Privacy and the Groupblog Plugin

The Groupblog plugin on the Commons facilitates the creation of blogs attached to Groups within the Commons. This functionality allows teachers to create Public spaces for their students to contribute, based on their membership to private classroom groups.

The problem with the plugin is that it doesn’t recognize the additional privacy settings created by the WPMU DEV Additional Privacy plugin we use to allow blogs to be private to a list of users, or the Commons community. What this meant is that an excerpt of the content posted on a Private group blog appeared on the main activity feed. It was only the first few lines of the post that appeared, and clicking on the post on the main activity stream re-directed to a screen indicating that the blog was private, but those first 55 words of a private post shouldn’t show up at all.

The fix was commenting out lines 963-1010 of the code in the bp-groupblog/bp-groupblog.php file.