[Chapter-delegates] chapters collaboration demo - evaluating buddypress - anyone care to use it ?

[Elena Zvarici]

Dear @all I would like to thank to those who have joined our proposal for a chapter collboration platform at http://www.anuntul.eu/wordpress and for taking the time to study it. 

It is more or less clear that this is a demo solution, not ready yet but it could do the job if we put our minds to it colaboratively :) 

If interested I can make you administrators so you can take your time to study the back-end when you have the time. 

There are several nice features to this installation: 

- a Wiki editor with html editing capabilities (Buddypress Docs), which allows for collaborative document editing and revision history. 

- an eLearning solution within each group which can be used as a virtual classroom. 
I am testing out the Buddypress Scholarpress plugin for our chapter's purposes, which allows the creation of eCourses within dedicated Budypress groups. Private messaging can also be activated within each group to allow / disallow for student communication. 
Maybe Scholarpress can be used by chapters for their eLearning purposes towards their local membership - this is what we plan. Buddypress and Scholarpress can be fully translated into all languages, several translations are already available. 

- The integrated forum is in fact a collection of forums split into discussion groups - topics (a bit confusing, I know). You can see the different groups I've created to simulate a little bit the kind of discussion we could have among chapters. In this situation we can imagine a general group to include all registered members and specific groups dedicated to discussions on specific topics. Group creation can be made available to all user roles OR restricted to a user category (chapter delegates .. ) 

- Each group can be made public (free to join) private (request for membership necessary) or hidden (only possible to join on invite from an existing member). It functions a little bit like Facebook groups. 

- Within each group the user can set his / her group digest settings: daily, weekly, monthly. 
- Each group can contain a document storage space for PDFs, docs etc 

- Each user profile can be made public or private - only friends will see the user's activity stream and other generated content. check this within your profile 

- Members can become "friends" or follow each other's activity. Based on the user's privacy settings, users can specifiy if they want to be contacted only by friends or by everyone. 

- The advantage of Buddypress compared to a classical forum is the activity stream resembling a little bit a private Facebook with possiblity of embedding multimedia, videos and slideshare docs like you see in the sitewide activity stream. This can generate lively discussions on specific topics. Each activity stream has its own rss feed making it possible to check it from anywhere within your browser provided the forum is public. A bit of testing is necessary to fine tune the privacy settings and to decide what is public and what is private. 

Of course like with any Wordpress installation, users have the possibility to publish posts, collected into the blog page. But I guess the groups and the forums would be the preferred alternatives for communication. We will definitely see more messages passing as you just need to hit "Enter" so short messages will abund instead of long emails. Daily / Weekly Group digest settings will be welcome in this case. 

- There is a known bug with Embedly (http://embed.ly/) which breaks any frontend html editor in Buddypress (used by Wiki but also the Scholarpress lectures) I will have to find another embedding plugin. 

Well this is pretty much it, the solution has to be fine tuned, privacy levels specified, and a webspace decided for it (it can stay here or Isoc can host it?) but it is doing lots of things "out of the box" for an opensource solution. 

Most importantly - do you see yourselves using it instead or as a complement to the classic mailing list ? 

@Ted, I hope this covers your question about why we "chose" this solution over others: it functions prety much out of the box quickly, the other solutions were bulkier like Alfresco (java app, 4 gig of memory needed, a real server) and need "real" developer hours rather then tweaking a few things to make it work. 

Best, 


Elena Zvarici 
Communication manager 
Internet Society Romania 
+40726128728 
http://www.isoc.ro 

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