BuddyPress.org

Hiding a field on a form is not that difficult. As long as the required data gets added to the database by some other means it doesn’t change the underlying foundation at all.

As I said, I’m sure that with enough coding you code get this to work. But it might require core hacking. If so, that would be a change to the underlying foundation. I’m not sure without trying it so your best bet is to talk with the WPMU gurus on their forum.

It is not a WPMU issue.

…

The WPMU forum will just send me back here and rightly so.

Whereas they may indeed send you back here, it is a WPMU issue. Just because you think it is a BuddyPress issue does not make it so. I’ve said that several times, DJPaul has said that, jjj has said that as well.

WPMU’s functions take care of the underlying registration process. BuddyPress just hooks into that process, adding a few of its own fields and checks along the way. WPMU does not allow you to position the username field in a different sequence–not without behind the scenes changes. Of course it is easy enough to hide it via CSS, but whether or not you can then write data to it, bypassing WPMU’s field validation protocols is a different story. I have not tried that. I am not sure. But, it is a question that must be asked of WPMU, not BuddyPress.

You said above that:

I’m not really a coder. I understand I’ll need to learn from scratch or hire someone.

Well, if you aren’t looking at how the underlying registration functions are coded, then how can you say with such certainty that this is not a WPMU issue?

I have not spent all the time that I have responding to your various questions in your various threads to get rid of you. If I didn’t want to help, I would simply have ignored your posts. I’m offering you support and pointing you in the best direction for the given issue. You can choose to ignore my advice. That is your prerogative.

Perhaps you’ve already spent time on the WPMU forums and did not get the response you have wanted. We’ve been as helpful as we can here.

Without contracting with a coder or coding yourself, you’re out of luck.

I’ll send you an email later… I’m also going to lock this thread as per the normal with these “looking for coder” posts; people can see you are after some work done and can contact you via the messages section of this site.

This website isn’t so much about the hiring of developers as much as it is about the development and support of the software itself. Many of us do website development on the side (or as a main source of income) and I suggest you keep an eye out for those people.

You can also check out the BuddyPress Job Board group and see if anyone volunteers there?

In the future I’m sure a few developers will step forward as goto guys.

Firstly, in response to the post you made that got me here (which I deleted out of respect for the topic starter,) please don’t ask for help in someone else’s topic. Everyone’s questions hold the same water here, and we’re all drinking from the same cup. I have no idea what that means, but it sounds like a good analogy.

If what you want to do is replace the word “Blog” all through-out a BuddyPress install, you’re going to need to modify the template in a few places, as well as some core files that gettext that out for you.

I haven’t really tried tricking the gettext into translating specific words for me, but I bet it’s possible to do, albeit probably not easily.

Fact is, that BuddyPress can still only build off of the weaknesses of WordPress itself. What you’re trying to do can really only be worked around with smoke and mirrors, because WordPress itself doesn’t really care what your real name is; the fields exist simply to add depth to a username.

Short of developing your own MU/BP plugin to shift the emphasis, you’re out of luck. Usernames are 100% necessary, because it’s how you login and out of the site, along with your password. Usernames cannot include characters other than alpha-numeric, so you can’t use an email address either. This means they MUST create a username. You could make a plugin or modify your registration to force the creation of a username based on two fields (first name + last name) but that means you’ll need to tell the user what your website made their login name to be, instead of letting them make their own.

There really are only a hand-full of sites that don’t use some kind of username as a login, and in my opinion it makes more sense because not everyone uses the same email address for life, and what happens if I registered with my work email address and get laid off, and I need to login but forgot my password? Now my new password goes to an email address I have no access to. In this case, username makes the most sense, and is almost fail safe unless you’re REALLY having a bad day and forgot your username too.

What about people like me, that like to use their middle names? I get no respect I tell ya!

Are you using a custom theme of some kind? If so, did you copy over the code from bphome/functions.php? If not, do you have any other plugins installed, and can you verify that you have BuddyPress installed 100% correctly?

Seems really odd that your WPMU + BuddyPress installation somehow takes up over 30MB of memory.

You could try upping the available memory to say, 40MB or so, and see if that helps? Do a search here (or Google) for php.ini and hopefully that should help you on your way. There are a few things you can put there to help increase the available memory for your hosting package.

Basically you just make a file called php.ini and put it either in your WordPress root directory, or your wp-admin directory. I’m not sure it really makes a big difference, but I suppose it also depends where the errors are coming from mostly too.

First off, I do sympathize with your frustration on finding an acceptable set of solutions to your questions. Without writing the code for you, it is difficult to point you in the proper direction. There have been a number of options presented, that while being a compromise to your ultimate, desired solution, could produce satisfactory results.

Isn’t the whole point of Buddypress to turn the WordPress base into something more user-centric?

Yes and no. As I already said two posts above:

WPMU is not designed as a user-centric platform. It is blog-centric. BuddyPress puts the focus on the user.

But, BuddyPress is still a layer that rests on top of WPMU, not the other way around. BP relies heavily on certain WPMU functions to handle much of the user registration process. And WPMU requires that the username field be populated (I realize that you know that).

This thread is NOT about the username issue.

