BuddyPress.org

My guess (and this is a long-shot) is that you cannot leave the field blank once you’ve entered something in there, but BuddyPress also won’t lock you into that screen if it is.

Otherwise users could find themselves in all sorts of redirect problems going from profile group to group.

I haven’t tried that part yet myself though.

If there’s 5 required fields on the page, and you fill in 4 of them, in my opinion it should still save the 4 you filled in.

Haha! You are correct! This must be a bug. Otherwise, it seems useless to have a message saying you have to do something when in fact you don’t.

But, if you leave that screen and go back to it, the information gets saved. The activity stream doesn’t say it got saved, but they do.

Ironically enough, if you save your profile without all of the required fields filled in on the page, it still saves the data. Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I kind of like it like this actually

John,

I just tried editing a test user profile field in which a newly-created required field had not yet been modified by that user. I changed some data in a different field and when I clicked on “Save Changes”, I got a message stating that:

There were problems saving your information. Please fix the following:

"Allow this profile group to be seen by" cannot be left blank.

In other words, since I had not entered data in this new required field, it would not let me save my changes.

The only fields that show up during registration are the ones in the main group, and even then they have to be marked as required. Any other profile fields won’t show up during registration, but just like Jeff said will need to be filled in.

(Ironically enough, if you save your profile without all of the required fields filled in on the page, it still saves the data. Not sure if this is a bug or not, but I kind of like it like this actually.)

I suspect in the future there will be more selections and features as to which fields to show on registration, etc…

Any profile fields you add after a user has registered will be blank until they go into their profile and add data to them. If you have set a profile field as “Required”, the next time a user edits their profile data, they will not be able to save their changes unless they have entered data into any required fields.

Did you manage to get it hiding certain fields? I need to ask people for sensitive data that I don’t want shown on the public profile. Would this suffice and where in the code do I need to flip it?

Jeff, thanks for the clarification.

I made sure that Blog Tracking was enabled when I realized that it should allow my students’ comments to show up in their activity list; I did this after just a few students had commented on a post. For some reason, though, their comments are not appearing as part of their activity.

I’m beginning to think that something is wrong with my database. My site and blogs seem to be working correctly as far as posts go, but user data is not showing up in the database consistently. I’ve had two users register, but their required profile fields have not been added to the appropriate tables, etc.

Since I’m well underway with my summer courses, I can’t afford to do any sort of re-install, but once the semester ends in early August, I think I will do the install from scratch and hopefully eliminate these sorts of problems.

I can’t find this…is there a plugin?

I can’t understand how the messaging problem happens, everything is sent using usernames, and has nothing to do with profile fields.

In fact, everything in BuddyPress is based on usernames, and those have to be unique. Perhaps you can give more detail on some specific problems?

Yes, with bpc activated.

All works correctly excepted, with bpc on, the standard “member list” wich shows a profile page issued from bpc i guess.

The bp accesses to profile are all working without trouble.

The profile who appears when cliking on “members” or on one of the categories created with bpc shows:

basic fieldset ok

2 additonnal fields of mine ok

The avatar is gravatar. In bp profile the avatar is on my server.

activity, groups, friends are empty

each title shows-up with (0)

Dan-

Okay, I’m just thinking out loud, just going through the registration process.

As long as BuddyPress is installed and activated, is does not matter if your users register via the wp-signup.php form (which is found in WPMU) or the register.php form (which is found in BuddyPress). The extra fields from BuddyPress will show up on either form.

Here is where the data is stored:

The datum for “Full Name”, which is a required BuddyPress field, is stored in the table wp_bp_xprofile_data. The data for the “Nickname” field, which is the username if no full name is provided, the “First name” field, and “Last name” field, are stored in the table wp_usermeta. The data for “username” and “Display Name” are stored in the table wp_user.

So, here’s a question:

Did you at any point uninstall BuddyPress and delete the BP tables in MySQL? Did you delete any of the WPMU tables? Did you do either or both of these and then reinstall? If yes, did most of your students register before that time and then only those four register after a BuddyPress reinstall?

I’m just grasping at straws now. Perhaps someone else will have insight into this issue.

Dan-

I’m going to make just a few comments now. I’ll look at this in more detail tomorrow.

It look’s like you are using the default themes that come with BuddyPress–bphome and bpmember. Is this correct?

Pardon me if you know all this already but, when a user (one of your students) logs in, a link appears in the upper right corner of the buddybar with a link to their profile page. This link displays either their username or nickname. What is displayed depends on whether or not a nickname has been entered by the user. For all but four of your students, there is no nickname.

Now, when a student clicks this link, it will take them to their profile page. Once there, they can edit their profile. In the default BP install, there is a “Full Name” field in the profile that can be filled in.

WordPress Mu uses this data for the display in the backend–your picture #2. If the “Full Name” field is blank in their profile, then you will only see data in the “Username” and “nickname” fields, with the username used as the nickname. If a user has add anything to the “Full Name” field, then Mu will use that, and if it can, split it automatically into a “First name” and “Last name”.

The fact that 4 students have data in these fields indicates to me that they went to their profile page and clicked “Edit Profile” and then added their full name to the “Full Name” field. It is not a mystery.

Finally, when logged into WPMU’s backend, go to the “BuddyPress” menu group. Once there, click on “General Settings”. You will see a field named “Full Name field name”. Then, click on “Profile Field Setup”. There, you will see all of the currently-setup profile fields that your students can utilize. You can add, edit, or delete fields. You can make certain fields required.

You should spend some time not only in the WPMU’s backend, but also in the members’ area of BuddyPress to see how all of this works.

I hope this helps.

You’ll get that error message from bp-xprofile.php if you have a group of profile fields defined but no fields in the group.

Fields show up in the order they were created. By September… I would say 50% right now? There’s a few different things on the roadmap for what comes next, and you can always vote on what you think you’d like to see also.

The first blog visible on the buddypress.org homepage will link you to where you can vote for what you’d like to see come sooner or later. The votes will determine the path, so make sure to get involved.

Is there a workaround? It’s pretty essential to have a registration form that makes sense to potential new members.

What is the best way to approach this now? Will the fields show up in the order they are created? Or backwards?

What are the chances that this issue will be solved before September?

What are you trying to get from the profile fields? The new user info? All that filter gives you is the text of the message that it’s gonna send out. The user login name is embedded in there but that’s about the only way to get at it. You’d have to parse the text of the msg to get it out.

I have related questions about the relationship between the WP tables and the BP tables, so I’d like to make sure that I understand the responses above.

I know that BP maintains user profile information separately from “wp_usermeta” (in “wp_bp_xprofile_data”, to be specific). BP provides functionality for modifying this information, but no way for putting “wp_usermeta” fields into the “edit profile” form.

So I think the answer to Peter’s question is that without *major* customization:

1. You have to be happy with user data being stored in a few different places

2. All user editable info must be in the tables created by BP

Is this correct?

BTW, what does the “Disable BuddyPress to WordPress profile syncing?” option do under BP General Settings in the admin page? Does this only apply to the username field?

Some people don’t find that feature terribly useful, yet others seem to like it but want to limit it to certain fields. It’s subjective. No it’s not a bug for bp to be linking to search that way. bp has no way of knowing what is relevent.

Westpointer-

This sounds like an interesting plugin. Thanks for your contribution!

Please consider submitting it to the WordPress plugin repository, tagged BuddyPress, when you feel it is ready to go. I’m sure many people will find this useful.

I will be interested in using this plugin myself on a new site I’ll be developing in about 2 months.