[Boone Gorges]

Hi @m4soN – The easiest place to add custom CSS is in the Customizer. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-add-custom-css-to-your-wordpress-site/.

Once there, you’ll need to learn a bit about how CSS works to make the changes you want to change. Without knowing more about what “very ugly” means, it’s hard to give specific instructions. But let’s say you wanted to increase the field padding. You might introduce the following CSS:

.buddypress-wrap .bp-tables-user tr td {
  padding: 20px;
}

Here’s some more info about getting started with CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduction_to_CSS

[Boone Gorges]

It could be that bbPress has changed the way it finds clickable links in 2.6. Here’s some code that works for me to prevent bbPress from finding these links:

add_filter(
	'bbp_make_clickable',
	function( $val ) {
		remove_filter( 'bbp_make_clickable', 'bbp_make_mentions_clickable', 8 );
		return $val;
	},
	0
);

[Boone Gorges]

You mean you want Twitter to turn into the embedded timeline, etc?

Here’s a minimum script that’ll enable autoembeds for BP xprofile fields. Note that “476” is for illustration purposes – you’ll want to whitelist this for your own relevant field IDs. https://gist.github.com/boonebgorges/d4be14885d1a8ab8b6e5d7900a5fd220

[Boone Gorges]

The function responsible for creating the notices is bp_nouveau_template_notices(). For example, if you override the buddypress/members/single/profile/edit.php template, you can insert <?php bp_nouveau_template_notices(); ?> just above the tabs, and the notices will show there. (They’ll also show in the original spot, which you could hide with some targeted CSS.)

To make a similar change without overriding the template, try the following:

add_action( 'bp_before_profile_field_content', 'bp_nouveau_template_notices' );

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @sibahmed, and thanks for the post!

Unfortunately, BuddyPress doesn’t have these kinds of fields built in. They’re called “nested” or “conditional” fields, and they’ve been requested in the past – see https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/579. It’s a large job to build it as a feature for BuddyPress, though it’d be easier to build a custom tool for yourself that does this.

If you’ve got the technical experience, you could a custom BP_XProfile_Field_Type, whose edit logic would contain the markup and JavaScript to enable these sorts of fields. I did some quick searching, and it looks like someone was writing this at some point – see https://rimonhabib.com/coming-up-next-buddypress-nested-conditional-fields/. Maybe worth following up there?

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @cassel – Thanks for the post!

I’ve just installed All In One SEO to try to reproduce. Looks like the line numbers have changed – I’m seeing 5711 now, instead of 4735! – but the error is still there.

Looking into the all-in-one-seo-pack code, it appears that this error only occurs if you haven’t yet saved the options for this plugin. Once you’ve done so, the error ought to go away.

For the record, I was able to trigger this notice even without BuddyPress.

I’ve opened a ticket with the All In One folks to let them know about the bug on their end, so stay tuned at https://github.com/semperfiwebdesign/all-in-one-seo-pack/issues/2805 ! In the meantime, you might consider forcing errors not to be displayed on your production site – always a good idea. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-turn-off-php-errors-in-wordpress/

[Boone Gorges]

BuddyPress is not approaching EOL. As @sbrajesh noted above, BP is coming up on a 5.0 release that’ll include, among other improvements, REST API endpoints for our major content types. The development team believes this is going to be an important step in making BuddyPress more powerful as a foundation for community development.

I acknowledge that the amount of activity on the project has not been consistent over the last year or two. The BuddyPress project – the development of the plugin itself as well as the manning of these support forums – is 100% volunteer driven. BuddyPress is not a business, and as such, no one is paid by BP to work on BP. The central group of volunteers who work on BP development and support is pretty small, which means it’s quite sensitive to fluctuation in activity; if just one or two active members get busy with other work for a while, it can have a significant effect on the pace of the project. In contrast, Michael and Brajesh are both correct when they note that businesses with paid employees are able to devote a much more concentrated and consistent amount of effort to their products.

