BuddyPress.org

@rickaltman – I think buddypress can do most of what you describe here right out of the box. I would search for forum threads and maybe plugins to have your members auto join a group –
this would give you something like “your site dot com / groups / mainGroupName / members
for this kind of list – although it would be a list rather than grid system – you may find another way to do it, but it’s probably gonna take some hacking-up things to get the grid layout if you really want that – I’d try to find something less robust – like maybe just the wpmudev membership2 plugin in the wp repo – and hackup a page to list authors with a wp theme or something…

bp can do a profile pic.. but it needs plugins to really “upload photos” – and that’s a can of worms in which some is over-baked, some under baked, and future possibilities are endless.. some built in bp hooks have been made a while back but.. well not sure what meant exactly by “upload photos” –

its going to be much easier to get community support for regular wordpress themes and such.. buddypress is probably a lot more power than your use case is gonna need.. and with that is gonna be spam issues – virtually no support for customizing anything.. even if you knew php really well, you’d have learn wordpress well, and then try to digest all the BP docs and sort through tracs.. gits.. and other random stuff on the web that is not well documented, no well supported, and leaves you wondering if it’s secure… and the chances of all the various hackedup things working well together is blah… and future updates – hahaha.. who knows that is going to happen.

In your situation I’d say it wouldn’t hurt to play around with BP – as it’s free.. but if it doesn’t do what you want out of the box.. then I would delete it all – and try a basic wordpress with members plugin.. maybe even just a ‘multi-author blog” – you’ll get less spam, and much less work.

Others may think / feel differently about all this, my experience comes from my issues – your mileage may vary..

Hi,

sidebar is part of your theme. The edit.php (members/single/profile/edit.php) template file doesn’t contain a sidebar, but a form. And this form goes into any theme who has a place for “content” (usually it is the main content).

If you don’t want a sidebar on the member page or on the profile, you can add a conditionnal on your (child)theme sidebar.php or around the call to sidebar you can find in almost all your theme files.

The thing to search is get_sidebar which calls the sidebar template.

Note that BP use mostly to “page.php”, so if your theme has such a file, it is where to start. You already know the way to BP’s template doc. More about this on WP codex:

get_sidebar()

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/dynamic_sidebar

disclaimer, I am not a bp dev, just a long time user, and my knowledge is far from complete.

1 -each Profile / Member offered a separate gallery or media library?
This was a problem from the very beginning, and perhaps the biggest problem for bp aside from lousy filter options for the activity stream. Initially it was handled by the ‘bp-album’ plugin – which was later abandoned amidst some drama – rtmedia is kind of the standard for handling this now – but it’s bloated, important functions have gotten expensive, and it’s not well supported in core or themes – it’s terrible at keeping things separated like comments on media and galleries –
There is a new bp media like experimental thing that looks promising, and some attempts at making placeholders for bp media have been made in the past year, new hooks for bp attachment, etc. Some code has appeared on github showing a great start at possible core bp media handling – but not enough devs on that.

if you must have media with bp I suggest getting the premium “press permit core” and ask for support in limiting what other users can see in the media library. God forbid you have a problem with users trolling other users – and you have media – as you can purchase the buddyblock plugin which will prevent most abuse user to user, but it does not hook into the separate commenting system that rt-media creates. I strongly encourage you to try the other media plugin and hope that works for what you need before getting stuck with rtmedia and no way to export it’s data to something else.

2 a cap on how many Mb’s a user is allowed to upload for the total amount of media space
Wordpress has a setting for this when using multi-site setup – but I think it affects only what gets posted to the user blogs aka sites. I think rtmedia has an optional purchase-able plugin for this if you use their system to allow for the media uploads – not sure if the other competing system has such functionality.

This is a problem, and a solution should include a way for admins to look at users who have uploaded media, not just by user and space taken up, but also by date. There should be more control for deleting content with various parameters as well. I pity you if you find one day a user has uploaded 100s of photos that violate… terms.. and you have to delete each one at a time. If you find a way to handle this better with rtmedia I’d love for you to share it.

Currently I have tons of photos and videos that users have uploaded and no good way to look at or remove, aside from going profile to profile and manually checking what shows up there. A better way may exist, I have not found it yet.

3 – Why do all members have to be Authors in order to be able to Post because this was the only method that worked for me.
When you say post, that sounds like posting a post to a blog – either their own multi-site blog, or perhaps to a group blog. This is how worpdress is and is great for controlling things with blogs. If you mean a user needs to be an author in order to add to thier “activity stream” aka wall or profile or whatever, I do not think they need to be a blog author in order to do so… “What’s new” activity posts work fine without being a blog author.

