Daily Tip: BuddyPress Private Messages for Followers Only Now Available

Cut down on annoying private messaging spam with this new plugin. BuddyPress Private Messages for Followers Only works together with the BuddyPress Followers plugin to virtually eliminate private messaging spam. This plugin allows members to send private messages only if the recipient is following them, similar to the way Twitter currently works.

If you’re not using the Followers plugin and have Friends operating on your site, then check out BuddyPress Private Messages for Friends Only.

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Introducing our latest theme: Product

Today we’d like to announce the release of our latest theme Product.

Product makes a feature out of anything. Product is a theme that’s simple on the surface but easy to make your site a marketing and business wander.

Discover Product here in the demo or you can download it right here.  You can also check out the tutorial video here.

Here is a list of some of the features Product comes with:

• Feature sliders – set how many slides show along with their contents – videos, images, text copy or type in and it works even with embedding!
• 3 bucket featured content section
• Top or bottom buddypress navigation if you have buddypress installed
• Configurable title and description
• 2 constant widget areas that change depending on area of the site
• Blog/news template
• 5 preset colours
• Set a square logo, logo or site title for your image
• Default mo and po files
• Create your own design using the simple colour picking theme options that require no code being touched to change colours and fonts.
• Parent and child theme structure
• Tutorial video and PDF manual

Content your way

Perhaps the greatest assets of Product are the flexibility when it comes to showing content on the front page.  You not only get a cracking slideshow, but you also get the ‘3 buckets’ you can fill up with content and have a login section if you use BuddyPress.

Like all our themes for BuddyPress this doesn’t just work for WordPress Mu but for WordPress and also even without BuddyPress – how is that for value!

Styling for BuddyPress

Like all our themes we don’t force you into buying a framework and we make sure that the BuddyPress elements are all styled. Here is an example of the forum pages.

As with all our themes we’re also going to make sure Product gets updated on the day WordPress 3.0 is released.

Discover Product here in the demo or you can download it right here.

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Easily Style and Manage BuddyPress Groups With BP Group Control and BP Group CSS

BuddyPress groups just got a big boost this week with two new plugins that are bound to enhance the group experience:

BP Group Control

The BP Group Control plugin gives group admins the ability to:

• Create new members for their groups
• Add existing users to their groups
• Directly delete members
• Assign their members an identifying tag ( the group name ) that shows up next to their display name on their profile and directories.
• Make different parts of this plugin active for public vs. private groups
• Rich options page: everything above can be turned on or off individually, permissions set differently for site admins vs. group admins and for private vs. public groups
• Sends email to newly created users

This plugin gives group admins a greater level of moderation. Essentially, it helps you to strengthen group identity by improving the admin’s ability to control group membership. Got some cantankerous members? If they don’t abide by the terms of the group, this plugin allows you to yank the users’ memberships. Because it works with both public and private groups, the group admin is able to maintain a custom level of exclusivity based on the admin’s preferences.

BP Group CSS

BP Group CSS is an exciting new plugin that allows you to customize the look of your group page using CSS. Check it out below:

CSS updates to the page happen live on the page as you write them. Finally you can give your BuddyPress group a custom page!

These two groups-specific plugins will allow group admins greater flexibility and creativity when forming their own little discussion communities on your site. With this level of user freedom, just make sure that you have trustworthy group admins before you let them loose!

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Daily Tip: Miscellaneous Menu Has Been Moved in WordPress 3.0

Looking for the Settings >> Miscellaneous menu in 3.0? It’s been removed. Now you can find the Miscellaneous settings under Settings >> Media in WordPress 3.0:

WP 2.9.2

WP 3.0

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Simple Guide to Creating Custom Author Templates With WordPress 3.0

Custom author templates can be a great enhancement to a multi-author blog where you want to implement unique styles for one or more blog authors. WordPress 3.0 makes customizing author templates easier than ever. It’s now similar to the way you might create a unique category template: ie. category-news.php and it’s new to 3.0.

How to include a custom author template file:

WordPress first will look for one of the following:
author-{nicename}.php
author-{id}.php

If neither of these are present, it will then look for author.php followed by archive.php and then index.php.

Step 1: Create the author-{nicename}.php file.

The easiest way is to copy the archive.php file and then add or change whatever you want to in that file. Save it as an author template file, ie.:

author-walter.php

Step 2: Upload the file to your theme’s folder.

Now you can check out your custom template by visiting the author’s archive you customized. For example:

http://yourdomain.com/author/walter/

This is an example of a custom author template page added to the BuddyPress default theme:

The above example uses the basic archive.php template for BuddyPress with an added tag to include Biographical Info for the user at the top before the posts. Include this snippet in your archive.php file to show author info:

<div id="authorbio">
<?php

if(isset($_GET['author_name'])) :
    // NOTE: 2.0 bug requires: get_userdatabylogin(get_the_author_login());
    $curauth = get_userdatabylogin($author_name);

else :
    $curauth = get_userdata(intval($author));

endif;
?>
<h4>Walter's Bio:</h4>
<p><?php echo $curauth->user_description; ?></p>
</div>

How to customize the template will be up to you. You can add particular CSS classes, unique backgrounds, a quick bio at the top of the page, custom author information, or anything you want to make the page different from your default archives.

Further Details and More Information

Please note that the custom author templates will only work with WordPress 3.0 and will not be applicable to earlier versions. You can find more detailed information about how to create unique author templates, tags you can include, and a sample template in the WordPress codex section on Author Templates.

