[wiste]

I didn’t take it away because it’s still useful, and with the filter options the general “noise” is much less. If you have a forum, it’s not the most used part of the network, the people who will be using my network are more focused on the forum. By making the forums the first thing they see and not the activity feed, it makes it so the activity feed is an extra feature and not the main focus of the group.

[wiste]

If you want to see what it looks like you can check out a group page on my website:

http://www.makeloops.com/groups/amigurumi-designers/forum/

[wiste]

If you want to see what it looks like you can check out a group page on my website:

http://www.makeloops.com/groups/amigurumi-designers/forum/

[wiste]

I made it so that the “home” tab was named the “activity” tab, moved it over, and made the “forum” tab the first tab that users see when viewing a group. That way at least the first thing they see isn’t the activity feed for the group which is very overwhelming.

You can do this for each group individually using the BuddPress Group Extras plugin, but you’d have to do it one group at a time. Instead, I added some code to my functions.php in my child theme to do the same thing, but for all groups.

Below are the two functions I created. The first renames the activity tab and moves it over, the second forces the “forum” tab to be the first tab a user sees when visiting the group (unless the group has no forum in which case it still defaults to the activity tab).

//function to reorder and rename group tabs in buddypress
function whff_setup_nav() 
{

global $bp;

  if (isset($bp->groups->current_group->slug) && $bp->groups->current_group->slug == $bp->current_item) 
  {
     $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['position'] = 110;
	 
	 $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['name'] = 'Activity';
	 
}

} 
add_action( 'bp_setup_nav', 'whff_setup_nav', 100000 );

//function to redirect group home pages to the forum tab instead of the activity tab
function redirect_group_home() {
  global $bp;
  $path = clean_url( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] );
  $path = apply_filters( 'bp_uri', $path );
  if (bp_is_group_home() && strpos( $path, $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['slug'] ) === false && bp_is_active('forums') ) {
    if ($bp->groups->current_group->is_user_member || $bp->groups->current_group->status == 'public') {
      bp_core_redirect( $path . 'forum/' );
    }
  }
  
}

add_action('bp_init', 'redirect_group_home');

[wiste]

I made a slight change to the function for redirecting the user to the forum instead of the activity page because I forgot that you can create groups that have no forums which results in the group page never being able to be found. Now if you the group h as no page the activity page will still be the first tab selected when viewing a group:

//function to redirect group home pages to the forum tab instead of the activity tab
function redirect_group_home() {
  global $bp;
  $path = clean_url( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] );
  $path = apply_filters( 'bp_uri', $path );
  if (bp_is_group_home() && strpos( $path, $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['slug'] ) === false && bp_is_active('forums') ) {
    if ($bp->groups->current_group->is_user_member || $bp->groups->current_group->status == 'public') {
      bp_core_redirect( $path . 'forum/' );
    }
  }
  
}

add_action('bp_init', 'redirect_group_home');

[wiste]

The last update of Custom Community seems to have a lot of problems. Unfortunately, that’s about as far as my knowledge of it extends. I’ve ended up just renaming and moving the activity tab.

[wiste]

No problem! I found your post because I had the exact same issue. On my site I’ve just renamed and reordered the tab because I think it’s still useful, it’s just information overload if that’s the first thing you see when coming upon a very busy group. I also disabled the ability to make comments on items in the group activity feed to reduce the confusion about where forum posts should be made.

[wiste]

I’ve got no advice the actual problem as I’ve only been banging my head against BuddyPress for about a week, but did you check to see that the update didn’t overwrite your changes? My understanding is that you need to use a child theme for file changes so that updates don’t overwrite them.

[wiste]

Hi @rayela, since your original question never got answered I thought I’d give you an answer:

As you discovered, you can disable all activity feeds for your entire site by unchecking the “activities” component on the BuddyPress settings Components tab, but as you mentioned this results in a blank home page which isn’t good.

Unfortunately, you cannot fix this without writing code because there are no easy options to do this with BuddyPress (I feel your pain, I quit programming for a reason).

You will need to create a functions.php or bp-custom.php as mentioned above to add custom code to. This function will redirect it so that the forum tab is the “home page” for your group and remove the “home” tab so that it’s no longer visible:

function redirect_group_home() {
  global $bp;
  $path = clean_url( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] );
  $path = apply_filters( 'bp_uri', $path );
  if (bp_is_group_home() && strpos( $path, $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['slug'] ) === false ) {
    if ($bp->groups->current_group->is_user_member || $bp->groups->current_group->status == 'public') {
      bp_core_redirect( $path . 'forum/' );
    }
  }
  
  $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home'] = false;
}

add_action('bp_init', 'redirect_group_home');

I’m not sure if you’re still active here but I felt after your amiable responses you deserved a real answer.

