BuddyPress Live Notification 2.0 Adds Real-Time Notifications for Users

photo credit: MACSwriter – cc

The BuddyPress Live Notification plugin was originally released in 2011. Brajesh Singh, prolific plugin author and founder of BuddyDev, created the plugin to provide Facebook-style real-time notifications for users. Over the past four years, a number of significant changes in both WordPress and BuddyPress have necessitated a complete rewrite of the extension.

The 2.0 version of the plugin adds support for BuddyPress’ new notifications component, as well as the Heartbeat API, which is now used to fetch the notifications.

The updated version includes the following:

Complete rewrite of the code to include support for BP notifications component (introduced in BuddyPress 1.9.0)

Uses WordPress Heartbeat API instead of long AJAX polling for greatly improved performance

Allows theme authors to change the notifying mechanism by overriding the notify method of the bpln object

Fires custom JavaScript event bpln:new_notifications when new notifications are received on the client side. A theme author can hook into it to make modifications.

Because BP Live Notification was designed to be easy to theme and extend, Singh created an example plugin to demonstrate how to replace the notify window UI with your own customization.

The sample plugin repackages the notification window with the jQuery notice plugin. Check out a live demo to see how that style of notice is presented.

If you don’t like how BP Live Notification styles its alerts by default, you can easily integrate a different jQuery notice plugin using the example Singh posted on GitHub. Searching the web will turn up a wide variety of beautiful notification styles that you can adapt for use with BuddyPress.

Both Twitter and Facebook use live notifications to keep users interacting on their social networks. When you receive a live notice, it confirms, in an almost tangible way, that you are at the center of where the social activity is happening. If you think this would benefit your BuddyPress network, download BP Live Notification 2.0 for free from WordPress.org.