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Daily Tip: Quick Tag to List All Authors on a WordPress Blog

Here’s a quick tag that you can drop into your template in the sidebar, footer, or wherever else you’d like to list authors for your blog. It will out put a list with links to each:

Default List Blog Authors (Admin is Excluded):

<h3>List of Authors:</h3>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_authors(); ?>
</ul>

List Blog Authors Including Admin

<h3>List of Authors:</h3>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_authors('exclude_admin=0'); ?>
</ul>

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WPMU DEV WordPress 3.0 theme updates go beyond the usual

We’ve already told you about our guarantee to support WordPress 3.0 by the end of the day it comes out.  With our themes though we’re going even further by with many of them adding extra features along with making sure they work for WordPress 3.0 and BuddyPress 1.2.4.1.

We not only have updated our new themes we’ve also updated every other theme we offer too – it’s all part of our upgrade and support guarantee!

Just take a look here at a sneak preview of some of the coming features in our theme updates.

BuddyPress Daily:

• NEW FEATURE: Sign up now box: encourage your users to sign up with a button and text area linking to sign up form that detects if multisite or buddypress form it should show.  You can also enter your own custom login page url if you have created one and it will link to that.
• NEW FEATURE: Date and time now uses whatever you have your set up defined as for both – simply change that and it will reflect on the front.
• NEW FEATURE: Added in Wordpress 3.0 menu function.

BuddyPress Business:

• NEW FEATURE: Added ability to position BuddyPress navigation in top navigation or keep in bottom bar.

Product:

• NEW FEATURE: Sign up now box feature added to this theme also
• NEW FEATURE: Added ability to add link to image in slider.
• NEW FEATURE: Added in WordPress 3.0 menu function.

Added to that many of our themes have also had for the search and archive pages the built in WordPress post thumbnail function implemented.

It doesn’t stop there, we’ve got other updates planned and we’ll let you know all about it once WordPress 3.0 has been released.

We hope you are just as excited about WordPress 3.0 as we are it’s going to be a great release and we’ve got you covered theme and plugin wise from the start.

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BuddyPress Showcase: 12 New Stellar Customizations

It’s that time again to showcase how people are using the BuddyPress platform to create beatiful websites. We’ve selected a few of the most impressive sites sporting complete customizations of BuddyPress. Grab a cup of coffee and be inspired.

NY Blogs

NY Blogs is a premium blogging community for New Yorkers to speak about art, culture, fashion, entertainment, politics, social issues, community, and finance.

FilmmakerIQ

FilmmakerIQ.com is a website for filmmakers. It’s a community built around the idea that information and knowledge is your single most powerful filmmaking tool.

Arts Westchester

Arts Westchester is New York State’s largest private, not-for-profit service organization, working to ensure the availability and accessibility of the arts for all of the county’s residents.

Going Postal

Going Postal is a penpal service that seeks above all to provide a community to those who love letters.

Gleeks Online

Gleeks Online is a news and community for Glee fans.

The Secret Bistro

The Secret Bistro, a free service for you to all enjoy. It will allow you to meet new friends, discover secret supper clubs, share recipes, plus many other cool things.

EVRD

EVRD stands for everything random. It’s a site for anything and everything that is cool, interesting, or funny on the interwebs

Ecoerth

Ecoerth is a site where users can learn and share information and knowledge on all topics relating to health and wellness of the body, mind, spirit, our planet and virtually every aspect of one’s life.

Kev Jumba

Kev Jumba is a site for Kevin Wu, the owner of Youtube channel “KevJumba.”

Pavilion Interactive

Pavilion Interactive focuses on social media, interactive communications and tools that help people make better decisions.

Fisherbook

Fisherbook is a magazine, social network and blog platform, soon to include forums, classifieds, fishing directory, photo store, and video store.

Sofa Stop

SofaStop is an online community website for frequent backpackers and aspiring travellers.

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Daily Tip: Unique Floating Social Networking Buttons For Your WordPress Blog

Need a new way to add social buttons to your WordPress Have a look at the Sharex plugin. It’s an easy way to add a unique set of sharing buttons with customizable features to your blog:

Features:

• Services: Twitter, Facebook, Google Buzz, MySpace, Delicus.
• Auto-trim URL: by.ly
• Setting the background image.
• Positioning Top, Down in the post.

Check out a Live Demo

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WordPress and Google Calendars: How to Style and Integrate Events For Your Site

Kalendas is a new plugin created to help integrate Google calendar events into your WordPress blog. For a long time there has been a lack of decent, easy-to-use solutions for integrating the two. This new plugin contains widgets and shortcodes to display one or all your calendars in an event list.

How to Install Kalendas

Step 1: Install the Minimax

Minimax is a minimal AJAX library that is required for running the Kalendas plugin. Simply install and activate.

Step 2: Install the Kalendas Plugin

After you activate the plugin, you will see Kalendas added to the Dashboard >> Settings menu. There you can configure the plugin to suit your site’s needs, as shown below:

Step 3: Add the Kalendas widget to your sidebar OR include the Kalendas shortcode in your page or post

You can give your calendar a title and then will need to add the calendar’s feed.
If you need help finding the xml feed for your Google calendar, check out these instructions.

The other option is to use a shortcode in pages and posts to output a list of events: [kalendas:title,feed]

*Optional* Step 4: Customize the CSS of the plugin to compliment your site

Copy the file kalendas.css to your theme folder. The plugin will check for it and will add your customizations.

Make sure your calendar is public and that your server’s time zone matches your Google calendar’s time zone. Otherwise, things could get confusing for you and your users. There may be a bug here and there, as it’s a new plugin, but this plugin has the potential to be one of the best options currently available for WordPress and Google event integration.

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