In one of the chapters in the WordPress All In One Desk Reference, Andrea includes a list of recommended plugins for use in a WordPress Network. One of those is no longer available for download. Because it was such a handy plugin, I updated the plugin for WordPress 3.0 so that it works with both single and network installs. It can be installed in either the mu-plugins or plugins folder. Here are the features:

In a single site WordPress install adds the following privacy options:

• I would like my site to be visible only to Site subscribers.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site administrators.

In a WordPress network activated on an individual site adds the following privacy options:

• I would like my site to be visible only to Registered network users.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site subscribers.
• I would like my site to be visible only to Site administrators.

When Network Activated or in the mu-plugins folder in a WordPress network adds the following:

• A privacy selector in the Super Admin -> Options page to allow individual site privacy or the 3 above across the network.
• If the network setting is individual privacy the Super Admin -> Edit Site screen has a privacy selector.

Thanks to D Sader for the original version. Download Network Privacy.

• June 29, 2010 — BuddyPress Author Link (0)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (12)
• June 21, 2010 — Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0 (45)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (12)
• May 31, 2009 — ComLuv Beta (2)

© Ron for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 9 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: mu-plugin, network, plugin, WordPress 3.0

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Some friends of mine (Joe Ugoretz and Jim Groom) were chatting on Twitter yesterday about how Userthemes, the WPMU/MS plugin they rely on to allow user customizations of copied system themes, had broken with WordPress 3.0. I decided to take a look at it. After digging a little, I found the immediate cause, as well as a workaround.

Please note that this workaround is very much a hack. It shouldn’t cause any security issues (see explanation below), but it will break the next time you upgrade WP.

Joe’s problem was that the plugin was only working for Super Admins. Administrators of single Sites could not copy new Userthemes, and they were redirected to the dreaded wp-admin/?c=1 when they tried to access the Edit Userthemes panel on the Dashboard. I figured it was a problem with permissions, and it was: all of those functions are triggered only for those users with the capability edit_themes, but for some reason only Super Admins, and not Administrators, were showing up as having that ability. (The weird thing – when I did a var_dump of WP Roles, I saw that Administrator *did* have edit_themes.) Maybe there’s some setting in WPMS that allows users to edit themes, but I couldn’t see it.

So the solution is to change the edit_themes check to something else. switch_themes seemed like an obvious choice to me, since anyone with the ability to switch themes on a given blog would also have had the ability to edit themes on that same blog. So there shouldn’t be a security problem – only blog admins should have the ability to make userthemes.

You’ll need to modify the plugin, as well as a few lines in the WordPress core.

1. Back up. I’m not responsible for anything that goes wrong!
2. Open the userthemes.php file. (I’d link to it, but I can’t find it anywhere on the web. When I’m at a better internet connection, maybe I’ll upload a version for you to edit. Maybe someone out there has a copy to share.) Search for all instances of ‘edit_themes’ and replace with ‘switch_themes’.
3. From your WP root directory, open wp-admin/theme-editor.php. On line 12, change ‘edit_themes’ to ‘switch_themes’.
4. From your WP root directory, open wp-admin/menu.php. On line 173, change ‘edit_themes’ to ‘switch_themes’.

Related posts:

1. Making Sitewide Tags work
2. Sitewide Tag Suggestion in WordPress MU 2.8+
3. Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X

We’ve been picking away at updating plugins and things for 3.0, doing general tidying up and so forth. Just a dust and a clean, and sometimes a sprinkle of awesome.

New in the Featured Posts plugin: a short code. Set it up, pull in a feed, pick & choose your posts, slap the shortcode in a page you’ve set to home and there you go.

Download it from the repo: Featured Posts

• October 26, 2009 — Featured posts plugin and widget (33)
• June 28, 2010 — Another Featured Posts update (10)
• June 27, 2010 — Network Privacy (8)
• May 12, 2010 — Upgrading to 3.0 (8)
• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (12)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 7 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: feature, featured post, plugin, post, rss feed, update

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Here on the CUNY Academic Commons, we have an installation of MediaWiki which runs alongside our WordPress/BuddyPress installation. Without some additional coding, edits on the wiki don’t show up in the Commons News feed, and as a result they tend to get a little lost in the shuffle. This new plugin, BP External Activity, addresses this issue by allowing the administrator of a BuddyPress installation to specify an arbitrary RSS feed whose items will be regularly imported into the activity stream.

