As part of research for a new version of my Achievements plugin for BuddyPress, I need a list of all the BuddyPress action names.

For non-developers, actions are the hooks that WordPress & BuddyPress launches at specific points during execution, or when specific events occur. This allows plugin developers to hook into these events and do whatever they want.

It took me a while, but here’s how you can use the terminal (on Mac or Linux) to find all BuddyPress’ actions.

grep -r -h "do_action( '[aA0-zZ9+]*' )" . | awk -F "['']" '{print $2}' | uniq

With thanks to the Calm Banana.

Sarah Gooding at wpmu.org has taken a look at my Achievements plugin for BuddyPress. I think it’s a great writeup and certainly has inspired me to carry on improving it. Take a look.

2009 has been a very important year for BuddyPress, from its 1.0 release in April, reaching a critical mass of contributing users, helpers and developers on the forums, third-party plugin and theme development, professional use and acceptance of BuddyPress and appearances at many WordCamp events throughout the world. BuddyPress 1.2 is on course to be released early next year – you can test-drive it at http://testbp.org/.

Between my knowledge of BuddyPress, my contributions on the forums and my plugins, I have perhaps five or six plugin ideas or concepts at some stage of development. Some of these may see the light of day at some point and some will not.

As it nears Christmas and a new year full of promise and opportunity, I wanted to share my ideas for future improvements.

• Search is currently special-cased for each of the built-in components. There isn’t a central search page (like Google), though each component has its own appropriate search areas. BuddyPress needs a central, extensible search page to show matches on all content on a site; you shouldn’t have to go to a specific page or use a drop-down box to find matches across the entire site.
• BuddyPress needs OpenID like toast needs butter. I was lucky enough to meet Will Norris in the BuddyPress IRC chatroom last night and chat a little about this with him. Be sure to look at his OpenID on WordPress webpage.
• BuddyPress likewise needs to embrace the Social Web; I’m working on FOAF and SIOC profiles for BuddyPress; happy to work with someone(s) on this.
• BuddyPress needs better end-user documentation; by end-user, I mean site administrators. I feel there is an expertise barrier at the moment, and it’s too high. Screencasts would be a great way to “sell” the product to site administrators as well as showing how to use it.
• Following on from the last point, I’d like the admin backend and the default theme to have a little help button. When selected, you would get a modal window drop down over the page and it would concise instruction and guidance on how to use the current page; you could even tie in the screencasts so after you’ve read about it, you could watch it.
• A fortnightly podcast discussion recent developments and recapping/reviewing forum discussion would rock. Someone should do it. I’m not entirely sure my awesome singing voice (cough) would carry it off, but maybe I’d be happy to give it a try with someone?
• The BuddyPress homepage needs to make better use of BuddyPress Groups. At the minute, unless you go looking for the groups, they are invisible. Refreshing the theme on the homepage would do this.

Merry Christmas!

Apparently there’s a bit of a trend amongst medical bloggers as part of Invisible Illness Week to make a list of 30 things to do with their “illness”. So, with some of the answers copied from Kerri’s list (because they are true), here we go:

1. The illness I live with is: type 1 Diabetes.
2. I was diagnosed with it in the year: 1997.
3. But I had symptoms since: I don’t know. I went into hospital on a Saturday with a blood glucose of ~44mmol/l.
4. The biggest adjustment I’ve had to make is: every little day-to-day, moment-to-moment change.
5. Most people assume: that they know everything about Diabetes.
6. The hardest part about mornings are: when they start out of range.
7. My favorite medical TV show is: I don’t watch TV.
8. A gadget I couldn’t live without is: my glucose meter.
9. The hardest part about nights are: having low blood sugars in the middle of them.
10. Each day I take 2 pills & vitamins: Only insulin, nothing else (touch wood).
11. Regarding alternative treatments: Poppycock.
12. If I had to choose between an invisible illness or visible I would choose: Neither, thank you.
13. Regarding working and career: No problems, prejudice or people problems so far.
14. People would be surprised to know: that it’s not as easy as we make it look. Sometimes it hurts in every way.
15. The hardest thing to accept about my new reality has been: that I have very little memory of the “old” reality.
16. Something I never thought I could do with my illness that I did was: Drive. I now know that I can, but the diabetes still scares me too much to learn.
17. The commercials about my illness: We don’t have any in the UK.
18. Something I really miss doing since I was diagnosed is: I really have no idea.
19. It was really hard to have to give up: snacking!
20. A new hobby I have taken up since my diagnosis is: None.
21. If I could have one day of feeling normal again I would: be footloose and fancy-free.
22. My illness has taught me: That it’s always darkest just before the dawn.
23. One thing people say that gets under my skin is: “Are you allowed to eat that?”
24. But I love it when people: try to understand, be helpful and supportive.
25. My favorite motto, scripture, quote that gets me through tough times is: I don’t have one.
26. When someone is diagnosed I’d like to tell them: that they aren’t alone. And they’ll be okay.
27. Something that has surprised me about living with an illness is: what you take for granted.
28. The nicest thing someone did for me when I wasn’t feeling well was: Help me.
29. I’m involved with Invisible Illness Week because: I saw this on Six Until Me.
30. The fact that you read this list makes me feel: that I’m not alone.

