I’ve been examining both Elgg and BuddyPress for use as a social networking platform in the K12 setting. One of things necessary for our school (and probably many others) is that unmoderated content be private.
About three months ago, BuddyPress developer, Andy Peatling, responded on the BuddyPress forum that the initial release of the software would be would be for open networks and that after the release the plan is to introduce privacy settings.
About a month ago, user josswinn began testing dsader’s More Privacy Options plugin for WPMU, and posted his experiences in both the BP and WPMU forums. By putting More Privacy Options in the mu-plugins folder, blogs can be set to one of five levels of privacy. If an admin sets the primary blog to “visible only to registered members,” the BuddyPress portion of the installation is locked down nicely.
This also effectively blocks registration which is desirable for our purposes. Apparently another plugin called Members Only functions similarly, but without the numerous privacy options.
While the pages are blocked, RSS feeds are another issue. In spite hacking dsader’s More Privacy plugin as recommended on these forum posts, I found myself able to access RSS feeds to material that should have been blocked. Josswin reports the same with Member’s Only as well. I tried using Clifton H. Griffin III’s Disable RSS, but that did not work either.
The More Privacy Options plugin seems to block RSS feeds fine on my other WPMU installation. I am puzzled by the difference. The only solution I see at this point is to delete or rename key RSS files within WPMU. It will be interesting to see if a resolution appears. Otherwise, it might be best to wait until there are privacy settings within BuddyPress itself.
Related Posts
Tags: buddypress, k12, privacy
-
Have you had any luck on this? I need to create a private Buddypress site and would like to know the best way to do this. Thanks.
-
Hi there,
I just posted a sort of hack solution to your feed problem at the BuddyPress forum: http://buddypress.org/forums/topic/more-privacy-options-private-blogs-and-activity-streams. The gist is that I’ve tweaked BP core to keep entries on blogs with MPO privacy settings from appearing in activity streams, which in turn keeps them out of BP’s RSS feeds. This doesn’t help with WPMU’s native RSS feeds, but I’m pretty sure that the most recent version of MPO takes care of this anyway (I haven’t tested it, but the code makes it look that way). Hope this helps a little.
Boone
-
i’m exactly looking for the same thing, i also tested elgg
thank you for your post it helps me
(i’m using wordpress classic, i hope those plugins work with it too) -
i’ve found a plugin for wordpress classic : http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/private-wordpress/
it blocks blog access (every page, so everything in buddypress) if you’re not logged in
it blocks rss feeds tooit needs to be modified a bit for buddypress (registration is blocked)
i succeeded to make it work for my buddypress : i can access homepage and registration page without being logged in, but every other pages are blocked. -
@Antoine what did you modify to get it to work with buddypress?
-
i changed some php code in the private.php file from the plugin private wordpress
here is the function :
function private_wp() {
global $method;
global $self_url;
$result=strcmp($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'],”/register/”);
if(!is_user_logged_in() and !is_page(‘a-propos’) and ($result!=0)) {
if($method == 3) {
wp_redirect($self_url . ‘sorry.html’);
}if($method == 1 && function_exists(‘auth_redirect’)) {
auth_redirect();
}
else if($method != 3) {
wp_redirect(get_option(‘siteurl’) . ‘/wp-login.php’);
update_option(‘pwp_method’, 2);
}
}
} -
brilliant.
thank you!
i will give it a try. -
it gives me a error division by zero on line 195
using single wp 2.92 and buddypress 1.2.4.1
Reply
Creative Commons License
Openedweb by Stephen J. O’Connor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.
8 comments
Comments feed for this article
Trackback link: http://openedweb.com/blog/2009/02/19/private-buddypress-communities/trackback/