Posted by Doktor.Science on November 12, 2008 at 3:29am
Has anyone taken a look at BuddyPress (Buddypress.org), the WordPress-based social networking project?
I just downloaded it and have been pretty impressed by its ease of use and the supplied widgets for groups, forums, and activity tracking. The base theme BuddyPress provides is decent. Several sites have been developed with it (flokka.com)
Comments
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Yes, I have seen it quite some time ago. It appears pretty and cool, some sort of uniqueness in the theme too with two left hand columns ( though it throws the main content slightly too right, imho) and calling profile comments 'wire'.
It packages very nice features out of the box while some of the features are incomplete like group forums, when I last saw it.
Drupal can be made into such or even better package ( or installation profile ) - it can have even better features except one or few things like which is still not possible or problamatic eg. blocking an user, so that even her/his pm is blocked, out-of-the-box ajax comment on profile ( guestbook and APK are there but there is problem when you use with userpoint), showing group icons of subscribed groups on profile page, recent profile visits on APK page, showing image or video thumbnails on activity feed, og resource issues etc
BuddyPress is pretty cool
BuddyPress is pretty cool and while I'm sure Drupal could be turned into something like it or better, there's that learning curve again. While it may not be as customizable, BuddyPress provides out of the box functionality that will be sufficient for most users. Are you aware of installation profiles for Drupal which provide similar functionality out of the box?
Not yet
Installation profiles in Drupal are still in their infancy. Once they get better developed, I think we'll see a lot of Drupal based things like this. As the minnesota said, Drupal can do all of this including the things s/he said it couldn't. The real trick is putting it all together in a package that non geeks can use.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia
ajax commenting , group icons
A few things I said could not be done PROBABLY can be done, for example
ajax commenting ( in some way, though not like Orkut ) : by the ajax-comments module, a small and nifty cool module
showing group icons of subscribed groups on profile page : this can be done, even the groups can have their own banner ( non-advertisement, I mean : a rectangular top gif / jpg ) by image field module and views.
I have not tested the ajax commenting for profile ( but it works great on nodes ), I have tested group icons or banners for organic groups, its really cool - I do not know if any script or any actual social net offering banners to its groups, but with drupal this can be done.
Icons on groups
A bit OT but how did you get the icons on groups? I just ran into this. It can be done on a site by site basis with imagefield but OG has no standard way built into it.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia
Yes, OG has no standard way
Yes, OG has no standard way - it is by adding imagefield and/or Embedded video.
And using views to display the thumbnail beside the name of each OG in the list of OGs.
Each Group owner can upload an image and/or put embedded video code when they create the Group - they can of course edit it later or change it whenever needed.
Ah
Too bad. I hoped you had found something I missed. That's all fine and good if you're only dealing with sites under your control. But it makes it hard for a generalized solution.
Anyway, getting horribly OT here. :)
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia
I hope no one minds getting
I hope no one minds getting OT here :)
But I am not sure I understand what you intend to do. For me it works like this :
any authenticated user can start a group (in fact, that is obvious) , while they create the group they fill in the name, click the options, and can upload an image of their choice in gif/jpg etc.
When the OG list page is visited, all users ( whether they have subscribed to the group or not ) can see the thumbnail ( so called icon ) of that image by the side of the name of that group. In the main group page this thumbnail can be seen again as thumbnail, banner or whatever imagecache preset has been determined.
If a group owner decides not to upload an image a general default picture can be used as the thumbnail. This is in fact a generalized solution for me; am I missing something ?
Not general
That works fine for you but that is very site specific. You may store the image in a field named field_og_icon and another in field_og_image. I suppose I could add some setting to tell APK what the field name is but I'm not keen on that idea.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia
Now I understand ....As far
Now I understand ....
As far as I remember there was an issue submission at OG so that such a generic thing could be done.
Actually it would be nice if APK showed the group icons - at some time down the years in future ( as buddypress and elgg and groupjive of joomla developes more ) APK will need to show the group icons
( and a 'more' link there if the user has more than 'n' groups )
Orkut has the best presentation of group icons or logos in the profile page and this is one area that is/will be very interesting.