While it’s disappointing that the BuddyBoss team’s improvements haven’t been integrated into BP, I completely understand the reasons why their team has opted to fork rather than contribute. Personnel issues aside, the pace of development of a widely-used open source project, developed in a decentralized way with loose management, is necessarily going to be slower and more conservative than a private product. And it makes sense that a business owner would want 100% control over the direction of their core products. I respect the BuddyBoss folks and wish them the best of luck with their platform.

All this being said, I continue to believe that BuddyPress is the best community solution of its type, particularly for those users who need maximum flexibility and customizability. My limited experience with BP’s direct competitors in the WP market is that they work nicely for their central use case, but it’s extremely difficult to modify the default behavior.

As someone who’s been involved in BP for a long time and cares a great deal about the project, I must extend thanks to the folks in this thread who are here, demonstrating their concern for the well-being of BuddyPress 🙂

[Boone Gorges]

The simplest way to disable, at the moment, is to squelch the update_user_meta() call. Untested, but something like this should work:

add_filter( 'update_user_metadata', function( $should_update, $object_id, $meta_key ) {
    if ( 'last_activity' === $meta_key ) {
        return false;
    }

    return $should_update;
}, 10, 3 );

I’ve opened a ticket to discuss disabling the backward compatibility feature in BP. https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/7882#ticket

[Boone Gorges]

I’m afraid I haven’t ever used any of the available group chat plugins for BuddyPress, but a web search shows that a number are available: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=buddypress+group+chat&t=ffab&ia=web

[Boone Gorges]

There should be nothing additional required – no registration or enqueuing.

It looks like I made a typo in my original comment – I doubled the /buddypress/ path. Here’s the proper destintation in your theme:

wp-content/themes/your-theme/buddypress/members/single/profile/profile-loop.php

Sorry about that!

[Boone Gorges]

Excellent! Good luck with your project 🙂

[Boone Gorges]

If you need to do extensive customization to the appearance of the user profile, I’d recommend overriding BP’s templates in your child theme. For example, you can copy the file wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/members/single/profile/profile-loop.php to wp-content/themes/your-theme/buddypress/buddypress/members/single/profile/profile-loop.php. Then, make the modifications you’d like in the copied file.

Note that wp-profile.php is only used when the Extended Profiles component is disabled.

[Boone Gorges]

508 usually means that the hosting provider has put a limit on the resources available to your account. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20040307/how-to-fix-the-508-resource-limit-is-reached-error-in-wordpress. BuddyPress does generally require more resources (RAM, MySQL I/O) than a standard WP installation. I’d suggest reaching out to your hosting provider to ask about the potential of upgrading your service to support the use of BP.

[Boone Gorges]

Applying https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/changeset/11750 should fix the problem. Note that this change is in bp-messages/bp-messages-template.php, *not* notices-loop.php. There should be no need to reapply these changes after BuddyPress 3.0, where the fix will become part of the BP release.

[Boone Gorges]

Here’s some info on migrating vBulletin data to bbPress, which will get your content and users in. https://codex.bbpress.org/getting-started/importing-data/import-forums/vbulletin/

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @gregthebuzz – You might have better luck moving some of your logic into BP_Group_Extension, which does most of the template-related work for you. See https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/group-extension-api/. The display() method is where the content for your public-facing tab will go, while the edit parameter will help you configure what you’d like group admins to see under Manage.

I’m unsure how or whether this’ll integrate neatly with https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-extend-groups-fields/. That’s something you’ll probably want to talk to that plugin author about.

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @billybelly – It’s difficult for us on the buddypress.org forums to provide concrete advice on a non-free product, because we don’t have access to test it. If you paid for the UX Builder project, then they ought to be the ones providing you with support.

That being said, it’s possible that BP templates are inherently incompatible with this plugin. BP technically uses WP pages like Activity, Register, etc, but it sorta hijacks the page loading process in a way that can make it incompatible with certain kinds of “builder” plugins. If you’re looking to customize the interior portions of a BP page, it’s best to do it either using CSS (which you can access via the Customizer and a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-custom-css/) or by overriding the templates in a child theme. See https://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/a-quick-look-at-1-7-theme-compatibility/#overloading-template-compatibility-theme-files

[Boone Gorges]

It’s a bit hard to tell what’s going on without being able to log in and see exactly what your users are seeing.

