How to use BuddyPress as a Private Collaboration System

Advertisment

For sites with multiple writers, it’s nice to have a place for them all to interact privately. Though there are solutions like Yammer and Teambox, they require your writers to register and log into another site.  I  can only guess as to how busy some people are! With this post I’ll show you how to make your own Private Social network for your writers using BuddyPress.

WordPress 3.0 is required for this guide, as we’ll be putting WordPress 3.0’s new multi-site feature to good use, along with BuddyPress. For better integration my Past guides on BuddyPress should go down a treat.

Useful Links

• The Beginner’s Guide to BuddyPress (Open Source Social Networking)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-1)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-2)

Making the new Section

For the private section, what we’ll really be using it another WordPress site. Thanks  to the wonders of Multi-site it will use one database, so users don’t need to re-register.  So we’ll have an extra section which is technically a separate site…  It’s up to you whether to use a sub domain such as social.example.com or a directory: example.com/social. I’ve went with a directory as for my own setup a sub domain wasn’t needed.

Making it Private

Depending on the content you plan to post in this section you may not want it private, if so  you can skip this part.

By making the site private I mean that visitors need to be logged in, in order to access the site.  Absolute Privacy does a great job at making a site private, redirecting logged out visitors to the log in page, though this can be changed to any page you want.

To be extra sure of your privacy you should edit your robot.txt file to disallow your private section.

Guide to editing your robot.txt

Editing your theme file

Again what you do here depends whether you’d like the private section to match your main site, or whether to have it looking totally different.

For this section firstly refer to my two past guides

• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-1)
• How to Create your own BuddyPress theme (Part-2

Going that bit further

Once you get this far, you should have BuddyPress setup working, privately or not, with its design built to suit your needs/tastes. You could finish up now, though if you want to add a bit more class to this read on!

To make it that bit easier for your members to access this section we can put a link on the main site linking to the private section. Though instead of letting anyone who visits the main site see the link, it’ll only be visible to logged in members.

<?php
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
    echo '<a href="#" class="private">Private</a>';
}
?>

You could change this so that when someone not logged in visits the site they see a “Write for us” link. Or even a nice welcome!

<?php
if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
    echo '<a href="#" class="private">Private</a>';
} else {
    echo '<a href="#" class="write-us">Write for us?</a>';
};
?>

Changing the look of the login page

Though the default WordPress login looks fine, and works great. Though it would be nice to remove the WordPress branding from it, and make it look like its part of the site too.

WPFuss have a great code snippet for changing this logo, all you have to do is add the code to the functions.php of your theme

Customize The WordPress Login Screen Logo Without a Plugin

Don’t want members? Have writers instead

Instead of calling your writers “members” on the site, we can call them anything you wish. For instance if you wanted to called writers, as they are writers!

Add the following to your wp-config.php or bp-custom-php

define( ‘BP_MEMBERS_SLUG’, writers );

or if you’re a business:

define( ‘BP_MEMBERS_SLUG’, employee );

to change it to Employee.

Note: The above code only changes the slug, which is the URL i.e example.com/members to example.com/writers.

Some other alternatives.

define( 'BP_ACTIVATION_SLUG', 'activate' );

define( 'BP_ACTIVITY_SLUG', 'activity' );

define( 'BP_BLOGS_SLUG', 'blogs' );

define( 'BP_FORUMS_SLUG', 'forums' );

define( 'BP_FRIENDS_SLUG', colleagues );

define( 'BP_GROUPS_SLUG', 'groups' );

define( 'BP_MESSAGES_SLUG', 'messages' );

define( 'BP_REGISTER_SLUG', 'register' );

define( 'BP_SEARCH_SLUG', 'search' );

define( 'BP_SETTINGS_SLUG', 'settings' );

define( 'BP_XPROFILE_SLUG', 'profile' );

To change these component names everywhere on the site, the recommended way is to use the .po file. Though they are usually used for translating WordPress to another language we can easily use them to change the names.

You can find this file, buddypress.pot   in /buddypress/bp-languages/

You’ll need to rename it to buddypress.po in other words: remove the “t” at the end.

File Sharing

With a simple to install plugin you can have let  your team share files or documents easily. It would be a simple alternative to the likes of drop box, your team can add the file right in the discussion!

Forum Attachments for BuddyPress allows members to upload file attach files to their posts in the forum. Simple yet effective.

Announcements

As you’re using WordPress for all this collaboration why not use the blogging features of WordPress too?  You could use the blog posts to replace memo’s or emails. It’s much easier to talk as a group on a blog post than in an email!

Conclusion

Once you have this setup, you and your team, no matter what you do, now have a private place to collaborate together.  You can turn off what you don’t think is needed, say for instance the activity feed, or profiles may not be helpful for everyone. They may even prove to be a distraction for their work!

Alot of you may find you only need 1 group for your private area, be sure to turn off Group Creation in the BuddyPress settings. Though to keep things organized, a group for different topics could be very helpful. For example here on 1stWebDesigner, we could have a group for each of the main categories,