I am trying to attach a screenshot : the first left thumbnail shows the uploaded image by a group owner, the second left shows thumbnail of a group video, if they have one. The default blank thumbnails could be different and of course more descriptive and aesthetic :)
http://img218.imageshack.us/img218/9107/samplegrouplistdr3.gif
Once it's conceptualized...
It's not all that complex.
Imagefield
ImageAPI/ImageCache
Views
CCK/Nodereference
OG
Create a node type with an imagefield with two presets: one for the icon; one for the group header. An admin uploads images (or users can upload images).
Create a view that filters on the above node type.
For your OG group types, set up a nodereference that uses the view. When creating a group, users select the appropriate image. The two presets can be used to display the image as needed (in the header, or as an icon).
Then, modify the default view that lists groups to display the icon.
We implemented something comparable to this for a client in D5, and controlled display via the theming layer. In D6, it could also be done via the theming layer, or possibly via Panels with minimal code.
IMO, this is better implemented as a recipe than as a module -- there are a lot of moving parts to generalize.
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
FunnyMonkey
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Thanks
I think we've drifted a bit here. The reason I was looking for a built in OG solution is that I have know way of knowing from APK how you have your icon attached to your group. Right now, it can give you a list of linked text because that's stored right in the user object. But icons are not possible to do generally. They would have to be tailored for each site. Since moshe has won't fix'd the default icon request, that's likely going to stay that way.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia
Definitely drifted
But hey, being directionless ain't all bad.
This would definitely be difficult to implement as a module -- it would require dependencies on CCK, Imagefield, Filefield, ImageCache, ImageAPI, and Views. The install would need to create two presets for header and icon images, and a content type to hold the imagefield that would be manipulated by those presets. Then, it would need to ship with a default view for selecting images when creating group types via OG, and then it would also require that a nodereference (to select the header/icon image) be added to any group nodes.
And it wouldn't be a bad idea to ship this with a group-specific tpl.php file that displayed the header image in a specific way.
And to be safe, we would probably want to look at field locking.
And here we circle back to BuddyPress -- the strength of an app like BuddyPress is that, upon install, many of these items are preconfigured -- ie, the choices we are talking about implementing have already been made, and the UI for changing them via the admin interface is largely non-existent. The strength of Drupal is the extensibility, and the ability to extend the app in a large number of ways. However, Drupal's various admin features create a scary, frequently counter-productive potential: because the option exists, people will explore them, and things get broke. It's the curse of UID1, and the reality that every site needs to have an admin role.
And this also ties into this new post: http://groups.drupal.org/node/17775 -- It's easy to build and distribute a site that solves a specific set of problems -- the unfortunate reality is, however, that the most well designed site can be broken very quickly by a curious person logged in as UID1. This also assumes that there is only one solution/one way of building social sites. In very general terms, it gets down to ease of use balanced against flexibility.
Also, Michelle, from the perspective of development, from what I've seen you can do all of the things I'm talking about while sleeping and blocking spammers on d.o, simultaneously :)
Cheers,
Bill
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
FunnyMonkey
Click. Connect. Learn.
Using Drupal in Education
I think we're having two different conversations :)
Your comments are great for the original topic of this thread. Mine, however, went OT because it sounded like minesota had found something in OG to add icons. Looking back, I realized I misread. What I was looking to do wasn't write a module for adding icons but add the ability to pull out the icons into APK. The only way APK can list a user's groups with icons is for all sites using APK to add the icons in a standardized way. Since OG doesn't and won't provide a standard method for it, that isn't possible.
You do have some interesting ideas there on the original topic. At some point I will be moving beyond my forum / profile tutorials into a full tutorial on building a SN site. Who knows, maybe I'll write a book. ;) Unfortunately, though, I can't actually code or write in my sleep so it's going to take me a long time to get that far.
Michelle
See my Drupal articles and tutorials or come check out the Coulee Region
My blog, mostly about Drupal: Shell Multimedia