4 – BuddyPress and BB Press how should I set up my .htaccess file – this should be documented somewhere around here. Wish I could tell you, I don’t have any bb press running with any buddypress installs any longer.

If you don’t want robots to crawl your site, search for forums for making buddypress private – you’ll want to lock down your site with a password required to view anything – if you really want to block bots.. if it’s just the nicer bots you are referring to, like googlebot, yahoo and bigbots – then you can setup a robots.txt with something like

robots *
disallow /
allow index.php

but I don’t think having the main engines index your index.php is really helpful with most WP themes.. you’d probably be better with “allow /about-us/” for example.. as most wp sites I’ve worked with dont have a good ol’ index.html

your experiences may vary..

With BP you eaither have lots of time to code, or you take everything as is for the most part. Auttomatic has not funded bp well since the first dev Andy left – it’s basically abandoned like unwanted bastard child that gets (almost) no support – and has been for years. Instead depending mainly on volunteer contributors that obviously have to do other things like earn a living and pay bills.

Some great people do amazing things making bp better – I appreciate those that are making the documentation better and fighting the good fight of dealing with all the wp core changes and how they affect bp when it updates – and other work to make it better. However what is seemingly most important to many webmasters and end users may not be on the roadmap for future releases – and finding developers to mod up BP is not as easy as one may hope either.

custom fixes today may well be broken with future updates, and no one has thought about the laws in Europe for privacy and users being able to export data you have them.. all kinds of things..

consider bp a huge mix of free code that is very experimental, and in my humble opinion should be removed from the wp plugin repo if automattic is not going to fund it properly – it certainly should not be on the first page view of plugins – anyone installing it likely has no idea what can of worms they are getting into.

If you are thinking of the future and how you may need to moderate user’s uploads and such, I strongly encourage you to test out the mediapress alternative – but realize in order to get core functionality with bp right now you will have to add on a walled garden from one place or another.. without any import / export options – before you invest too much of your time and your user’s pictures and videos into silos you may never escape, you right as well look into and test out peepso (https://www.peepso.com )- as they seem to have more skin in the game and have made at least some import / export things if I remember correctly.

again, I am not a bp dev. also I have not used mediapress yet – although I would with a fresh install – rtmedia has not met my expectations, although not a total fail, it is only 60% of what it should be. I have not used peepso yet either. Just a guy that’s been running a few bp installs for a few years, and my knowledge is fuzzy at best. surely @ma.tt, others thoughts, and your mileage may vary.

Yes, my BP brothers, there’s a plugin called BP Simple Private and I think it will solve your problems, without having to work with robots.txt

Prior to using BP Simple Private, my site’s member pages were way too accessible.. You could type http://mysite.com/members <- and you’d see the whole members directory.

Prior to using BP Simple Private, you could type http://mysite.com/members/aaronthomas1979, and you’d jump straight to my profile.

With this plugin, people (or search engine bots,) will be redirected to a page of your choosing, and the member pages will not be displayed.

If you already have the issue of member pages being displayed in search results, there’s nothing you can do to immediately fix that, but make the change (get the plugin) and wait for those bots to crawl your site again, but next time, they won’t find those pages.

It works for me..

Hem… you’re free to use BuddyPress to your needs, but i guess there is a moment where you reach the software limit.
If you publish private activities in the public activity stream, what do you expect ? To compromise privacy or the way the software works ?
As with 99,9% of software, you have to answer by Yes or No to each option you find. For groups, you have 3 options: 1 OR 2 OR 3 and not a bit of each, depending the current wind speed ! It’s private or it’s public, but not Y and N.

So far i know, hidden group members see the hidden group activities when they are on their group activity page. A group is hidden means that “public” can’t see/access to it, so you can’t see those activities on the site activity page.

If you install BuddyPress on the main domain you can use the Display Widgets SEO Plus Plugin https://wordpress.org/plugins/display-widgets-seo-plus/ (I’m the developer) to show/hide widgets on specific sections of a site.

Just released version 1.1.0 which includes specific widget logic support for BuddyPress/bbPress, could set the widgets for the BuddyPress parts of the site to NOT load on non-BuddyPress sections, this would stop some ‘bleed through’ of content from BuddyPress to the rest of the site.

That being said, from an SEO perspective (my background is SEO) there are other issues that could leak out to potential Google visitors.

Check this Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=WordPress+Plugin

Note the WordPress Plugin Repository listing (1st result) has six additional indented results (called sitelinks: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/47334?hl=en).

The 6 links for the WordPress Plugin Repository listing are benign, but if there was an adult section of WordPress it could be listed as a sitelink.

