BuddyPress.org

Hi
I have a wordpress theme and I have two plugins one is buddypress v2.0.1 and the other is Commons In A Box that tells me that my theme is not buddypree compatible can you tell me what and where I should add to my theme that will make it buddypress compatible. I do understand that the way my theme looks and functions is up to me. I see 1000’s of buddypress themes what makes theme compatible and my’s not?

EMac

Hi @julianprice,

Your proposal is respectable, but unfortunately I do not think it will have a big impact on visitors to this forum. Most of them just ask for help, not for explanations and certainly not to take lessons! The explanations are (mostly) on Codex (thxs @mercime, @hnla) and the plasters for big and little sores are (sometimes, thxs contributors) on the forum.

I reply to your message because this is the second time you propose this type of approach and this is obviously a topic that you would like to heart. But this is about you, your views and your motivation. In front you have a diverse audience, ranging from amateur to pro, between noobs and specialists, from many different countries, with very different mentalities and very different social behaviors. And as you can see by browsing the forum, topics are usually short, sometimes poorly worded and often unanswered. Hard to read ? No, it is only the BP audience in his whole variety !

The reasons are multiple, irrespective of audience: lack of product knowledge, panic facing an unidentified problem and therefore inability to articulate, language barrier, and much more serious, lack of time, real or perceived problem, given to the treatment of a case. We are in 2014 and on the Internet, where each ms. count !

As already said, the helpers community is small, very small compared to buddypress downloads ! Personally I would have difficulty establishing a Helpers Top 50, despite my six years of attendance in this forum.

Anyway, all of this is common to any support forum, at least I observed. This support forum is not a discussion forum, is not a course forum, is not a philosophy forum. And IMO, it is allright so.

You want to educate ? Ok ! But does the BP audience want to learn ?
Learning is a complex process, on an individdual and collective point of view.
Learning suppose some basics, such as a thematic unicity, volonty, curiosity, motivation and, at least, a handfull of humility.

Educating. Wow ! There is so much to say about that… Ok. Let us talk about educating over BuddyPress… What part we address first ? PHP ? HTML ? CSS ? MySql ? Server administration ? SEO ? Usage ? BP is only a shell, not a unic thematic like a math course.
Ideally, educating needs some talents, a robust knowledge of a subject, a natural disposition to teach and a lot of time and disponibility without any guarantee of results. You certainly need also a good dose of self-denial and a large space behind you to be able to step back in any circumstance. And a handfull of humility. Too !

Now, let us consider John Doe. The supposed to be educated user.

The majority struggles when asking for help to strangers. Asking a question on a forum is more like a message in a bottle as a grammatical demand between four eyes to your English teacher. How many people read only on forums but never ask anything because of this feeling?
And which attitude to adopt when we receive a response, good or bad? Must we say thank you if the help doesn’t match our goal? Should we rephrase with the risk to be considered as a profiteer? Should we hook in a topic believed to be identical to our problem and already written (time spare is time spare!!!) or open a new tread? This are so commonly questions, that the world wide forumers needed to create from scratch a web specific phenomenon: the troll!

Askink for help under these conditions and with such uncertain issues is not easy at all.
Receiving any kind of answer is not easy, too.
Receiving a circonstanciated answer, with various explanation, examples, links and tutti quanti, from an unknowed person, personally, voluntarily and without consideration, is very very stressfull and really difficult to accept. Take a minute to consider this point, because we are all, and all over the world, habituate to handle such a situation with money, not (no more or not yet) with our felling. Consider also that we are all dependent and in varying degrees of mood, touchy, selfish, proud. This is more or less our daily reality who, when on a forum page, we opposite to a disembodied screen readed text. It’s very unnatural, no ? And so difficult to digest for any normally constituted human for sure ! Affect against computer. EOL.

Do you really want to <i>Educate the General Public</i> about BuddyPress ? Do you want to proselytize or advertize ? Create a dedicated site, do your stuff, and maybe with a few chance, great patience and a lot of perseverance, you will come to aggregate in a few years a cute pretty lttle buddypresser community.

Dan. Paris. France.

