BuddyPress.org

Hi, BuddyPress uses bbpress for its forums so you may get a quicker response over on their support forums.

I’ve just had a quick look at the forums on my site though and I can only see an option to use IMG tags to point to already online images and don’t see an option to upload images straight to the forums.

forums are handled by bbPress – not BuddyPress

you could edit the /forum to “topic” or “discussion” in the settings no? same for /forums can be something different as a page name.

or might this be it? https://bbpress.org/forums/topic/how-to-remove-forum-from-url/

Hey everyone. Thank you for the insightful conversation. This is exactly what forums and communities are for, and is a great example of why it is so important to have them.

This question has come up just about every 180 days for the past 10 years, for both bbPress and BuddyPress. I usually don’t chime in on them, because they almost always go through the same motions:

1. Some people are worried
2. Some people don’t like the core functionality
3. Some people think it’s too difficult
4. Some people think it’s not powerful enough
5. Development team defends the project
6. Unhappy people trash the project
7. Nobody really feels much better
8. People get bored and the topic fades away
9. Someone bumps it back up every once in a while

I’m replying here and now, because I agree a lot with everything everyone has said here, even if I don’t like or agree with how it’s said.

There are a lot of things about BuddyPress not to like. There has been a lot of added complexity over the years that has made it more difficult to understand and to work with. Building a community website with it takes a long time and requires a lot of experience to do well, and that’s even before the community has activity, membership, or growth.

Without a big huge obvious whale of an example community, and without a big huge corporate sponsor, it’s hard to see the penultimate standard for what BuddyPress can be used to achieve.

Because BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org are part of the WordPress.org network of sites, and because WordPress.org doesn’t really use the social features that BuddyPress provides, even it isn’t that great of an example anymore.

The folks at BuddyBoss have, no doubt, invested nearly the same ten years as the rest of us have, working hard to make something out of nothing, only with a different set of goals in mind, that now is taking them in an exciting new direction.

Having met several members of the BuddyBoss family, and after spending more than a few hours hanging out with them through the years at various WordPress related events, it cuts deep to hear how negative their perspective is on BuddyPress, but I don’t disagree with them, or think they’re wrong.

Ten years ago when everyone was excited about BuddyPress, wasn’t because of the technology or the tools or the potential. It was a pain in the butt to setup. It required a version of WordPress (MU) that didn’t even come with an installer. It did everything “the wrong way” and not “the WordPress way.”

Everyone was excited because it looked cool.

Source: Venturebeat

While not an exact clone, BuddyPress 1.0 popularized the 3 column design layout that Slack, Discord, Teams, and Mattermost, and others have built empires on top of today. Since 2.0 and later, we listened to user feedback instead of our guts, and worked to make BuddyPress simpler to drop into any WordPress installation, but in doing so we sacrificed the opinionated design that made all of us curious about what we could build on top it ourselves.

I believe BuddyPress is, still to this day, the single most important piece of software on the open web. It empowers anyone to foster free and open dialogue with the privacy and freedom of having their own website on their own hardware, while also being powerful enough to scale up and grow as a community of people garners momentum. And it empowers people like the folks at BuddyBoss to grow even beyond BuddyPress itself.

BuddyPress also continues to be a faithful sister-project to WordPress, bbPress, and GlotPress, acting as a playground for just about anyone to jump in and start helping improve the software that over 11 million users on WordPress.org and 300k other installations rely on to power their activity streams, member profiles, and more.

I personally have met or know a few hundred people that have amazing careers (in WordPress or elsewhere) because of the knowledge and insight that contributing to the BuddyPress project has trained them for. (This is one of the most valuable things about BuddyPress that you can’t write on the tin, in my opinion.)

To the folks that feel like leaving BuddyPress behind, happy trails until we meet again. And I hope we meet more often than we have, because our diversity of experiences and opinions is how we forge great open source software together, and that’s hard to find when you’re always looking inward at the same project for this long.

To the folks that love BuddyPress as much as I do, thanks for sticking around and helping out and being a part of this community here. The best is yet to come, with media attachments, database improvements, deeper WordPress Admin integration, and if wishes were fishes we’d revive a retro bp-sn-parent theme to bring some of that old excitement back again.