I suggest logging in as a non-admin, then right-clicking the space where the avatar should appear. Select ‘Inspect Element’, and then browse through the developer tools to see whether the avatar is actually in the source. If it is, but is hidden by CSS, you should be able to use the inspector to figure out which CSS is the culprit. If it’s not there at all, you could have some other sort of problem – like, perhaps, a failure to connect to Gravatar.

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @demonos – Please understand that everyone who responds to things on these forums does so as a volunteer. You can help to decrease overall response time by helping a user or two yourself 🙂

The following bits should be enough to reenable wp-signup.php:

remove_action( 'bp_init', 'bp_core_wpsignup_redirect' );
add_filter( 'bp_has_custom_signup_page', '__return_false' );

[Boone Gorges]

Hi @datenfresser – You can customize the template by overriding the template file in your child theme. Copy the file wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/members/single/messages/messages-loop.php to wp-content/themes/[your-theme]/buddypress/members/single/messages/messages-loop.php, and make your modifications to the new file.

To turn avatars into links, find lines that look like:

<?php bp_message_thread_avatar( array( 'width' => 25, 'height' => 25 ) ); ?>

and do this:

<a href="<?php bp_message_thread_from(); ?><php bp_message_thread_avatar( array( 'width' => 25, 'height' => 25 ) ); ?></a>

Something like that should get you close to what you want.

To link the excerpt, find the line that includes bp_message_thread_excerpt(), and wrap it in a link to bp_message_thread_view_link(). See the ‘View Message’ markup just above for a template you can copy.

[Boone Gorges]

Ah, interesting.

1. If you’ve got access (through the mysql command line tool, or through PHPMyAdmin, check the character set and collation https://makandracards.com/makandra/2531-show-the-character-set-and-the-collation-of-your-mysql-tables There may be something funny going on there.

2. Do you have the same problem with other content? Can you post a private message with a special character in the subject line? A blog post with a special character in the title?

These items will help narrow down whether it’s a problem with bp-groups, or a database-level config issue.

[Boone Gorges]

It’s not possible to use a regular BP profile field to keep track of data changes over time. BP doesn’t keep records of old profile field values – it only stores the most recent one.

There are a number of ways you could accomplish it. If you had the technical know-how, you could build a tool that hooks into XProfile and syncs user-entered data to another system (maybe an array in usermeta or something like that). Another option is to manually created new fields every 3 months, but then you’d need to do some customization to the way fields are displayed on the front end so that the profile doesn’t show all past entries as separate items. Either way, some customization would be required.

Maybe someone on this forum knows of an existing tool that will help.

[Boone Gorges]

Be sure you’re looking at the View All tab.

[Boone Gorges]

Some things to check:

1. Check the timestamps at Dashboard > Activity. Are they off as well?

2. Are in timezone UTC-5 (US Eastern)? Just so we have a better understanding of what’s going on.

3. You say the “server time” is “set correctly”. Can you say more about what this means?

4. Are timestamps for WP content (like posts and comments) correctly displayed?

5. When you look in the database – wp_bp_activity, the date_recorded column – what do the timestamps look like? Are they UTC or in your local timezone?

It’s generally recommend to keep PHP in UTC and to allow WP/BP to do the timezone offsets; see https://weston.ruter.net/2013/04/02/do-not-change-the-default-timezone-from-utc-in-wordpress/ for one account. My guess is that your server time is set to local time, so that things are getting double-adjusted. How this can best be fixed depends on whether only activity items are affected, or if it’s all items on the installation.

[Boone Gorges]

You can pass user IDs into bp_has_members() like this:

$custom_ids = my_custom_ids( 'country', 'usa' );
$has_members_args = array(
    'include' => $custom_ids,
);
if ( bp_has_members() ) {
    ...
}