@mika89
Please review:

Theme Compatibility & Template Files

You will need to copy the buddypress folder from your-site\wp-content\plugins\buddypress\bp-templates\bp-legacy\buddypress
Place this in the root of your child theme. Then simply navigate to activity\activity-loop.php in that same folder and make your changes there. Just remember the folder structure needs to stay the same as it was when you copied it over to your child theme.

To customize your activity loop, I believe you’ll want to copy the ‘activity’ folder from ‘buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress’ into the root folder of your theme. Then edit the activity-loop.php file within that new copy of the ‘activity’ folder.

Hi @davinadanian

What is the difference between using BuddyPress from the webiste versus downloading it to your computer?

Do you mean like wordpress.com and wordpress.org?

BuddyPress is downloadable only – there is no web service version of it available like there is with wordpress.com.

i know this thread is ancient but I needed the same thing so heres some code if you need it as well

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: BuddyPress change last initial
Plugin URI: http://wpfixr.com
Description: Change the last name to use only the first initial
Author: Anthony Brown
Version: 1.0.0
Author URI: http://wpfixr.com
*/
$changeLastInitial = new changeLastInitial;
add_filter('bp_displayed_user_fullname', array(
    $changeLastInitial,
    'last_initial'
), 7, 1);
add_filter('bp_get_member_name', array(
    $changeLastInitial,
    'last_initial'
), 7, 1);
add_filter('bp_get_the_profile_field_value', array(
    $changeLastInitial,
    'last_initial_xprofle'
), 7, 3);
add_filter('bp_core_get_user_displayname', array(
    $changeLastInitial,
    'bp_core_get_user_displayname'
), 7, 2);

class changeLastInitial
{
    function bp_core_get_user_displayname($name, $id)
    {
        $name = $this->last_initial($name);
        return $name;
    }
    function last_initial_xprofle($value, $type, $id)
    {
        if ($id == 1) {
            $value = $this->last_initial($value);
        }
        return $value;
    }
    function last_initial($name)
    {
        $name_a = explode(' ', $name);
        // if there is at least two parts to the name
        if (count($name_a) == 2) {
            // replace the last part of the name with the first letter of the last part
            $name_a[count($name_a) - 1] = substr($name_a[count($name_a) - 1], 0, 1);
            // put it all back together
            $name  = implode(' ', $name_a);
        }
        return $name;
    }
}
?>

1. Use BP Xtra Signup plugin and add an xprofile field of birth date

2. Not sure on this but this plugin might help Buddypress Xprofile Custom Fields

Just wanted to chime in that WebDevStudios’ “BuddyPress Registration Options” plugin is nearing, but not quite there yet, its 3.4 release which will offer both BuddyPress and bbPress support. We’ll use user meta to check if approved, and if not, prevent access to everywhere but the unapproved user’s profiles.

Willing to take feedback from anyone wanting to help beta test.

I had the same problem and I added this CSS to my theme in the Custom CSS section, if you don’t have Custom CSS section, you can create a child theme. I don’t know if its buddypress or a plugin but some avatars in “activity” are set as “mini” making the 20×20 avatar. It may look good in replies but not in the situation you described. Here is the custom CSS I used to keep the mini avatar at 50×50 like the rest of my activity stream.

#buddypress .activity-list li.mini .activity-avatar img.avatar, #buddypress .activity-list li.mini .activity-avatar img.FB_profile_pic {
height: 50px;
margin-left: 0px;
width: 50px;
}

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/album-script-for-bp-2-1-and-wp-3-9/

I’d love to see this option become a part of the core options. I am trying to disable gravatars on all these buddypress. Would be great to have the option for admins to establish a group of avatars that would be auto-used for groups and profiles, removing the third party dependency, saving some privacy, increasing page load speed, and giving communities a better branding by having their own options for default avatars.

contrary to some of the other commenters, I think there is space for a theme to focus on some of the buddypress shortcomings – even those that work with WP / BP – there are often issues that are not well handled with a BP enabled site, and many theme authors are reluctant to adress the usability issues that occur when using as the base for a buddypress site.

