Amember + WordPress MU (WPMU) + BuddyPress

I've been running a membership site for a little over a year using Amember. Very happy with it and all the great tech support.

Here's my goal: to have a full-blown social networking component in my membership site. I'm using a forum (bbPress) but I feel like the whole thing is a little too clunky for my users.

I've been looking hard at BuddyPress, which is a set of plugins for WordPress MultiUser (WPMU) that integrates bbPress and some other nifty tools.

Has anyone attempted an integration with WPMU? If so... what kind of results are you getting?

My integration with WordPress is a bit outdated right now and before I go through the trouble of upgrading Amember, upgrading WordPress, and then adding on a forum (I've got a less-than-pretty integration with bbPress going right now, but it WILL break when I update everything).

If not WPMU... has anyone used Elgg or any of the other open-source social networking platforms?

Hi David, let me know if you need help with the bbPress integration.

Somehow the "enter" key made a post reply instead of a new paragraph.

To continue, what are you thinking of in terms of integrating WPMU or other social
networking platforms in aMember?

Lee

Thanks, Lee. I appreciate the response.

First, my bbPress integration is done by using the WordPress plugin (I did this 6+ months ago) and then integrating WordPress and bbPress. It's not likely to survive any software upgrades.

Overall I'm not happy with bbPress. It's great for what it does, but my users are all small business owners and most of them not tech savvy. I think there's still perplexed about what to do with the forum.

I think I'd get better adoption and usage if it made more sense to them. I'd love for there to be *real* user profiles... the Gravatar integration is fabulous, but that means another site they have to go to to get avatars working. The "real name" display isn't great. The user list is clunky (I found a bbPress plugin that does it). I don't have single sign-on working because of the fact that the WordPress install that glues all of this together isn't really where I want the users to be.

Basically, I started the membership site to support the training program. I had no idea what direction I wanted to go and so I started testing stuff. The reason people join is for the training we conduct each week using GoToMeeting. But I'd like to get them more engaged and I feel like we'd have longer paid memberships if we could get the forums to really take off.

I like BuddyPress a lot. It fixes a lot of what I see as limitations of bbPress. But I don't know about the WPMU integration with Amember. If we could get that working, I feel like we could get the users engaged.

So... I've considered Elgg and am now taking a look at eFront, even though an LMS wasn't really what I originally had in mind.

I don't want to introduce any new technologies to the users at this point until I'm pretty confident we can get it to go where we want it to go...

Hope this helps!

aMember has the eFront plugin, eFront is good for edu-environment, I presume your training program can fit into the use of the software.

For aMember + Wordpress + bbPress I have got single-sign on working great.

Perhaps you can share more about BuddyPress, here or email codeispoetry [at] amemberincremental.com . It sounds like an interesting integration, I might look into it when I find time.

Lee

Looking to pull off the same aMember + wordpress MU + BuddyPress for a campaign site. In an ideal world, users would visit the campaign site and be able to do one of a few things:

1) Donate to the Campaign Fund using aMember Authorize.net WITHOUT creating a full on buddypress member page - the users info would still be saved by aMember for the campaigns records and multiple donations by the same user could be tracked.

2) Donate to the Campaign Fund using aMember Authorize.net, automatically creating a buddypress account with a member page. This member page would allow campaigners to track total donations, blog, discuss with other members - all the good stuff that buddypress allows.

3) Create a Member page without donating. This would signup the user in both the Wordpress and aMember databases - creating user records, without going through the donation process.

I would love for the whole thing to be integrated enough to send out eblast to all members (donors and non-donors) - anyone who signs up or gives an email address.

I'm I dreaming too big here? First, it it possible to handle donations with aMember period? I'd like to offer 4-5 suggested amounts and a blank spot for "other amount" on one form along with the signup info and CC form. I'd also like all of the aMember functions (signup, checkout, member info, etc) to be called from within Wordpress / BuddyPress pages, so that the user never has to visit the root/amember/ part of the site.