The plugin imports RSS feeds every hour. You may find that you need to decrease your Simplepie cache time to make it work:
add_filter( 'wp_feed_cache_transient_lifetime', create_function('$a', 'return 600;') );
reduces the RSS cache to ten minutes, for example. Put that in your bp-custom.php file if you are having problems with the plugin.

At the moment, the plugin uses the Author field from the RSS feed to look for a matching author in your WP database. If it doesn’t find one, it uses the unlinked text ‘A user’, as in ‘A user edited the wiki page…’.

Thanks to Andy Peatling, whose External Group Blogs served as the inspiration for a good part of the code.

Visit the plugin homepage for more details.

On the CUNY Academic Commons we have a MediaWiki installation running parallel to our WordPress/BuddyPress installation. In the past I had hacked together an inelegant and constantly breaking solution for importing wiki edit notifications into the BP activity stream. I’ve just written a small plugin called BP External Activity which solves the problem by using the BP activity API and RSS.

The plugin can be used to pull items from any RSS feed and add them to your BP activity stream, with customizable text. It’s feature-light right now (and requires some hand-coding to work) but it’s still pretty much the coolest thing ever. I will update it to be better when I get around to it.

Get BP External Activity here.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress plugin: BP Include Non-Member Comments
2. New BuddyPress plugin: BP MPO Activity Filter
3. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin

Cross-posted on the CUNY Academic Commons dev blog

A few people have asked recently for a list of the plugins installed on the CUNY Academic Commons. In the spirit of Joe’s post, here I thought I’d make it public. I’m going to limit myself to the BuddyPress plugins here, for the sake of simplicity. (I’d like to write a series of posts on the anatomy of the CUNY Academic Commons; maybe this will be the first in that series.) Here they are, in no particular order other than the order in which they appear on my plugin list.

• BP TinyMCE. This plugin is messed up, and I have part of it switched off, but I still use the filters that allow additional tags through, in case people want to write some raw HTML in their forum posts, etc.
• BP Groupblog. Allows blogs to be associated with groups, displaying posts on that group’s activity feed and automatically credentialing group members on the blog. I did some custom modifications to the way the plugin works so that clicking on the Blog tab in a group leads you to subdomain address rather than the Groupblog custom address (thereby also ensuring that visitors see the intended blog theme rather than the BP-ish theme).
• BP MPO Activity Filter. This plugin works along with More Privacy Options to ensure that the new privacy settings are understood by Buddypress and that blog-related activity items are displayed to the appropriate people.
• BuddyPress Group Documents. This one is crucial to our members, who often use the plugin to share collaborative docs.
• BP Include Non-Member Comments makes sure that blog comments from non-members are included on the sitewide activity feed.
• BP External Activity – an as-yet unreleased plugin I wrote that brings in items from an external RSS feed and adds them to the sitewide activity feed. We’re using it for MediaWiki edits.
• BP Group Management lets admins add people to groups. Very handy for putting together a group quickly, without having to wait for invites.
• BP System Report. We’re using this one to keep track of some data in our system and report it back to members and administrators.
• BuddyPress Group Email Subscription allows users to subscribe to immediate or digest email notification of group activity. Right now we’re running it on a trial basis with a handful of members, in order to test it. (Here’s how to run it with a whitelist of users, if you want)
• BuddyPress Terms of Service Agreement, another as-yet-unreleased plugin (this one by CAC Dev Team member Chris Stein) that requires new members to check TOS acceptance box before being allowed to register.
• Custom Profile Filters for BuddyPress allows users to customize the way that their profile interests become links
• Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets. Lets the admin decide the default state of BP widgets on the front page.
• Forum Attachments for BuddyPress. Another of our most important BP plugins, this one allows users to share files via the group forums.
• Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress. This is our legacy email notification system, which is going to be in place until I get back from my honeymoon and can replace it :)
• Invite Anyone lets our users invite new members to the community and makes it easier to populate groups.

