social networking plugin (buddypress)?

[mattiejas]

I’m considering to install buddypress to give us nicer profile pages, to allow us to organize crew subgroups with their own activity streams, and to have a more powerful messaging system compared to what social club offers us:

BuddyPress

This could be useful to discuss recruitment, crew events, crew jobs…

I’m slightly hesitant because ideally we’d integrate this with the social club website (e.g. messaging) but sadly this is impossible. Another hesitation stems from the observation that some of this can also be done through the forum. The difference from the forum is that people can join and follow just the groups that they are interested in, and the forum seems less flexible in this respect.

Do you want nicer profile pages? Do you want crew subgroups? Do you want more powerful messaging? Are there any other features from buddypress that you think we should exploit, or that we should avoid? Thoughts welcome!

[83427]

maybe iam too conservative but do we need profile pages? do we need subgroups etc? i dont think so. iam looking forward for replies from others.

[83427]

anyway i think it may be possible to connect somehow to social club via this api´s

https://support.rockstargames.com/hc/communities/public/questions/200228816-Crews-API

so if we will be able to connect buddypress to those api´s to sync members profiles, feeds etc, lets do it

[jeffrey]

as far as i can see thats gonna be hard… it’s all done with http GET request and i think you will only be able to get public data from the crew. the private data is only accessible if you have a current open session with rockstar servers. and i belive you can only get data not send it to update some page.

the api you’re speaking of has no public documentation, its not meant to be used by 3rd party software i think

[mattiejas]

@83427: Nice find about the social club API. On another note, you may not realize but we already have profiles on our website, and they look very ugly. 🙂

@jeffrey: I agree with you. As you say, it may be doable but not without huge effort, unless Rockstar release themselves a wordpress plugin for this purpose (I don’t think they ever will but who knows…). The other consideration is that perhaps one day we might move to other games too, in which case we don’t want to exclusively bind ourselves to Rockstar’s system. They may also change their API at will and we don’t want that to break the website.

So, I think I’ll enable the buddypress plugin one of these days, and see what each feature can give us. The beauty of wordpress is that it is easy to disable plugins again if we don’t like it. At the very least the profile pages will look nicer.

[jeffrey]

yes i agree, we could just try it out. if it doesn’t cut it we can always remove it again right?
if you need any help, im always willing to look into it 😉

[mattiejas]

I’ve activated it. The features enabled are:

* extended profiles (like old profile pages but now they look better)
* account settings (this is generically useful, should be standard in wordpress)
* activity streams (things like when someone mentions you in the forums etc. seems useful too and not intrusive)
* notifications (again seems generically useful)

Things not enabled for now:

* friend connections (already on social club)
* private messaging (already on social club)
* user groups (could be useful but maybe not yet)
* site tracking (seems unnecessary)

I’ve edited a few things around in the site – most notably the login widget is gone now since buddypress provides that functionality in the top bar. Just give a shout if you see anything else that looks wrong.

[83427]

loox good in my eyez (y)

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