From a WordPress perspective there’s also the core WordPress Search functions. The Static Pages that BuddyPress uses for ‘holding’ the BuddyPress specific output can be found via a search. If you have the default BuddyPress setup try using the WordPress Search Form to search for the word “Members”.

This will find your BuddyPress Members Directory Holding Page.

Same result with “Registration”, “Activate” and “Activity”.

It’s difficult to prevent bleed through of different types of WordPress content, so if your client is conservative I’d suggest a sub-domain/other domain to play it safe and manually add interlinking via Text Widgets and Nav Menu Links.

David Law

Hi @vickievik,

the right question here would be how to make my theme compatible with buddypress.

The thing to understand is that BP use dynamic content for its page and that these page are NOT ordinaty WP pages.
For each content, BP fires a so called template-part.
Lets take as example a profile page

The slug is /members/ which exist as “page” on wp’s page list. This wp page has no content and also no model or template. It’s just a “slug” in the wp ecosystem.

When you’re on a profile you have the page(aka /members/) but also many template parts, depending what you’re doing on that profile. Aside the common parts header – content – footer, you’ll find also personnal activity, frineds, groups, mentions, notifications, messages and not the worst, profile settings. All this on the same “page”.

Most theme mistakes are at this point. People try to design the page, instead to work the template parts.

When you design a theme, you usually design something for a page, independantly from any plugin. This structure is used by any Twenty Theme and you can follow them as model, because these themes are bullet proof and systematically used by all wp devs when building (in our case) BuddyPress

BP can be used with almost any existing theme, so far this theme is respecting WP’s coding standarts.

If you have brocken elements, and specially thoose using JS, it could be due to missing ID or class or even more simple, some missing instructions/conditionnals in your theme.

BP’s template parts are designed to fit with a majority of themes. The best to do, at least while creating your first theme, is to use BP “as is” and build your theme around thoose existing parts and not to remove/modifying BP arts to fit your creation.

Hi,

by reading the first topic, it sounds like you try to use more than one child theme !

I already have activated my other child theme

If it is the case, it’s not the way to proceed. 😉

1) You should have only one child-theme activated.
2) in this child, you add a folder called buddypress.
3) if you need to modify some BP templates, you copy the original from wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/ into the child BP folder.

Example of what you should have:
wp-content/themes/XYZ theme
wp-content/themes/XYZ-child/

Let’s say you want to modify BP’s register page.
wp-content/themes/XYZ-child/buddypress/members/register.php
or you want to modify the profile header template
wp-content/themes/XYZ-child/buddypress/members/single/member-header.php

And that’s it ! The only thing you have to do is to pick the right file and add it to the child by respecting the original path who starts at: /buddypress/path/to/file.php

Inside the template file, yo can manipulate html tags and find different action hooks ( do_action( 'something' ); ). Take care to not rename or remove the existing class/ID names whithout knowing what you do.

In bp-custom.php, you can manipulate BP’s behave by adding custom functions.

In the child-theme style.css, you manipulate whatever related to your theme layout – for the entire site, including BP or other plugins.

And as all this is done via the child, anything will remain after any update of BuddyPress, your original theme, WordPress or plugins.

Reading actively the forum will bring you other answers, tips and tricks.

Hi @rezbiz,

in brief, you want to add some status dependent custom link to the BuddyBar.

I’ll ignore Kleo (premium theme) and Visual Composer (third party plugin).

Following examples let you add an external link to a non BP page on almost any menus (except BP usermenu).

How it works ?
– create a test page and call it Book.
– the page slug must be /book/
– the link (tab/button) will be displayed to logged-in users only.

I made also a snippet which add such a link to the WordPress Main Menu. This menu is the one you see in WP’s menu customizer by default. Depending the theme you use, you have always a main menu and X others. This can vary and it’s to you to find how it can/should work eventually. See theme documentation and WP Codex if you get in trouble with it.
Note that it should work with all Twenty themes at least.

Add the snippets to bp-custom.php and see the result. After that, read through the code and modify the page name/ID and slug to your need. Leave anything else untouched.