Over at sixuntilme, Kerri’s listed six of her diabetes “bad habits.” I thought I’d share mine; I can’t do six, but here’s four:

Not changing finger-stabber needle

I’m not quite leaving these until they are rusty, but not far from it! I have recently switch to using the Accu-Chek Multiclix, which has a drum of stabbers in which you rotate around after use. I’m not changing the drum daily – more like twice a week – but I’m working on it.

Autopilot basal rates

Since starting the pump about a year or so ago, it’s changed my life; it’s wonderful. However, there are times when I know I need to do a period of intensive testing so I can assess and make changes to basal rates. In fact, I need to do that right now, but it feels too much like work so I keep putting it off. Maybe later this week!

Selective memory for glucose trends

It has been known that when I visit my diabetes care team, I get very guilty and start making up all sorts of crazy excuses when they point out the very obvious which I’ve somehow missed. Probably linked to point 2 above. I ought to put some time aside every couple of weeks to adjust the basals.

Bolus-Stacking

Same as Kerri. For an explanation for those not in the know, see this post of Kerri’s from 2005.

I made my SVN repository public which I use for my BuddyPress plugins (Welcome Pack and Achievements). It is at http://svn.dangerous-minds.com/djpaul/.

For example, to get the latest trunk (development) version of Achievements  — which requires BuddyPress trunk/1.1 — use http://svn.dangerous-minds.com/djpaul/achievements/trunk/.

When implementing a custom component in BuddyPress, you will often have additions for the member theme. Member themes live in their own folder, /wp-content/bp-themes/.

To render a member theme template, your component will call dpa_load_template() which takes an argument of the name of the template to load. The path is hardcoded to the /wp-content/bp-themes/ folder.

The problem with this is that after installation of a custom component, the site administrator will need to move the relevant member theme files (bundled with your component) into /wp-content/bp-themes/. This is an annoyance to site administrator, and it may end up being a frequent support request (“why is X not working?”).  This very first hurdle may even stop people trying out your component.

Something else I’ve seen is that when installing future updates, people may forget that they need to move the updated member theme files into place; this can cause incompatibility issues between versions of your software, something we’ve seen with recent versions of BuddyPress.

For my upcoming “Achievements” plugin (think a cross between forum points and Xbox Live), I decided all that I wanted the site administrator to do would be to download it from the Plugins admin panel – no moving files into the member theme.

So, I present to you my code: (06/01/10 – updated for BP 1.1.3+)

bp_core_load_template( 'yourcomponent_theme_filename' );  // loads /plugins/your_plugin/filename.php

function yourcomponent_screen_filter_template( $located_template, $template_name ) {
	if ( !empty( $located_template ) )
		return $located_template;

	if ( $bp->current_component != $bp->your_component->slug )
		return false;

	if ( false !== strpos( $template_name[0], 'yourcomponent_theme_' ) ) {
		$prefix = strlen( 'yourcomponent_theme_' );
		$template_name = substr( $template_name[0], $prefix, strlen( $template_name[0] ) - $prefix );
		$template_path = WP_PLUGIN_DIR . "/your_plugin/$template_name";

		if ( file_exists( $template_path ) )
			return $template_path;
	}

	return false;
}
add_filter( 'bp_located_template', 'yourcomponent_screen_filter_template', 10, 2 );

Hello everyone, welcome to metabiscuits.com.  My name is Paul and this is my first blog which will cover topics around areas such as web design and development, Wordpress, PHP and HTML5, as well as projects I am working on.

I’m quite nervous about getting started here, so initially I am going to be aiming to post one blog a week whilst I find my feet.  You are welcome to leave comments on future articles as I post them, or to contact me on twitter (@pgibbs) directly; thanks.