[wiste]

I fixed it using the advice from this blog post.

function whff_setup_nav() 
{

global $bp;

  if (isset($bp->groups->current_group->slug) && $bp->groups->current_group->slug == $bp->current_item) 
  {
     $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['home']['position'] = 10;
     $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['members']['position'] = 60;
     $bp->bp_options_nav[$bp->groups->current_group->slug]['notifications']['position'] = 110;
}

} 
add_action( 'bp_setup_nav', 'whff_setup_nav', 100000 );

I added “global $bp;” at the top of the function. Now works like a charm. Thank you for your hard work in sussing this out!

[wiste]

I’m calling it like I see it. Some of the responses I’ve seen here are down right uncivil. WordPress powers 20% of all websites on the internet, you think people sign up to use it because they’re just lazy programmers? No, they really don’t know how to program so when someone asks for help and says, “I don’t know how to program” telling them to go learn and stop bothering the “busy” developers is completely useless.

These forums are pointless because the developers are unresponsive. I can go to a dozen other forums and ask random blokes what they think I should do and get just as much help as I’ve seen anyone get here. At least if you didn’t have these forums people wouldn’t keep getting told to go here and ask for help by well meaning people who assume that help will be given when help is very unlikely to be received.

A large portion of the threads I see here are people asking for help, getting no response, and then either muddling through long enough to answer their own question or just giving up. If they are lucky enough to figure it out, there are half a dozen or more other people begging for the solution because they got no answer when they asked themselves. It’s completely dysfunctional.

[wiste]

@logicwolf, I tried your code out and unfortunately it seems to have no effect on y site. Is this solution still working for you? Any thoughts on why it might not be working for me? I copied exactly what you wrote and added it to functions.php in my child theme. I tried changing the values for the position but that also had no effect.

[wiste]

@ubernaut thanks for the reply! Sorry but my internet has been down and life a little too busy to log back in here.

I finally got a reply from the theme developer, but his answer didn’t help. He did at least confirm that it was a problem with the theme and then told me to just upgrade to the new theme they were developing (which is still in beta and has massive problems), so not useful at all. I hacked in some custom CSS I’d found for someone else havign as similar problem with a different plugin to trick it into displaying correctly while I look for another theme.

I believe it is somehow related to the fact that buddypress sidebars are not the same as site sidebars, it just doesn’t see that there are any sidebars at all. I went through the codex and the pages and tried to see where I could fix it myself since the developer has essentially abandoned the theme but it’s just a little beyond my coding skills at present. I think my ultimate solution will be to find a theme by a developer with better support. Hopefully as I learn more problems like this will be less of an issue.

—

On another note:

I realize that this is an open source, free product but I have to say that the attitude from the developers here in the threads I’ve read is incredibly off putting. Rolling your eyes at people who’ve installed a plugin but do know how to code and find your codex incomprehensible is extremely unhelpful.

WordPress was designed just so that people who didn’t know how to code could build custom blogs and websites. Whipping out a hipster sneer and telling them that they should be grateful is both rude and mean. You are the ones who chose to develop a plugin for a different user base than the core product. Don’t slap them across the face for assuming your plugin might work for them (since it’s apparently the #1 plugin on WordPress.org) and then having questions when it doesn’t.

I will say that having read the forums here first, I almost didn’t install BuddyPress at all because I don’t really want to interact with devs who treat their users so poorly solely based on the excuse that it’s free so you should be able to talk at us however you like, or simply ignore us if our questions are “too stupid”. If I didn’t have even at least a little experience with programming and web development I would’ve passed over it completely. I won’t be able to recommend it to any of my clients because I wouldn’t ask them to have to deal with this themselves.

You are lucky that you have users here helping one another, because for the most part they are the only one I see providing any support.

[wiste]

It’s really hard for me to believe that a plugin this popular would be so difficult to get support for. I see dozens of posts in here with zero replies. Where are the developers and experts?

[wiste]

Anyone? Even if you could get me to the right place to start searching that would be something. Right now I can’t even find the right php file to start digging through.

[wiste]

Digging around, I see that this is happening with virtually all of the pages related to groups aside from the main groups page, so all of the group creation pages are also having this same problem, pretty much anything that is generated by the php and not a real page.