Suffusion for example is a good WP theme, with some enhancements for buddypress at one point.. but the next page navigation is too small, and not easy to adjust. There are also majoy issues with the tabbed sub menus like in user profiles (site/member/profile then activyty, media – etc) – and no easy fix for that.

As far as your theme being based on bootstrap, I suggest you scrap that and switch to foundation of something. I love bootstrap myself, however wp themes that are based on bootstrap all fail to work well with bp-media in my recent experience.

So the choice pretty much comes to using a buddypress with a good theme and no bp-media plugin, or use a buddypress site with bp-media and a theme that is not based on bootstrap. Which really limits things quite a bit in my humble opinion.

This is where I took the info from:

Changing Internal Configuration Settings

Are you doing anything else in bp-custom.php? Maybe something you’ve customised is causing the issue.

Is there an easy way to do this?

Yes. You can do this quite easily.

1. Choose a Facebook login plugin from the WP plugin repo:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/

Maybe try searching for 'social login'

2. Hide the BuddyPress registration form

Yes. I did change group to project for the entire site (www.trackfight.net).
You need to edit the language files for Buddypress and depending on your theme the theme’s language files as well.

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with /bp-registration-options/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

arg – tried to post a reply and I think it got akistmetted for having two links…
/wonders why they do not whitelist links to wordpress org / buddypress org here for that setting somehow.. sheesh

sem101 – I use two plugins that ask questions before signup

Buddypress Humanity
and
Good Question

This prevents most of the bot sign ups that we plaguing us for some time with those group creators.

This does not stop the manual spam signups, so we have delete a few accounts each week, but it has prevented the tons that we were dealing with before.

We used to have good luck with https://wordpress.org/plugins/bp-registration-options/screenshots/

but we started having some issues around bp1.7 I think. Other people say it works now (https://buddypress.org/support/topic/feature-request-new-user-moderation/ ) – but I don’t have time to play with half baked / half working solutions. Your experience with it may be fine.

We do not use si captcha any longer as we had issues with some multisite problems. I do think it slowed down some of the spammers, and certainly cost them time and a little money to get around it – so it’s cool.

I use one of the blog defaults type plugins to auto set new blogs/(sites) to have settings like ‘users must be logged in to comment’ – and “discourage search engines from indexing” – this has helped a bunch for us.

Of course the manual spammers will still need to be manually deleted – you will never stop the manual spammers, if you did, then you would stop regular people from signing up. Unless of course you went for one of those “invite only” buddypress setups.

I recently donated to a plugin author to create a new plugin that allows superadmins to force certain settings on sub-site/sub-blog users.. like forcing only allowing registered / logged in users to comment. That plugin is working, but it is not quite polished enough for wp repository release I think – but that is another kind of spam blocking issue.

Hope these tips help you, they have made a huge difference for me.

@okamiokami
You can test some of the solutions in this ticket that simply stops the activation email from being sent then use BP’s new build in activation to manually activate the users. Of coarse I haven’t tested this but its worth a shot.
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/3443

@dirtyblox ,The Problem is Item-Nav html code changed,so these many words not translate to other language.solution this,must update it from new buddypress.pot use poedit

Hi can you aid me in this? Mine does not want to work together. I also have BuddyPress and Paid Membership pro

Of course you can change these tab labels.
Read here and here for general information.

It’s possible that the problem comes from your theme or a plugin. You have to debug…:evil:
First thing to check is the content of your language folder.
Normally buddypress-xx_XX.mo/po files are in wp-content/languages/
See also if you have a “plugin” folder in “languages”. Maybe you have a second buddypress-xx_XX.mo in it. In this case, it is this file who has priority over the other. If you have a custom translation, you have to place it in this folder anyway.

Second thing to check are the theme/(possible)plugin translation vs. BP translation.

FYI, since BP 2.0, WP/BP/bbP translations are automatically updated from Translate WordPress (Glotpress), but you have to ensure that you have the correct version. Simply open the .po file with a text editor like notepad++ and read the header content.

If the above debuging process have no result, here’s a good solution by Alex ( @viper007bond) to “force” a translation or customizing an existing.
Successfully tested on BP 2.01 ! 😉

https://buddypress.org/support/topic/rename-groups-label-on-profile-menu/