Paul Wong-Gibbs 9:43 am on October 21, 2014

In just over a week,…

In just over a week, WordCamp San Francisco happens. As far as BuddyPress goes, some of the BuddyPress core team will be there, and — more importantly — a number of community contributors will be there. 🙂 We’re looking forward to catching up with everyone, old friends and new, and chatting with you about BuddyPress.

WordCamp is on Saturday (and Sunday), and the highlight of the weekend is, without doubt, our very own @boonebgorges‘ session, “Be a Volunteer, not a Martyr: a Practical Guide to Contributing“.

Sunday is split between regular presentations and a Contributor Day. If you’re planning to attend the Contributor Day, would you be interested in learning about the variety of ways that you can help contribute to BuddyPress, and getting the benefit of advice and the experience from existing contributors to help you get started? Let us know.

After the conference has wrapped up, Tuesday and Wednesday will be set aside for WordPress.org contributor team meetups — and BuddyPress will be there, too. 🙂 It’s an opportunity for some of the people from the contributor teams who normally work across the internet to talk face-to-face and enjoy working in each others’ company.

The purpose of this blog post is to invite suggestions that you would like the BuddyPress contributors to discuss while at the event. Questions that are open and prompt further discussion are best. For example, questions about a specific Trac ticket are best to keep on Trac, but open-ended questions like “what is BuddyPress planning to do with media in the future” are fun and would work really well.

So… what’s on your mind? 🙂

Paul Gibbs 9:44 am on October 21, 2014

To start the discussion, I’m hoping we can talk about each existing component – what we like about it, what we don’t like, and what we want it to become in the future. And how we can get there. 🙂
hnla 10:19 am on October 21, 2014

‘Messaging‘ how far could it be taken?, Definitely room for improvements in the user account screen layout, but is there anything in the core component that could be expanded on? Personally have been wanting to see what could be done with sitewide messaging in both core functionality and in display presentation at some point when I have a little down time.

User Profiles & WP roles: It has been raised in the past to look to tie BP into WP user roles/capabilities, perhaps lose the pseudo BP capability – is this something that would strengthen BP? One of the commonest requests or discussions seen regarding BP and WP in a community sense has to be users defined by a group identity/role, this isn’t necessarily a BP area to have to define and can be achieved with some custom functionality but could BP improve this area given it so nicely extends and defines the user via the xprofile component and user account screens.

Any chance of moving SF a little closer to europe 🙂 , it is an awful long and expensive way away to travel to, it’s a shame more of us can’t be involved 😦
- David Bisset 12:50 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  SF closer to Europe… i would campaign for a BuddyCamp at the next WordCamp London or WordCamp Europe at least.
  - imath 2:56 pm on October 21, 2014
    
    If only !! 🙂 I agree a major BuddyPress Europe event would be awesome
    - hnla 3:00 pm on October 21, 2014
      
      be nice but probably a lot of work to organize as standalone, most likely have to be part of WC Europe, best chance of drawing from a general captive WP audience ? 🙂
danbp 12:41 pm on October 21, 2014

The “Boone Session” sounds really promise full ! And i already agree with him in regard of his preamble.

Activities – Will the activity component be continued as is ?
We have actually two great different activity types: content specific and technical specific.

X published a new post is a very user friendly information (from user to user – human to human)
X modified his profile is just tech friendly (from system to user – machine to human) and honnestly, who cares about outside of the site admin ?

Of course they are projects where such informations are equaly important, but for the common usage – so far i observe this after many years of support help – SWA is rarely seen for the strength of its diversity and its polyvalence, but mainly for content apparence/exposure (posts and comments essentialy).
IMO, the swa is to verbose (even noisy) and could be better displayed/distributed over a community site with some component options.
As example:
X modified his profile on dashboard (default) and as view option profile only or profile and SWA

Have a nice and constructive WPSF ! Cheers. 🙂
- hnla 2:57 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  I would second a general think about activity updates, types – as described above – and perhaps a little more admin backend control over them at present we have to do a fair bit of additional work filtering things to adjust this aspect for specific cases.
David Bisset 12:50 pm on October 21, 2014

I will only be there until Monday EOD and i’m involved with community summit. Nothing urgent on my plate (i’m more of a developer and evangelist than a contributor though). I am interested to in discussion of expanding options in User Profiles, and maybe have another discussion on BuddyPress registration spam and what possible built-in options are (i have seemingly rock solid third party solutions, but get enough people coming up to me asking about this for me to note that it’s a hotter topic to the general community). I’m sure i’ll think of more things on the long plane flight over.
Boone B. Gorges 1:29 pm on October 21, 2014
- bp-blogs is a much neglected component. IMO, a lot of the stuff currently done in https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-groupblog/ could be moved to core.
- Attachments: how far we want to go in BP core, and what are the first steps?
- imath 2:59 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  +1 for “Attachments road?”
pixelcoder 2:41 pm on October 21, 2014

