BuddyPress.org

I tried very hard to get this to work, and I can not get that code to work, even in the default template or even by creating a blank .php with pasting in the code listed above to upload to the mu-plugins directory.

First of all you should not be placing the code in mu_plugins. Either place it in your bp-custom.php file, create your own plugin that resides in /wp-content/plugins/, or put the code in your member theme’s functions.php file.

But, in the BP Profiles section, the users can simply change their login username to anything they want. This will obviously lead to database errors and people changing their usernames to cause conflicts.

Where do you see the option in BuddyPress to change your login username? The only option you have is to change your display name. This is an entirely different piece of datum.

Yes, when a user registers for a new account, if they choose to enter the exact same datum in the username field as the “Full Name” field, then that is their choice. But, this data is stored and used in different ways. The datum from the “Full Name” field gets placed in two different tables: it populates the display_name field in the wp_users table and it is recorded in the wp_bp_xprofile_data table corresponding to the meta field entitled “Full Name” in the wp_bp_xprofile_fields table.

When a user decides to edit their “Full Name” field via BuddyPress, the changes to that piece of datum have no affect on the login username field stored in the user_login field of the wp_user WordPress table.

So, on the same registration page, you have two questions requesting for what their username is going to be. This is quite ridiculous, and so far their is no way to shut that part off. Does anyone have any ideas?

This is not correct. These fields serve different purposes as detailed above. One field is the user_login, the other is the user’s display name.