@mugwumpman,
first and last_name fields don’t belong to BuddyPress, but to WP profiles.
BP use only a field called Name at first install. User can enter their first AND last name in that field. Is this what you’re talking about ?
After reading your topic on wp.org, it seems that you use those fields to enter datas which are not first and last names, but more for company and company activity or such.
As you use BP, i would suggest you use the power of xprofile and offer to your user a much better experience by adding a field for a company and another for company activity (or something like that). So you can forget WP’s profile fields and use BP’s xprofile fields.
WP’s profile field used when BP is activated are: username, email and password.
And BP adds his mandatory Name field, which can be first, lastname, username or whatever other unique name belonging to a subscriber (which can be a human, a pet, a company….).
And yo can as many fields you want to the registery or for later on profiles.
The other problem related to font case is a mistery so far. Can be related to many things such as plugins or theme or custom function. This can be determined by debuging and using one of WP’s default theme and all plugins deactivated.
No matter to know if you fill a wp or a bp field for this. Both use a textarea, so it’s probably more a css thing somewhere.
BuddyPress will try to sync the value of a user’s “Name” field to the First and Last Name fields in their wp-admin user profile.
To disable this, go to wp-admin Settings > BuddyPress, and disable Profile Syncing.
