In wp-admin Settings > Reading, there’s an option called search engine privacy. This needs to be public for blog posts to appear in the activity stream.
If you wrote manually wrote code to perform a search on each data store, the page would be quite slow to load as you’re doing multiple searches. It’d also be very tricky to paginate results accurately.
If I were doing this, I’d investigate doing the above (making a template that manually searches for the top 5 results from each data store, and displaying those on a page). Beyond that, the solutions get very technical and complex.
It is not efficient to get the total number of activities and display anywhere. If you are inside an Activity loop, you can use bp_get_activity_count(). If you are outside the Activity loop, I’d suggest changing your design.
Set your users to the Contributor role, not Editor. Contributors can write drafts, but can’t publish.
I also want these people to receive notifications every time a new post is published.
If you specifically mean notifications inside BuddyPress, I’m not aware of any plugins that do this. You’ll have to write something yourself. If you mean notifications more generally, consider using the Jetpack plugin — users can subscribe to your site, and receive email updates when a post is published.
Regardless of what type of notification you meant, you’ll probably have to write some custom code to get it to send a message to your users when e.g. you promote them to Editor.
I haven’t looked at Welcome Pack in a few months, nor tested it against the latest versions of WordPress or BuddyPress. Not seen this error before, but it’ll be a while before I investigate; Welcome Pack isn’t a high priority.
imath: I’ve just done a code review of your plugin (the version on github, in master), and have left some feedback on Github. We’re keen to use it on BuddyPress.org once the issues are addressed.
