[mlovelock]

All those interested in events & buddypress might want to check out this: http://gsocevents.wordpress.com/

[mlovelock]

Create a child theme with your own blogs/create.php file and change the text to your preferred message.

[mlovelock]

‘deactivating’ a plugin doesn’t always quite cut it. It’s worth completely removing plugins from the plugin folder (delete, move elsewhere) and then add them back in one by one to activate.

[mlovelock]

But there are occasions where a shortened url is desirable and / or necessary. Much as we may not want to be dictated to by sites such as twitter a shortened url can be useful in that context, much as I love the semantics of WP / BP urls.

So maybe an answer is to provide a shortening service for yourself on your own domain? After all, if your domain goes you’re leaving a whole bunch of dead links anyway! Would this work as a plugin?

Not that I can propose how to do this at the moment, but here’s wikipedia on url shortening: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/URL_shortening

[mlovelock]

@stwc Lunatic

My favourite url shortener name so far I think is ‘Beam.to’

We push blog posts out to twitter via Hootsuite, which has its own url shortening ow.ly (see what they did there?) So if you’re looking to do that kind of thing, a separate twitter / sn client might be the way to go.

If you want to push members blog posts out to twitter, then any compatible WP plugin should work, you would just need to install a sitewide WordPress > Twitter feed plugin so that members can use it on their own blogs too.

We use shortening services because it’s the nature of the beast but apart from the worries @stwc mentions above, as a few people point out, the danger of course is that if that url shortening service should cease to be so will all your links! Just a thought…

[mlovelock]

http://artsphere.co.uk running WP / BP

It’s a standard WP theme and then I’ve installed the BP Template Pack plugin to adapt it for buddypress.

[mlovelock]

For more specific help you’d need to give more specific details –

i want to do all sorts of things to profile fields…..

… is a bit vague.

Also, you’re effectively asking someone to teach you how to write code. What you’re after probably requires a more in-depth answer than you’re likely to get here in the forums.

Perhaps you ought to download and break down / delve into the custom profile filters plugin and start from there – that’s an example of how to do these things in code – combined with the codex etc should get you started.

[mlovelock]

You need to write a plugin then, and / or delve into the wordpress hooks and functions – best to check out the buddypress codex: https://codex.buddypress.org/

[mlovelock]

If you’re using the plugin I mentioned and you want to do exactly what you mentioned above, you could probably just add it into the SN arry in the plugin file, thus:

$social_networking_fields = array( // Enter the field ID of any field that prompts for the username to a social networking site, followed by the URL that must be appended to username to create a link to the user's profile on that site. Thus, since the URL for the profile of awesometwitteruser is twitter.com/awesometwitteruser, you should enter 'Twitter' => 'twitter.com/'. Don't forget: 1) Leave out the 'http://', 2) Include the trailing slash (/) if needed to make a valid URL, and 3) to separate items with commas

'Twitter' =>'twitter.com/' ,

'Delicious ID' => 'delicious.com/' ,

'YouTube ID ' => 'youtube.com/' ,

'Flickr ID ' =>'flickr.com/' ,

'FriendFeed ID' => 'friendfeed.com/',

'Facebook' => 'facebook.com/',

'MySpace' => 'myspace.com/',

// your site's Company Field

'Company' => 'google.co.uk/search?q='



);



// You shouldn't need to touch anything below this line.

Of course I haven’t actually tried this myself. The alternative is to extend the plugin a little with a function that takes that company field and does whatever you want to do with it.

[mlovelock]

The limitation of WP-Ban is that it’s not working at .htaccess level, so it only really does it’s thing if a spammer is polite enough to access your site normally. You might want to look at something like a plugin that’s going to ban IPs and referrers at the .htaccess level.

Also, had a quick look at your site – I presume you’re talking about http://young-people.ch ? I notice your register page is still /register (albeit translated) – have you tried changing this to something else? There’s eevery chance that the mere translation of the standard ‘register’ slug won’t slow the spammers down.