I understand that. But what I quoted from your past post was about the username field and that is what I specifically answered in my last post.

This particular thread is entitled “How to use full name, first name + last name“. Burt already provided an answer to this question above via this thread where he shows you how to do exactly this in code.

I’ve understood all along in the various threads that you’ve started on this range of related topics that you want another option, some other way to insert your desired datum into the user_login field, or use newly created fields to allow registering users to enter their firstname and lastname, or that you want a way for users to enter their email for login, or a way to use BP’s xprofile table to display fname and lname in various ways and places, or a way to rearrange fields on the registration form, and that you hate WPMU’s concept of username and want a different option. I get all of this.

Others (including myself) have tried to be as helpful as possible in each of those threads, often rehashing the same answers. I don’t say this to be mean; I say this because we’ve tried to explain in multiple ways and multiple times that what you are after is not possible at this time without hacking the core (in some cases) or writing your own custom plugin(s).

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1746

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=1811

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2118

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2119

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2926

How does Buddypress handle first name + last name?

It does and it doesn’t. There are no firstname and lastname fields in BuddyPress unless you create them as Mike Pratt explained above. BuddyPress has its own mandatory registration field that by default is called “Full Name”. Look in the BuddyPress submenu group in WPMU’s backend. Go to “BuddyPress > General Settings > Full Name field name”

Now, there is a function in bp-xprofile-filters.php called xprofile_sync_wp_profile() that will take the datum from the “Full Name” field and split it into a pseudo firstname and lastname and then insert that as meta data into the wp_usermeta table, but it can only do that if a user actually edits their fullname field to include a more than one-word name. So if a user does not edit that field, there will not be any fname/lname wp_usermeta entries for that user.

Buddypress puts a default first x-profile field Name on the registration form; is it possible to replace that with separate first name + last name fields?

You can change the “Full Name” field name to whatever you want but you cannot remove that field from the registration page nor edit it to be something other than a single textbox field–at least not without hacking the core. Look under the “Basic” field grouping in “BuddyPress > Profile Field Setup” to see what I mean.

Or is there already a native solution for first name + last name in WPMU that Buddypress could tap into? (Nicola Greco: ‘… you could replace it with the wp built-in name & last name, or use xprofile fields fot that …”)

In this post above, I explained that if you want to go this route, you’ll need to pull data from two records in wp_usermeta to extract the firstname, lastname combination. If you do not feel comfortable coding this yourself, you could hire a coder to write a simple function to do just that. But be aware, as I explained above, it is possible that not every user will have firstname and lastname meta date.

From your OP:

Default Buddypress is fine for teens/tweens who want to use their anonymous username, but it’s not suitable for a more grown-up business network, for example.

BuddyPress seems perfectly acceptable for business users. There are many professional, adult-based sites that are successfully attracting users to their BP sites. Mike Pratt’s site is a great example, for one.

I’ve been using my full name on this site from day one. It did not bother me that I had to use a single username when registering because I knew I had the option to fill out my full name for display purposes later. It also allowed me to brand BuddyPress.org with my unique name, creating a useful URI in the process.

In fact, the single username approach is what many sites use to allow users to brand themselves. Twitter, youtube, FriendFeed, Delicious, Digg, LinkedIn, and many more all require a unique, single-word username. Of course, some of these then allow you to (or even require) that you use an email for subsequent logins. This is in BP’s future as well.

In the not too distant future, there may be an option to allow users to sign on with their email address via OpenID or another protocol. See the BuddyPress Roadmap and read about the Open Stack.

But for now, your options are limited and if you want to change things you must code your own custom solution or hack the core.

There is not much more we can do, but as I said in my last post, if the username concept bothers you so much, you’ll have to go to the WPMU forums and see what solutions might be in the works–if any.

Looks like a lot of people have different ways of doing things like this. It’s good to have perspective. :thumbup:

That is exactly what I want to avoid! Username is still at the top. I want to eliminate that impersonal username as much as possible.

I do understand this concept and your desire to achieve this type of setup. However, as I said in my previous post, WPMU is blog-centric, not user-centric. The username field is actually what WPMU stores in the “user_login” field of the wp_users table. Therefore, the way WPMU currently works, this datum is mandatory.

This particular request is a WPMU issue and has nothing to do with BuddyPress. I’m afraid there is nothing we can do here to help you, but I strongly encourage you to search the WPMU forums for a similar thread and post a new thread if you can’t find anything related.

At this time, your current options are limited to the ones discussed here.

Hey Chris,

There’s at least several of us using 1.0 alpha 6 still.

And there’s a few on 1.0 RC3 (including these forums on buddypress.org).

Looking forward to your updated tutorial when you figure everything out

[EDIT]

Our good friends at UMW have updated their integration tutorial for BP 1.0.2, WPMU 2.7.1 and bbPress 1.0 RC3:

http://umwblogs.org/wiki/index.php/Integrating_WPMu%2C_BuddyPress%2C_and_bbPress

I haven’t tried it myself, but thought it might help some of you!

Damn I was in a meeting and I missed all this fury, but the PHP version was my next suggestion.

1and1 people can do this by adding this line to their .htaccess file. (This has also been covered before.)

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php