Not sure if it fits with a development focussed meetup, but it’d be useful for me to hear more about how BuddyPress theme development can help you attract new customers over and above WordPress theme development.
imath 3:19 pm on October 21, 2014
- Activity is a major and great component. I think, it could be even greater if there was a way to “extract” the most interesting updates in it. Some “sorting” feature. For instance: sort activities by number of comments / number of “likes/bookmark/favorite” 😉 .
- Of Course Attachments.
- and maybe a more “granular” control
- danbp 4:02 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  +1 – and hopefull this discussion will lead to a huge collaboration & feature. 😉
Sarah Gooding 3:59 pm on October 21, 2014

For the Sunday contributor day, one thing that would be really helpful for WordPress developers who are new to BuddyPress is to get an idea of how to set up a good BuddyPress development environment for contributing to BP core. Maybe a few of the more experienced devs could share their setup for efficiently testing BP trunk, testing and creating patches, etc. I think this would be a good addition to BuddyPress documentation for contributors and I’d be happy to help write it out if we could have a few devs walk us through their different setups.
- hnla 7:31 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  And on behalf of the codex we would be happy to have the guide 🙂 actually it could link nicely from the ‘Participate & contribute’ page.
danbp 5:41 pm on October 21, 2014
About blogs and writing doc…..

BuddyPress support forum quick stats
Search keyword: multiblog, inspired by BP_ENABLE_MULTIBLOG

Related topics
2014 -> 12 >>>>> BP 2.0
2013 -> 57
2012 -> 108 >>>> BP 1.5
2011 -> 68
2010 -> 104
2009 -> 26 >>>>> BP 1.1

Blog usage
Past may, i made a little showcase of 30 sites using BP since 2009.
6 have more as 1 blog.

Community public profile
Even if this poll is not very significant, it let think, at least, that it is difficult to build a community of writers. It let also suppose that most of these people don’t have time or don’t want to write, even if they are supposed to be active community members.

BuddyPress public profile
On the other side, we have BP site owners and amateurs or professionals BP devs; and in many case i guess, they are a one and same person. With technical skills going from 0.1 to 200%. The Codex is intended for this public. But after work or hobby time, this public becames potentialy a community public. Not more, not less.
- Writing documentation needs to know about what you’re writing.
- To know that, you have to use it and to understand how it works.
- You need also time to write, creating snippet examples, testing and so on.
- A little talent for writing clear and understandable for the largest audience of pros AND amateurs, or even noobs.
- And all that in english, which is not everybodies mother language. Who knows this codex page ?
All this without any external assistance, in a first time at least, no support (you’re just going to write it….) and more or less without any particular gratitude or reward. Only because you’re motivated by (what you want) or nerved/irritated/sad/what you want, because this fantastic/reputated/very used tool could be much more fantastic/reputated/very used//what you want with some guidance (you’re just going to write it….). Huh ? 🙂
- hnla 6:46 pm on October 21, 2014
  
  And yes writing good documentation is hugely time consuming, checking existing documentation equally so, finding an ideal structure for those pages too is a difficult process.
  
  Are we saying here that the codex is not living up to expectations, not serving the community sufficiently well? Which could/would be fair comment.
  
  To be honest the page for ‘codex in your language’ had escaped my attention but making a note of it as it needs dealing with.
Henry Wright 5:04 pm on October 22, 2014

It would be great if you could explore the idea of ‘interchangeable data’. I’m not entirely sure if that’s the right term to use but let me explain. I’m basically thinking along the lines of the 10,000s of BuddyPress websites out there (if not many more). Imagine I wanted to register on just 7 or 8 of them. If there was an easy way I could ‘pick up’ or export my profile information to each one, it’d save me having to complete a new profile each time. I’d write my bio once and then ‘take it with me’ where ever I wanted to go in the BuddyPress universe.

This would also go towards solving the anonymous community problem many BuddyPress websites have. I often see 100s of mystery-men on a BuddyPress-powered website and vary rarely see a community rich in ‘profile info’. Easily movable profile data would somewhat help webmasters across the land build a more engaging community.

Wish I could be at next week’s WordCamp San Fran but looking forward to WordCamp London 2015!