[@mikestarrwriter Member 13 years, 10 months ago]

mercime, thanks much for that.

[@mikestarrwriter Member 13 years, 10 months ago]

Regarding my last comment on my question #3, I was browsing the BuddyPress plugins list and found this but unfortunately, the link (https://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-real-names/) goes to a different plugin’s page.:

BuddyPress Real Names
BuddyPress Real Names is a BuddyPress plugin that use two different fields (one for the last name and one for the first name) to display the Full Name instead of the regular name field. If you have already a community with members; you can use it to replace all the old names with Full Names. […] ..

[@mikestarrwriter Member 13 years, 10 months ago]

aljuk, thanks for the reply.

1. I think the BP Profile Privacy plugin is just what I need.

2. I’m not sure about the BuddyPress Private Community plugin. I think I’ll have to install it and play with it and see if it’s helpful for me..

3. When you say “All of that should, and does, happen as a matter of course”, *Name* is a core field but doesn’t break a user’s name down into first name, middle initial and last name. So in order for me to have that level of granularity for the user name, I’ll have to add a “First Name” field, a “Middle Initial” field and a “Last Name” field. So I end up asking the user to fill in their name information twice and the value the user enters into the “Name” might not match the combined values of the “First Name” field, “Middle Initial” field and “Last Name” fields. I’d much rather have the user enter values in those fields then concatenate those entries to fill the “Name” field.

4. So is there a way I can manage group members profile management separately from visitor management? If I set up the BP profile fields with the level of granularity I need for our members, that would be way too much information to ask a visitor to enter just to be able to register to leave comments.

5. Sounds to me like until I can heap enough abuse on the folks over at Artisteer, I’ll have to retweak theme files every time I make a change to the theme with Artisteer. Your suggestion of constructing a child theme sounds like it would work but I’d have to have my “real” theme become a child theme to the BuddyPress default theme and that seems to me to be the exact opposite of how things ought to work. It would be really nice if there was some way to install the BuddyPress default theme as a limited child theme to my Artisteer theme without overriding my Artisteer theme formatting. That does bring up a question though… is there any way I can create page templates for profile management that use the BuddyPress default theme yet have the rest of the site maintain use of the Artisteer theme? Another option might be putting up profile management on a separate domain and synchronizing the database from there to the main site’s database. However, this sounds like a level of development that’s probably above my skill level (I’m not a PHP programmer but am at least a fair HTML guy).

Again, thanks much for your help.