BuddyPress.org

Well there is nothing much to it.

If you understand what BuddyPress is, you know it needs to active a few components – you can decide what components you want to activate when you activate the BuddyPress plugin.

Let say if you don’t want private messages then don’t activate it. If you like your member to message each other you should activate.
Only if you activate components you need to create WordPress pages to show those components – simple right?
BuddyPress plugin helps you do that and creates those pages for you, you can save those default pages or change them to other pages.
Lets say you want your Groups not to show up on the example.com/groups/ page but at the example.com/community/ page then you can do so by just changing the name of that groups page.

Normally every WordPress theme should be able to handle the BuddyPress plugin just fine because BuddyPress uses the default WordPress templates to show all the BuddyPress pages.
But if you have an older WP theme or a very complicated WordPress theme you can get into some troubles of course.
There are some WordPress themes that are made for specific fields like photographers or portfolio websites those themes are often made just to target those fields of work and don’t need social media integrations.

They’ve made it more easy to use over the years.

If you look at where BuddyPress was years ago and where they are right now it’s a huge step forward to WordPress like coding.
Will they ever become as easy as WordPress, no I don’t think so, simply because there are only a few people looking after the code of BuddyPress and bbPress.

WordPress has become so easy because they have thousands of great developers looking after the code on a daily base. Those people push each other to the max, for example you have one guy who’s really good at programming new stuff and another girl who’s very good at understanding how a function should work for ‘less experienced’ computer users. Both can connect very well at the Make.wordpress pages and share ideas that become great code and working products in the end.

BuddyPress and bbPress only have a handful of developers who for the love of coding and this plugin put their time and knowledge into this. #respect!
I think they’re doing a great job and yes I also wished it would go faster 🙂
But hey, who am I to say anything, I don’t know anything and have tried to learn PHP a few times so I wish I could contribute more to those products but I failed to understand.

I do have to say if you know HTML + CSS you can do some stuff in altering the layouts which is great in my opinion.

Next up:
Some people are also living on the wrong foot, because they started with WordPress and it’s so easy to use they think WordPress has become some kinda magic power tool that can let everybody do anything online.
Wrong, it’s easy to use and you can do a lot because of all the free tutorials and code online but there are limits.

Some people have zero understanding of coding and want to become the next Facebook – that’s not gonna happen how easy the code ever will be.

@somethingelse doing if ( $wp_user->roles[0] == 's2member_level3' ) inside the loop is great but you might find your pagination doesn’t take your condition into account. For that you’ll need to hook into the bp_ajax_querystring filter

See the technique in action on the BuddyDev website:

Exclude Users from Members directory on a BuddyPress based social network

excluding specific ids isn’t necessarily helpful if you have a regularly changing membership…

FWIW – i am not a programmer… i am good at patching together workarounds tho 🙂
somewhere along the way i found this approach to ONLY displaying my level3 members:

<?php while ( bp_members() ) : bp_the_member(); ?>

  <?php
       $wp_user = new WP_User( bp_get_member_user_id() );
      if( $wp_user->roles[0] == 's2member_level3' ): ?>

which seems to do the trick – this is in members-loop.php

at the top of that file i have
<?php if ( bp_has_members( 'type=alphabetical' ) ) : ?>

it used to be bp_ajax_querystring() which seemed to continually thwart my efforts.

Now it nicely displays my teachers in alpha order with no headache… granted, it’s by first name, which i will eventually figure out how to fix.

Obviously i’m using s2member with buddypress, but i tried it using basic wordpress roles and it worked as well.

so far so good, at least…

Hi @randallpacker

You can do that using the advanced template hierarchy introduced in BP 1.8. Check out:

Template Hierarchy

Hi @wpdragon,

I think BuddyPress Security Check plugin is the best.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-security-check/

Codex is your friend – https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/customizing/bp_enable_multiblog/

It sounds like you’re heading in the direction of a private community. Keep in mind that if it’s private, then search engines can’t index your content. Which may be good or bad, depending on your goals.

You’ll find a lot of info by searching this support forum or the web for “buddyPress private community”

For instance:
https://buddypress.org/support/tag/private-community/