I'd love to hear any thought you might have! I'm planning on trying to pull this off myself, but already running into issues with decrepancies in database values between Wordpress and Wordpress MU (for example - WP MU creates a new database set for each blog - i.e. wp_1_ so the user_roles data is located in wp_1_options -> wp_1_user_roles... instead of wp_options -> wp_user_roles... not sure how to handle this just yet) If I can't pull this off myself, anyone interested in some freelance work?

Thanks,

Chip
www.hybr-id.com

just to bump this, I too would like to use wpmu / buddypress with Amember, is it possible at this time?

Thank you in advance

yes anyone have any luck getting buddypress and a member working seamlessly?

what would be involved if not any ideas from amember developers?

sure you would sell many more amember packages if so!

thanks in advance need to get moving on this project

My interested too. That combo would really be nice!

I would like to see it also.

Yes, I have Mu, aMember, and Buddypress integration. I even have the wordpress plugin working with subdomains.

We've tried unsuccessfully

Well... I wish I could tell you 'why' exactly we couldn't get WP-mu/Buddypress/amember to work together but it was my webmasters who have worked over a month now on it (yes, they were working on other things as well - but in the end we were not able to get the Wp-mu and amember to work together. )

My non-techie understanding is that we continued having MYSQL errors because of the table naming discrepancies between WP/amember and WP-mu/amember -- amember was looking for... .oh, here's one email from my programmer that explains it better..

--------------------
"MYSQL ERROR:<br />Table 'raven421_social.wp_options' doesn't exist<br />in query:<br />SELECT option_name, option_value FROM raven421_social.wp_options WHERE option_name IN('siteurl','home','secret')"

Amember is looking for a table named wp_options , but we do not have it, since our options table has been renamed to wp_1_options.
------------------

Just yesterday we decided to give up... then I decided to search again to see if anyone else had been successful. I would SOOO love to have MU/Buddypress but we're now considereing PHPFox with amember instead.

I'd be most happy to collaborate, barter or hire ... with others to figure this out.

- Anisa

why did you end up renaming the options table?

and my guess is that amember should be looking for the prefix first and foremost and then adding "table" part to it and querying that table... even if it wasn't, this would be an easy error to fix.

If your webmasters can't fix that error, they're useless - fire them and get someone who knows how to deal with stuff like that.

@ravenaven

Funny, I've just given up on the same project. I outsourced a company who's worked on amember / buddypress / wpmu integration since April and I fired them after frustration 3 weeks ago.

I now have a full time programmer who also cant get it going and I've decided today to change the scope.

Not sure as well what the problem is, but wordpress mu and amember work seamlessly. It just won't gel with Buddypress though.

Ah, it would've been so great!

If anyone has the answer, that will be awesome!

Wow I have allot to be learn with amember thanks for posting this post.

I did not know there is so many plugins to be use.

Guys... Wordpress MU creates a brand new set of tables for each new blog. This is how it works.

The first blog account gets table wp_1_options
The second blog account gets table wp_2_options
The third blog account gets table wp_3_options

Amember seems think it's still in a single wordpress environment, so does not see the other tables. You need a plugin that works specificically with Wordpress MU or another script.

I have a few suggestions that I cannot give here. You can send me a email at membershipsite@01support.com

SORRY GUYS

I just discovered that my suggested solution does not work with wordpress MU yet.

Maybe in a year.

were you using the wpmu plugin, or just the wordpress plugin from amember?

I assume the wpmu plugin takes into account the difference in table structure.

I would like to re-heat this topic as I too am interested in wpmu/buddypress + amember integration. Sounds like some people have it working. Anyone willing to share how?

hi there -
has anyone rewritten the new wordpress plugin to work with wmpmu? as discussed above. i would be thrilled to use or discuss getting this done with others. let me know. thanks! jenn

PS I did have amember+wpmu+buddypress working together until most recent upgrade of wpmu. now not sure what issue is.