// add Custom tab on site wide activity and members directory pages
function tab_custom_link_to_page() {

	if ( bp_is_activity_component() || bp_is_page( BP_MEMBERS_SLUG ) ) {

		if ( !is_user_logged_in() )
			return false;

		// link to what you want
		$link = bp_get_root_domain() . '/book';

		echo'<li><a href="'. $link .'">My Book</a></li>'; 
	}
  
}
add_action( 'bp_activity_type_tabs', 'tab_custom_link_to_page' ); // site wide activity page
add_action( 'bp_members_directory_member_types', 'tab_custom_link_to_page' ); // members directory page

// add Custom tab on Profile Nav
function add_profiles_link_to_page(){

	if ( bp_is_profile_component() || bp_is_user() ) {

	if ( !is_user_logged_in() )
		return false;

	$link = bp_get_root_domain() . '/book/';

	?>
		<li><a href="<?php echo $link; ?>"><?php printf( 'My Book' ); ?></a></li>
	<?php  
	}
}
add_action( 'bp_member_options_nav', 'add_profiles_link_to_page' );

// add Custom tab on Groups Nav
function add_groups_link_to_page(){

if( bp_is_active( 'groups' ) ) {

	if ( !is_user_logged_in() )
		return false;

	$link = bp_get_root_domain() . '/';

	bp_core_new_subnav_item( array(
		'name'			=> 'My Book',
		'slug'			=> 'book',
		'parent_slug'		=> bp_get_current_group_slug(),
		'parent_url'		=> $link,
		'screen_function'	=> true, 
		'position'		=> 40 ) );
	}
}
add_action( 'bp_setup_nav', 'add_groups_link_to_page' );

// add Custom tab on Groups Directory
function add_groups_directory_link_to_page() {

	if( bp_is_active( 'groups' ) ) {

	if ( !is_user_logged_in() )
		return false;
 
    if ( bp_is_current_action( 'custom' ) ) 
        return;
 
	$link = bp_get_root_domain() . '/book';

    $button_args = array(
        'id'         => 'my-books',
        'component'  => 'groups',
        'link_text'  => 'My Book',
        'link_title' => 'My Book',
        'link_class' => 'my-books no-ajax',
        'link_href'  => $link,
        'wrapper'    => false,
        'block_self' => false,
    );  
   
    ?>
		<li><?php echo bp_get_button( apply_filters( 'bp_get_group_custom_button', $button_args ) ); ?></a></li>
    <?php
	}	
}
add_action( 'bp_groups_directory_group_filter', 'add_groups_directory_link_to_page' );

// add Custom tab on WP Main Menu ( after Home, About, etc )
function main_menu_custom_link_to_page( $menu ) { 
     
	if ( !is_user_logged_in() )
			return $menu;
	else
 	// link to what you want
	$link = bp_get_root_domain() . '/book';

	$grouplink = '<li><a href="'. $link . '">My Book</a></li>';

	$menu = $menu . $grouplink;
	return $menu;
}
add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_items', 'main_menu_custom_link_to_page' );

Yes, it looks complicated, but it isn’t. Simply it’s not homogeneous ! 🙂

Hi @shughesd,

for clarification, the first topic author mentionned Trying to find where to edit the text above the fields.
Are you looking for the exact same thing ?
Is register.php in the right folder ? /child/buddypress/members/register.php ?

The only text above the fields when registration is allowed is
Registering for this site is easy. Just fill in the fields below, and we\’ll get a new account set up for you in no time.

You have 2 options to edit/modify this string:
– using the language file if you only want to change the text.
– modify it in register.php if you want to change the HTML tag (by default it’s <p>)

Other text above fields is the field title.
This can be changed in fields admin. Dashboard > Users > Profile Fields. Edit the field and change the title to your need.

And finally, which doesn’t need any alteration of a template or language file, you can use one of the 30 action hooks existing in register.php

You can write a function and hook it to the placeholder of your choice. To do this, you add the below functions to bp-custom.php

Example
Add a welcome message at the top of the registration page, above Registering for this site.
And another one below it.

function my_custom_register_msg_title() {
echo '<h2>Welcome on my site !</h2>';
}
add_action( 'bp_before_register_page', 'my_custom_register_msg_title' );

function my_custom_register_message() {
echo '<p>Thank you for registering.</p>';
}
add_action( 'bp_before_account_details_fields', 'my_custom_register_message' );

In hope it helps you to understand the principle of operation on templates.

Hi !

You can easily do this from wp’s users admin.
Once one or x members where promoted as “editor” or whatever wp role you created, you can attribute them to a group.

The snippet you’ll find on the codex will add a new bulk action “add to bp group” to the existing bulk selector, above the user list.

Select the concerned member(s), click on Apply. In the box showing up, add the group id, save and you’re done !

You can see the result by going to dashboard > groups > select the group you’ve added members and edit the group. See the group user list at the bottm of the page and verify the new user(s) are there.

Hi Jrzvw,

Were you able to fix this?

I can’t find where to start a new questions so i will just add to this one?

My current site only shows the members that were active. There is 50 WP members registered but only 22 showing on ALL MEMBERS page. I feel the amount of members showing will influence the amount that will join up. SO this one time I would like to have it show all registered members and after it can just add them as they are active.