Here’s a corny quote from a favorite movie of mine that feels fitting:

I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward. Though the road may wind, yea, your hearts grow weary, still shall ye follow them, even unto your salvation.

BuddyPress comes with many parts that integrate directly with your site, each other, and even other plugins (check out bbPress in the support forums.) We got paper writers for hire now. If you just want to use some features, BuddyPress will automatically adapt, showing only menu items. , pages, and buttons for the aspects you have allowed.

Note that you will have to have “Enable BuddyPress to WordPress profile syncing” checked in order for the function I provided to work.

Also, “WP offers the ability to set the display_name to any of the other names (nickname, first name last name, username, and more)”, yes that’s true, but when your preference is saved, the value you chose is copied into the “display_name” field in the wp_user database, so don’t get distracted by that issue–it’s still the WP “display_name” that bbPress and BuddyPress care about.

Sorry, it’s not the BP nickname field. That’s actually a WP user meta field.

Other things that appear to be true:
• BP uses WP’s “Display Name” to label the user in activity items and elsewhere.
• WP’s ‘nickname’ meta is required but not used widely?

So it seems like the key field for display in BP, bbPress and WP is WP’s “display name” field.

Ha! Names are confusing!

Hi Tom-

It sounds like you have a lot of balls in the air. For instance:

Remember, I have removed the original xprofile_sync function.

Honestly, I can’t know enough about your setup to tell you anything for sure. What I can tell you is this:

• bbPress uses WordPress’s “Display Name” field, not a BuddyPress field.
• BuddyPress only updates the WP “Display Name” field when profile syncing is enabled.
• BP’s default sync function also updates WP’s “First Name” and “Last Name”
• The replacement function I provided updates WP’s “Display Name” but _not_ the “First Name” and “Last Name” fields.

Feel free to comment out the “nickname” update line. You won’t hurt anything. You’ll just not update the BP “nickname” field. Which won’t affect the name bbPress displays.

Hi Tom-

I’d guess that you (or the previous site admin) edited the Display Name field to be called “Name.” You can check by visiting this screen on your installation: /wp-admin/users.php?page=bp-profile-setup

“Display Name” is usually the first profile field created, so if you inspect the input, and it has the name=field_1, then you can guess that your “Name” field is the “Display Name” field I’m talking about, just renamed, similar to how you renamed the “Base profile.” It sounds like when you’re talking about “Forum Name” you’re talking about BP’s Base Profile > Display Name, but with your own naming convention.

I also was wrong about the synchronization between Display Name and First and Last name. If I update the Display Field to be “Too Slim”, the WP First Name will become “Too” and the WP Last Name will become “Slim,” assuming that “Enable BuddyPress to WordPress profile syncing” (s you said). The WordPress “Display Name” field will become “Too Slim.” The WP “Display Name” is also looks like what is used by bbPress in its loops.

So, if you want your users to be able to change the name used by the bbPress forums, you’ll need to have “Enable BuddyPress to WordPress profile syncing” checked. Then, the WP “Display Name” field is updated when the BP “Display Name” field is checked. If you want to leave WP’s First and Last Name fields to not be synced after sign-up, the following code could be added to your bp-custom.php file or wherever you keep your customization code:

// Remove BP's action because it syncs nickname, display_name, first_name and last_name.
remove_action( 'xprofile_data_after_save', 'xprofile_sync_wp_profile_on_single_field_set' );
function my_custom_xprofile_sync_wp_display_name_only_on_single_field_set( $user_id = 0 ) {
	// Bail if profile syncing is disabled.
	if ( bp_disable_profile_sync() ) {
		return true;
	}

	if ( empty( $user_id ) ) {
		$user_id = bp_loggedin_user_id();
	}

	if ( empty( $user_id ) ) {
		return false;
	}

	$fullname = xprofile_get_field_data( bp_xprofile_fullname_field_id(), $user_id );

	bp_update_user_meta( $user_id, 'nickname',   $fullname  );

	wp_update_user( array( 'ID' => $user_id, 'display_name' => $fullname ) );
}
add_action( 'xprofile_data_after_save', 'my_custom_xprofile_sync_wp_display_name_only_on_single_field_set' );

It’s a modified version of this function, leaving the first and last name logic out: https://github.com/buddypress/BuddyPress/blob/5.0.0/src/bp-xprofile/bp-xprofile-functions.php#L803