Check for Javascript errors in your browser console (right click on the page and select “inspect”. and see if any errors show there that may give a clue.
Have you enabled the debug log in WordPress? If not, I recommend you install Developer debug tools, which will let you enable and view it, as well as providing a wide range of other debug and configuration tools.
The first thing to do is deactivate all other plugins and see if the activity page is loading. If it does, and it should, then it’s probably a conflict with another plugin. You can then reactivate the other plugins one by one until is stops working and you have found the culprit.
Another option, as I suggested, is to right click on the page, click on inspect and then find the option that says “console”. Here’ you might see some errors displayed, and this might give you some clues as to what the problem is.
I think best practice really depends on your target audience and what features they may expect or desire from their profile.
One of that main profile customisation features provided in BuddyPress is the ability to “overload”, a profile template file, replacing it with your own customised version. This is a simple way to add your own features to the profile pages.
However, overloading a page means any updates to it in future by BuddyPress would need to be manually added to your overloaded page, so this method, although simple, is not the only way to add custom features to profile pages.
If you look in the plugins/buddypress/templates directory, and investigate the templates in, for example bp-nouveau, then you can see there are a lot of action hooks you could use to add further content in specific locations in each page.
This second method allows you to keep the BP provided templates unchanged, but still add the content required.
The most configurable profile I ever created was for a social networking community that wanted the user to effectively create their own theme for their profile pages. So I built the following additional plugins for the site:
1. a theme specific plugin that allowed the user to fully customise their profile colour scheme.
2. A custom header plugin that allowed the user to select their own header image.
3. Similarly, a custom background plugin.
4. My profile home and sidebar user widgets plugins to allow the user to add their own content into their profile pages.
5. Menu customisations to bring all these customisation options into a single location, and remove/simplify them in other places.
6. Integration with the overall blogging platform – providing the user with areas where they can showcase their own blogs, and also allow them a variety of options as to who those blogs are shown to.
Those are just a few main examples as to the possibilities, but most of them do require some form of coding.
I’ve got a fixed version of this on Buddyuser dot com (The BP Follow page), The other alternative is to look up those errors on Stack Overflow and apply the fixes yourself.
I’ve asked to contribute to the Followers Plugin and have had a positive response, so hopefully, this will be folded into the WordPress Library soonish.
@mike8022 It’s certainly something something that I’ve done, because removing items from search can really hit large servers, it’s a known performance issue. So it’s better to not offer search to the bots, so that you can have a more nuanced approach to search for logged in users, and also for people visiting the site. A bot should not ne using search at all, in fact this is a primary part of a DOS attack, to het WordPress constantly searching for none existent pages. So what I’m thinking for my plugin, is to exclude bots from all searches, to give logged in users full search, and to have controls on what site visitors are able to search for. Included in this is the need to have control over the xml sitemap, and to enable hard rules for exactly what site visitors are allow to search for. Include in this a strategy of honeypots and other traps for those with prying eyes.
bbPress tags seem be a bit of a target, as a lot of the security solutions out there do not cover them. it pretty simple to turn those off for not logged in users, and also to choose to turn them off just for bots I reckon, but it shows a comprehensive approach is needed I reckon, and this DOS attack I’m looking at currently is helping my ideas gel into that comprehensive approach. As I see it, ideally, next time I get an attack, I’ll have a single page allowing me to lock down the entire site if I need to.
I just wanted to let you know I’ve not forgotten this, far from it in fact. One of the sites I look after came under a massive multifaceted DOS attach this week, and I’ve been throwing tonnes of features into my plugin to stem off the impact of it. So I’ve learnt a lot and have a bunch of ideas for additional features. I’ve just not been able to get the time to pull out my code for hiding things from search.
One thing I learnt was how good BP’s own privacy implementation is compared to the other free resources and I want to spend some time understanding these better so my own plugin can compliment rather than duplicate that aspect. Interesting though that I had one site where that option was not showing up, and it turned out to be our old friend the permalinks reset issue that was stopping it. No idea why that would be the case, but I think we should have a plugin that regularly resets the permalinks for us automatically as many people, including myself often forget to check this when troubleshooting and it would be good to take that issue away for people.
I already have the code to remove stuff from wp search in another plugin I have, I just need to put that into this new plugin and update it specifically for this task.
Currently, I’ve got part of the solution, I can redirect all the bbPress feed links to a 404 or back to the originating page. However, I want to remove those links, and ideally stop the rss functions from being triggered. I did find some clues for that on friday when I last worked on it, and should be back working on it on Monday.
Yep could you create a new thread for this? It just means we keep to the same topic and it won’t confuse future viewers.
I’ve decided to write a new bp privacy plugin which makes all bbp, wp, and bp pages private, disables xml rpc and also rest, removes the rss links and aims to deal with all privacy issues in one plugin, with settings to give flexibility.
