[Scott Hendison]

@hahvensa – My programmer, a member of this forum, is unable to have her replies go live or be shown in her history, so after reading your post she had an idea and fixed it – she asked me to post this –

we don’t use the dropdown select box, but while troubleshooting I put it back on and it doesn’t work for us either. I don’t know a solution to that since we don’t need it.

On the alphabetical issue: I finally found a way to make it work. I had to edit a core buddypress file though. bp-core/bp-core-classes.php on line 253, I changed from $sql['orderby'] = "ORDER BY u.display_name";
to
$sql['orderby'] = "ORDER BY u.user_login";

Of course this only works for us because we chose to use the business names as the people’s usernames. The sorting by display name, although should work, shows the list out of order. I can’t figure out why, but the core file edit has solved the problem. That will be frustrating on upgrades, but at least it now works.

Before the upgrade, we were sorting by display name and it worked fine, and this sounds like a workaround – Using buddypress for a chamber of commerce seemed like a good idea at the time, and overall we’ve been pretty happy, but is there any paid support somewhere?

[Scott Hendison]

Similar issue –

After upgrading Buddypress to the latest version of 1.7.2, the “sort alphabetically” is no longer working when viewing the list of members:
http://www.eastportlandchamberofcommerce.com/business-directory

It’s not working when you view all members, search results, or when choosing to view members in categories. In members-loop.php, here’s the line of code that has worked up until now:

<?php if ( bp_has_members( bp_ajax_querystring('members').'&type=alphabetical&per_page=500' ) ) : ?>

On another note, our programmer has posted this issue twice here since Monday, but her post has not appeared visible to her or to me, or presumably, to others. (Budddypress user, Dzynit) – Any ideas why that’s happening?

[Scott Hendison]

Yeah, Gregs plugin just generates content=”” for anything buddypress – Unique desc tags are nice to have regardless of whether they’re a ranking factor or not, but certainly not a deal breaker. Maybe someone can figure out how to roll it in… Greg?

[Scott Hendison]

I bugged @yoast twice on Twitter, once a couple of weeks ago and once just yesterday, looking only for a way to simply turn OFF his plugin for anything in my /member-directory folder or deeper.

I figured it’s not worth me being a pest, so this morning after finding yet another new discussion here, I decided to cycle through SEO plugins until I found one that worked –

this leaves my Buddypress title tags intact – HOOray –
https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gregs-high-performance-seo

I kept a few notes and was going to blog about it (and still might) but Gregs High Performance SEO does appear to work alright with Buddypress,

If i poke around I can likely figure out autogen on the description tags too, because the plugin DOES insert a blank one, whereas none of the others did anything for the desc tag.

Unfortunately, the author hasn’t put out a new one in almost a year, but at least my long running issue of no unique tags tags is solved for now

[Scott Hendison]

@miguelcortereal – I’m not sure why BP won’t take its cue from Yoasts (otherwise fantstic) SEO plugin and we’re trying to figure this out now – It sure doesn’t seem to work at ALL – and it even strips out the meager title tags that work fine in BP

We’re using BP as a business directory for a local chamber of commerce. All of the categories, searches, and even the businesses profile pages themselves are getting blank title tags via Yoast’s plugin, but turn it off, and they come right back. Irritating – We’re looking for a way to just disable the plugin for BP pages but might dump the plugin if we have to.

Unless we get Yoast working for BP too, I still don’t know how we can get a unique description snippet for each page either – His WP SEO plugin does that for you, taking a snippit from the beginning of the page – OR – you can go SEOverboard and put in one separately on the edit screen if you want to – (Same goes for the title and keyword tag – they autogenerate if you want or you can manually edit.)

The rest of it – the “on page” seo is pretty much covered, although we do like to make sure the template has a unique H1 tag, but that’s about it.

It’s also worth noting that the Yoast plugin does NOT add the BP pages to it’s xml sitemaps either, so we have to double up and use Arne deBracholds XML sitemaps plugin which does get every member BP page…

@therestofyou – Yeah traditional SEO has changed, and is less link-dependent now, but the fundamentals of on-page SEO 101 (like a unique title tag, etc). are all still important. Even having a unique desc tag is important for the serps to show a description for the users,

[Scott Hendison]

Yes, we’d REALLY like to see this – We are currently migrating users from a different system, and manually inputting 60+ members to begin. It would be nice if the first time they logged in, they all were prompted to change the passwords that we’ve had to make up.