Questions about any of these plugins or how they work with BuddyPress? Ask in the comments.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription
2. New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone
3. Upgrading from BuddyPress 1.0 to 1.1

Email Options on settings page

I’m quite happy to announce the release of a more-or-less stable (we hope!) version of BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, a BuddyPress plugin that allows for fine-grained, user-controllable email subscription to group content in BuddyPress.

This plugin is different from some of my others in that it was truly a group endeavor. The base of the plugin was written by David Cartwright, with a little bit of code from me. A nearly complete rewrite of the front-end and most of the guts of the plugin was undertaken by Deryk Wenaus. I wrote the daily and weekly digest functionality, along with some of the settings pages and various bugfixes throughout. The current codebase of the plugin is probably 60% Deryk, 30% me, and 10% David.

It was my first time working on a truly collaborative software development project like this, and it was a real pleasure working with both of these gentlemen. Thanks, guys.

Get BuddyPress Group Email Subscription here.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress / bbPress plugin: Group Forum Subscription
2. Group Forum Subscription for BuddyPress 1.1
3. Adding an “email to members” checkbox to the BuddyPress group activity stream

Our buddy Pete went and wrote up a very detailed post on how to upgrade from WPMU to WordPress 3.0 if you are brave enough right now to try out the beta2. Pete steps through it manually, so be prepared for that. (and backup your site first).

These instructions will still be relevant for the final release. The only difference is when the release is final, you will get an upgrade notice.

Thanks, Pete! Writing that post was on my list.

(Did you get the part about backing up first?)

• April 12, 2010 — Disabling the Plugin/Theme editor 3.0 (11)
• December 3, 2009 — MU 2.9 beta (6)
• June 23, 2009 — WP-Devel plugin (1)
• June 18, 2010 — Upgrading from WPMU to WP 3.0 (32)
• June 17, 2010 — The age of Thelonious and WordPress 3.0 (7)

© andrea for WPMU Tutorials, 2010. | Permalink | 8 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: beta, development, plugin, test, upgrade

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One of the goals of the Community Team behind the CUNY Academic Commons is to figure out how members are using the site, so that we can make it a better place for meeting and collaborating with each other. With a system like BuddyPress, though, it’s a bit hard to get a general sense of what’s going on on the site. BP System Report is a new plugin meant to address this issue.

BP System Report records regular summaries of statistics related to your BuddyPress installation. You can then compare any two snapshots using the built-in comparison tool, which calculates percentage differences. The information currently gathered by the plugin:

BP System Report

• Members: total number, number active during report interval, percent active, total friendship connections, average friendships per member
• Groups: total number, number active, percent active, total group memberships, average group membership
• Public/private/hidden groups: total number, number active, percent active, total membership, average membership
• Blogs: total number, number active, percent active

The plugin is quite beta, so still might be buggy. Please feel free to report problems.

Future versions of this plugin will include:

• more analytical data collected
• CSV export
• better admin control over report frequency

Regarding this last point: the BP System Report defaults to twice-daily reports. If you’d like to adjust it manually, deactivate the plugin, edit the line
wp_schedule_event( time() + 30, 'twicedaily', 'bp_system_report_pseudo_cron_hook' );
in bp-system-report.php to say ‘hourly’ or ‘daily’ or ‘weekly’ (or some custom time you define in bp_system_report_more_reccurences() )

Download BP System Report here.

Well well, what do we have here but another MIND BOGGLING BuddyPress plugin? This one is called BP System Report, and it allows admins to take periodic snapshots of some interesting data in their BP installation.

Check out the plugin page for more information and to download BP System Report.

Related posts:

1. New BuddyPress plugin: Enhanced BuddyPress Widgets
2. New BuddyPress plugin: Invite Anyone
3. Removing previous comment edits from BuddyPress activity – a plugin