BuddyPress.org

+1

I just want to agree on the confusion between user- and display names. I don’t think this will ever be crystal clear to a regular user. Like if I was to @ myself on testbp.org – not knowing about the difference between user- and displaynames – and a totally different name showed up in the message-textfield, I would probably get confused and think something like:

– Is this notification being sent to the intended user?

– Should I rename @nameA to @nameB because @nameB is the name I see in the profile? (When in fact the right answer is @nameA)

– This is too confusing to continue (fallout).

Just trying to imagine how users would react on this feature. Not saying this feature is bad, but I’ve said from the beginning that it should be more user friendly and I probably don’t need to say that the user- and displaynames confusion are bugging a whole lot of users.

having an “auto-complete”-functionality based on both – username and display name – would be much better than remembering and using “@username” all the time.

So even non-techie-users would be able to intuitively understand how the website works.

I agree with David about how a user will see the @username and might delete the text.

—

Originally posted by Andy:

Why would someone else’s activity display on your activity stream?

True, but I think adding an @mentions page on the displayed-user’s profile would help remedy users who like the wire.

You could make this page viewable if you’re logged in only.

One thing I don’t like about Twitter is I have to go to search.twitter.com to view @mentions of another user.

Excellent point. Not all is lost but I will take this opportunity to provide some feedback to @jjj and @apeatling re 1.2 in it’s current state

1. I get the use of the Twitter @ metaphor and adding “mentions” to the filters. Cool. BUT, it introduces a potential UI snag for users. Throughout 1.2 you make nice use of Display Name which users will become accustomed to and identify with. Now, you are identifying users by their user name as well (mixing metaphors, so to speak) as in ->

John Doe

and

@jdoe

Given people’s tendencies to use whacky usernames, thee is a big risk of confusion when both start popping up around the site. Not sure what the solution is but I think it’s not a trivial point, imho.

2. Now that the wire has disappeared and along comes the concept of “Send Public Message” (I get it) let’s look at what vehicle we’re making use of and what it may mean to users. As it currently stands in 1.2, to “Send Public Message” you click that button on someone’s profile and you are taken to your own Status Update field with an @username filled in.

a. the cursor is highlighted just before the @username not after (don’t forget to include a space) – this will only cause people to write the pubic message and push the @username to the end of the message. clunky

b. You’ll probably need to include a @mentions on each person’s profile page otherwise, you’ll never be able to easily see the public message to @username you just wrote. The key point being, you want this to show up on THEIR profile.

c. Probably worth considering including a notification to @username of said public message via email (make optional)

d. Q: Will these @’s be co-mingled in your own status updates and, thus create confusion. Maybe that doesn’t matter and i am overthinking it.On the activity stream, it says John Doe posted an update, when he really sent @username a public message. In Twitter when @ leads a message as 1st character, it has different context than everywhere else in the Tweet. Perhaps -> John Doe sent @username a public message ? or something.

I know I am getting fine grained here but theses (excellent) feature adds need to be over the top intuitive when introduced or they will breed unintended usages.

The thing is that bbPress doesn’t know that the user “nbsmrt” has BP Name “murat”.

UPDATE: Scratch that – your display names should actually be working, and in fact I see that they are for users other than “nbsmrt”. The bit I put below is necessary if you want the author link to go back to their BP profile instead of the bbPress profile page.

I wanted the name to be consistent everywhere, so I have a bit of common code that displays the user’s details in forum posts, blog comments, etc. Note that it requires deep integration because I am accessing BP variables inside bbPress.

For example, here is what I do in the forum…

First, in post.php I get the author’s details like so:

$author_id = get_post_author_id( $post_id );

$author = get_userdata( $author_id );

$author_loginname = $author->user_login;

$author_displayname = get_post_author();

Then I call a function to display the user link, avatar and other things. Part of this function does the following:

<?php

$author_url = _profile_url( $author_loginname );

?>



<div class="username">

<a href="<?php echo $author_url ?>"><?php echo $author_displayname ?></a>

</div>

And here is the code for the _profile_url() function:

function _profile_url( $login_name=0 ) {

global $bp;



/* if no login name is specified, use logged in user */

if ($login_name) {

$url = $bp->root_domain . '/members/' . $login_name . '/profile';

} else {

$url = $bp->loggedin_user->domain . 'profile';

}



return $url;

}

So the user’s BP Name is always used, and it always links to their BP profile.

My one concern about all this is that get_userdata() does a SQL query, adding one query for each author in a topic thread.

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.

1.) adding someone as a moderator is the same as admin pretty much

3.) BP is not currently setup to do this, one way to accomplish this though, instead of doing <?PHP if is admin?> to create groups, do <?PHP if user is level X ?> then you can manually select users and make them authors or contributors… then they would have the power to create groups. this would also give them power to create blog posts on the main blog, so you may not want them to have that power.

hopefully in the future, BP will have more control over giving users authority levels and what not…

4.) bp is not setup to do this either yet. you would need to modify the core to allow that content to be displayed to non-members

everything you want IS possible, but would require some modifications to the core of buddypress. and this is not suggested

alunsina, if you allow others to post to the main blog then then their posts will show up using the standard index.php template. When you select ‘blog’ from the home theme it runs a template called index.php. By default all posts in chronological order are displayed without any filtering by author. Whatever posts are most recent get displayed first. It doesn’t care who is the author.

This really isn’t something that bp controls. It’s just normal blog behavior. You can change what index.php displays when it is run by modifying the index.php template. Or you can not allow other users to post to the main blog.