[mlovelock]

Nice layout on the Dean Robinson site (linked above). I think that’s probably a large part of the answer, it’s about how we present groups / forums to our users. A lot of usability is tied up in the presentation – something I’m having to work on for my own site.

@D Cartwright do you need to completely hide the groups, or could you just remove them from the menu(s) if you only want users to use the forums? Or turn groups / forums off and install stand-alone forum even?

[mlovelock]

I’ve no doubt they’ll return, but I haven’t had a spam signup for a fair while. The odd one creeps in, but you can’t stop a determined ‘real’ person. But I haven’t been subject to the continuous signups I used to get when I first started my site.

The steps I’ve taken are:

Rename (not remove) wp-signup.php

Use custom bp-register slug

Removed “powered by” type text in the footer and other obviously WP / BP phrases

Installed NoSpamNX

Installed WP-BAN

Installed SI Captcha

Employed the .htaccess rules explained here: http://wpmututorials.com/how-to/spam-blogs-and-buddypress/

Nothing’s perfect against spam, but certainly for me, these things have helped.

[mlovelock]

Check out this plugin: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-profile-filters-for-buddypress/

It will allow you to exempt that field from the standard BP search string function. You could also add a little customisation in the settings file to set your Company field to redirect to somewhere else as you’re suggesting here.

[mlovelock]

@DJPaul – well it’s all groups isn’t it – as there’s no group forums on here, and no longer a wire, there’s nowhere to post content to groups is there? Or am I missing something?

Sorry, off topic I know.

@pandragon give some more info on your ‘avatar problem’ and someone can probably help you on here.

[mlovelock]

BuddiPhone – looking very nice btw

[mlovelock]

Yes, because presumably the blog was created when the member initially registered. They’re going to need to come back, log in and actually do something with the blog

[mlovelock]

I’d definitely be up for a kitten with an orange hat.

[mlovelock]

Is this the same problem as this: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic/only-admin-avatar-in-blog-1

[mlovelock]

Well, to be honest that pretty much sums up CSS doesn’t it – ‘just way too much css tweaking required’. Every site I’ve ever developed has required a fair bit of CSS tweaking / hacking / fighting!

As someone who hacked BP1.1 into a premium WP theme (and boy was that a headache!) I actually found that in comparison, BP 1.2 with @andy’s BP Template Pack was a dream. Granted, to get it exactly how you want it takes a little work, but I managed to update a new WP theme in under an hour! Then gradually bringing in BP css from the default theme along with some changes of my own has pretty much worked for me.

The default structure / css is never going to work for everyone – I think it has to follow WP to a point, after all, they’re related apps – but look at it this way: at leastyou haven’t had to create a whole social networking plugin!

@timnicholson – let me know if / when you’ve knocked together the tutorial and I’ll throw in any useful tips that I come across as I finish my own mods.

[mlovelock]

Er, bump…

On a followup, I can mark the user as a spammer, which at least stops them showing up in the members directory.

[mlovelock]

@Bbrian017 – the register ‘slug’ is the path to your register page. So the default is yourdomain.com/register – yours would now be yourdomain.com/randomcrazyslugger

Given that, you probably don’t want your register page to be ‘randomcrazyslugger’ so you might want to change it to something that makes a little more sense to your site / your users.

[mlovelock]

Resolved.

Info for anyone else with similar problems:

The initial problem was a plugin – the old bp-events plugin, although deactivated it was still interfering. Deleting bp-events from plugins folder immediately caused BP to appear as active.

However, couldn’t reactivate BP after upgrade, so removed BP folder from plugins folder and reinstalled BP. Then activated fine.

[mlovelock]

Done

@andy, why not make this post sticky?

[mlovelock]

Aha, is there a fix? Or shall I just chance upgrading BP again (after a backup of course)?

[mlovelock]

Just seen BP 1.2.1 is released, but won’t try upgrading just yet…