I have only added support for group and I am looking forward to your suggestion whether you will like to have the static map for User profiles too.

Features:-

Adds Google Map to Groups
Comes with Widget to showcase the map in sidebar
Simple to Use
Uses Google static Map, so no need for loading any extra javascript
Allows to enable/disable per group
You can set the basic settings in the admin panel.

Screenshots:-

Here is a screenshot of the map in action:-

Group Map tab

Admin Options:-

You can set the height, width, zoom level and the map type from BuddyPress->BP Simple Map admin options. Here are the two options to show it

Map Type:-

You can select from any of the four map types :- Roadmap, Terrain, Setellite, and Hybrid.

Zoom Level

You can select zoom level upto 21(highest) as shown below

Here is the widget settings screen

The widget will be visible on groups page only if the location is set and the map is not disabled.

The Location can be set from Groups->Group Name->Admin->Map as shown below

You can even disable the map for a particular group from admin->settings page

Ok, no more screenshots, now the time for action.

You can grab the plugin from below.

Download &Installation

http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-simple-google-map/

Git Repo:-

https://github.com/sbrajesh/bp-simple-google-map

I am looking forward to hear your thought about adding support for user profile.

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BuddyPress User Notifications Widget plugin

Brajesh Singh — Tue, 19 Jul 2011 18:47:16 +0000

Hi All,

I am sure most of you are busy building the social networks on BuddyPress. Well, here I am presenting another addon to help you a little more.

The BuddyPress notifications widget was suggested by @Reboot in the forum. There is one existing notification widget for BuddyPress but that does not allow multi instance or some other customizations. Reboot suggested to update that widget but when I checked the code, writing a brand new version seemed much better choice & that’s why I am presenting it here today

Some features:-

Multinstance, means you can have as many instance as you want.
Allows you to show/hide the notification count in widget title
Allows you to show/hide the message showing notification count (please see screenshots)
Allows you to show/hide the notification list(well, I am not sure if you would like to use that anyway)
Completely localizable, please use poedit/any other tool to translate

Let us see some screenshots

Ana an example of output(2 widget instances)

I hope some of you will find it helpful.

Download & Installation:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/buddypress-notifications-widget/
Git Repo:- https://github.com/sbrajesh/buddypress-notifications-widget

Please do let me know your suggestions or any thing you want in the comments.

PS: Last weekend, I promidsed to write some of the tutorial tips/tricks for BuddyPress. So, I am going to put eaither one plugin each day this week or atleast one tutorial. Please do keep checking

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Allow your users to change their Profile page background using BP Custom Background For User Profile Plugin

Brajesh Singh — Thu, 23 Jun 2011 20:55:26 +0000

Here is another plugin to spiceup your BuddyPress Based Social Network. I created this plugin a couple of days ago when I saw @findly.tk’s request on BuddyPress.org forum.

The plugin BP Custom Background For User Profile allows your users to set their own custom background image for their profile pages. It allows them to upload a new image and sets it as their background image. So, now every user on your network can have different background by using this plugin.

Features:-

Allow users to Change their profile page background

Screenshots:-

With Cosmic Buddy

With BuddyPress default theme

Background Upload Page:-

Download &Installation:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/bp-custom-background-for-user-profile/
You can follow the development on github.com here
https://github.com/sbrajesh/bp-custom-background-for-user-profile

This is just a basic plugin. I am looking for some ideas like:-

Should we create a pool of custom styles and allow users to select one of them?
Should we allow users to change css (Though, I have avoided it because we do not assume the user to be a web developer, instead a set of custom color schemes will be better)

So, what do you think ? which features we missed? How can we improve this plugin further? Please share your experience in the comments and help us to improve this plugin further.

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Supporting Cubepoints for Global forums

Brajesh Singh — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 20:57:17 +0000

Recently, I got a lot of request on our forum for supporting global forum with CubePoints BuddyPress Integration plugin by Tosh. I looked into the code of CubePoints buddypress integration plugin and it seemed like an interesting thing to do.

Though the current version of buddypress cubepoints lacked some hook to show the point form and update the settings, I am hopeful that Tosh will add it in next version of BuddyPress cubepoints integration plugin and open a new door for plugin developers to support their own plugin.

Here is what I did to support the global forum with cubepoints plugin.

1. Add a hook to BuddyPress CubePoints Integration plugin admin section to allow showing your form.

So, I put this code there


do_action("bp_cubepoint_main_settings"); //allow other plugin to hook and show their point poption here

That allows any plugin developer to put their own form elements in the CubePoints BuddyPress Integration plugin admin section.

2. Allow plugin developers to update their points/settings when the points table is saved.

Just adding one more hook in the function “cubebp_admin” and everything was setup.

Here is what I added, It may be different when Tosh updates his plugin.


do_action("bp_cubepoint_settings_updated");//allow other plugins to hook here and update their settings on save

Well, the base is ready now. We can easily extend the CubePoints plugin and support our own plugin now.

So, what functionalities we are interested in supporting, Obviously, It narrows down to these two

Giving/Deducting point on some action performed in our plugin
Logging the actions

CubePoints core proved a way for that

cp_points($type, $uid, $points, $data)

$type: your unique action identifier (or let su say It identifies the purpose of the point)
$uid: the user id to which points should be given
$points: how many points you want to give
$data: I am not sure the purpose of it. Perhaps It is used in saving logs

cp_points function adds the point and logs the action.

So, Now you just need to add a function to your action and give points.

Ex.


add_action("something_happened","give_point_on_something_happened");

function give_point_on_something_happened(){
global $bp;
$point=get_option("points_for_my_something_happened_action");//how many points you want to give

cp_points("hello_something_happened",$bp->loggedin_user->id, $point,"");

}

That will add point for your action. But wait you are not done yet. The cp_points already logs your event but to display it, CubePoints needs your help.

Here is what cube point does while displaying it


do_action('cp_logs_description', $result->type, $result->uid, $result->points, $result->data);

Just hook your function to show a meaningful message on the action “cp_logs_description” and you are done.

Here is the continued code snippet.


do_action('cp_logs_description', "my_hellow_something_happened_log_message",10,4);//4 is for no. of args

function my_hellow_something_happened_log_message($type,$uid,$points,$data){

if($type!="hello_something_happened")//remember this is same as we used in cp_points

return;

echo  "The wonderful action happened";//well you may make it meaning full by using uid and making something like user x did action alpha beta and received $points point

}

Ok, That was for everyone who want to support cubepoints in their own plugin.

CubePoints For Global Forum

Here is the CubePoints global forum integration plugin.

Download & Install:-

http://buddydev.com/plugins/cubepoints-global-forum-integration/

Here is modified cubepoints-buddypress-integration/includes/bp-cubepoint-admin.php. Replace it in cubepoints-buddypress-integration/includes.

And a screenshot of cubepoints admin settings page

If you are using Global forum cubepoints integration plugin, please note there are four actions defined

new topic create
topic delete
new post(or say reply)
delete post

There is a bug in global forum, the delete actions are called twice, so points will be deducted twice(as of global-forum-v1.0.2). Please make sure to allocate only half of those point to the delete actions. Say, if you wanted to deduct 10 points for post delete, make sure you specify -5 in the admin option. This is a bug with delete option
(for topic/posts) in current global forum. I will update and fix it when the new release comes.

Looking forward to hear your comments

P.s: Special Thanks to Joey for asking me to do this plugin.

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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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