BuddyPress.org

Dan-

I’m going to make just a few comments now. I’ll look at this in more detail tomorrow.

It look’s like you are using the default themes that come with BuddyPress–bphome and bpmember. Is this correct?

Pardon me if you know all this already but, when a user (one of your students) logs in, a link appears in the upper right corner of the buddybar with a link to their profile page. This link displays either their username or nickname. What is displayed depends on whether or not a nickname has been entered by the user. For all but four of your students, there is no nickname.

Now, when a student clicks this link, it will take them to their profile page. Once there, they can edit their profile. In the default BP install, there is a “Full Name” field in the profile that can be filled in.

WordPress Mu uses this data for the display in the backend–your picture #2. If the “Full Name” field is blank in their profile, then you will only see data in the “Username” and “nickname” fields, with the username used as the nickname. If a user has add anything to the “Full Name” field, then Mu will use that, and if it can, split it automatically into a “First name” and “Last name”.

The fact that 4 students have data in these fields indicates to me that they went to their profile page and clicked “Edit Profile” and then added their full name to the “Full Name” field. It is not a mystery.

Finally, when logged into WPMU’s backend, go to the “BuddyPress” menu group. Once there, click on “General Settings”. You will see a field named “Full Name field name”. Then, click on “Profile Field Setup”. There, you will see all of the currently-setup profile fields that your students can utilize. You can add, edit, or delete fields. You can make certain fields required.

You should spend some time not only in the WPMU’s backend, but also in the members’ area of BuddyPress to see how all of this works.

I hope this helps.