BuddyPress

I am trying to use define( ‘BP_ENABLE_ROOT_PROFILES’, true ); to put my user profiles at the root, for example, http://www.site.com/username instead of http://www.site.com/members/username

When I add this line to my wp-config.php, it changes the URL for the users to the root style, but then visiting that URL produces a 404 page not found.

This happens for all users, including a user I added after adding the command to wp-config

Is this a caching issue, and I just need to give it time? The site is live so I removed the command right away, so that my member profiles wouldn’t be broken.

@katemgilbert

Is there a reason why you need to change the URL profile member’s link? There is no advantage what you really want.

It ought to work.

@mikey3D – the site is for a workplace, and they want their business cards to read “site.com/realname”, where realname = username. The advantage is totally cosmetic, but desired nonetheless.

@djpaul – I know it ought to work, that’s what’s so frustrating. Do you think it’s a cache issue, and if I just wait a bit after applying the change they’ll catch up? I saw some other threads that say this fix doesn’t work in WP 3.1+, but other threads that say it does work in all versions, so I’m stumped.

Thanks!

I can’t see how it could be a caching issue. Are you on multisite or regular WordPress, and do you mind sharing what’s in your .htaccess file?

Have to admit I can’t get it to work on 1.2.8 / 3.1

I knew why you would do it but how will you eliminate duplicate content between members and unique items in the search engines? Use robots.txt:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /members/

EDIT: @gregfielding has similar problem “Help with redirect for root profile change” that I didn’t tell him.

@djpaul – here’s the .htaccess. 2 users needed their real URLs right away, so we have 301 redirects for them until this fix is solved. Could that be the issue?

# BEGIN WordPress

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^index.php$ – [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

# END WordPress

redirect 301 /a/kc /members/username1/
redirect 301 /a/liam /members/username2/
redirect 301 /kc /members/username1/
redirect 301 /liam /members/username2

Why not just use @realname on their business cards instead of site.com/realname?

@katemgilbert

It’s not that the profiles are broken, but that the activity and @mention permalinks for prior events aren’t updated. New activity will have the correct, new link, while prior activity links will be broken.

I’ll let you know if I have any more luck with this!