I tried : add_filter( ‘bp_get_total_member_count’, ‘bp_core_get_total_member_count’ ); in the theme function.php and also bp-custom.php BUT it did nothing.

I tried a few other suggestions e.g one that did make the last activity of all users registered to be a certain time, however this made all the Members look as they are logged in. Is there any code I can insert in function.php that will show the members registered and not just the active ones?

Cheers.

Link to my test site:

BP 2.6.11
WP 4.5.3

@danbp
If its possible i can categorized all kind my food or movie embed videos with custom post types… Maybe i create horror movie cpt, comedy movie cpt or etc..when any author want to share any movie, they will select cpt and will share post and other member will see Mrx published comedy movie.. So this is also for easy to non-friends, they will visit their profile and filter comedy movie, hımm nice man and nice sharing (this aproach never find anywhere)… Also i created a personal page for my members with frontend (also show filter bp) and they are adding videos there (also i will add link to their profile)… No need media album, no need media mp4 video etc… No need pay money to all kind media album pluging (because i tried and hate this, always trying different just paying money but never useful)….

Maybe, i read more article 🙂 because i m just economist and simple code user….

Thanks your time

Hi,

no, that thread doesn’t apply to your case. 😉

this information is inaccessible to administrators as long as the user is “Pending”.
That’s wrong !
You’re partially right, as you have no direct access, but you can go to a pending user profile information in backend.

How ?
– click on a approved member name when on the members management page (backend).
– once on that page, copy the URL and replace the user_id you’ll see in it by the one of the pending member.

Problem is to get the pending member user_id. It’s not available outside of the wp_users or wp_signup table.

The link to a pending member on the pending member list looks like:
../wp-admin/users.php?page=bp-signups&signup_id=1&action=activate

On the approved member list, it looks like:
../wp-admin/users.php?page=bp-profile-edit&user_id=41&wp_http_referer=%2Fwp-admin%2Fusers.php

The difference are:
signup_id=1 – which is not the user_id
and
user_id=41 – which is !

But if you take the second link example and replace 41 by the pending user ID you’ll find in the DB you can access to his information.

Pretty easy if you have only 1 or 2 users to check. A great hasle if you have dozens.

Could be a good feature for some BuddyPresser… 🙂

Maybe it’s an easy thing, but I am really confused. Please advise me.

Well, if it’s easy we’re both dummies cuz I find it extremely confusing myself.

Take the template for a single members profile page as an example.

/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/members/single/home.php

is to be copied and renamed to your theme, but first you have to rename it to index.php for some reason. like this..

/wp-content/themes/THEMEFOLDER/buddypress/members/single/index.php

Or this one which I forget is to either view the inbox or a message thread..

/wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/members/single/messages/single/view.php

would change to..

/wp-content/themes/THEMEFOLDER/buddypress/members/single/index-action-view.php

Some template files are turned into ‘actions’, some are to be ‘components’, some files get renamed, some names stay the same but go in different folders than the bp-legacy structure, and so on.

Here’s a page that can sort of help make sense of it..

Template Hierarchy

After thinking about it this is probs not the way to do it anyhows huh henry? buddypress doesn’t even register custom post types does it? you can tell i haven’t bothered for a few months on the buddypress side of things I need to give my head a shake, been awake too long lol, been so busy with server admin and css recently, a case of too much at once.

So any ideas how I would get this plugin ‘Scripts To Footer’ to work on the buddypress members pages and groups pages?

See the plugin I am using works flawlessly on ever other page of my website so I dont really want to stop using the plugin just because it cannot be used on single profile and single groups pages, I just need to find a way to make this plugin also move the javascript to the footer on these pages too and all will be good, its been a while since ive come back to this after a break, I really don’t want to undo everything and then hunt the files down and make them load in the footer manually.

Hey @alessandrat

Welcome to the BuddyPress forum!

1. Have two separate front ends for different user types (with differently configured profiles), appearances, and accesses.

Yes. This can be done with either a plugin (try searching the Plugin Directory) or coded through the Member Types feature introduced in version 2.2.

2. Have a place where shortcode could be put in so that users can take a questionnaire containing likert questions on their profile and/or while creating their profile.

Either a post, page or perhaps even an activity update all spring to mind as possible places to add it.

3. One but not both kinds of users can create their own group (public, semiprivate or private) or forum and browse/ join existing ones

The ability for all members to create new groups comes as standard.

4. One kind of user but not the other needs to be able to set up ways for the other type of user to purchase products (I assume I can use another plugin but will need a place to put the shortcode)

This will need to be either custom coded, or you may find a plugin with the functionality you need.

Hope this info helps!