BuddyPress.org

Please answer these questions: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2674

Since you are talking specifically about altering how WPMU deals with blogs, I’d suggest posting this question on the WPMU forums so that their gurus can answer. Whereas you might receive an answer on the BuddyPress forums, the WPMU forums is the more appropriate place for such questions.

I advise that you first do a through search of the Mu forums before posting.

https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/

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.

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.

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.

@notme31

Are you having the same issue as the original poster? If not, you should start a new thread as this thread is marked as resolved and few people will pay attention to new support questions in resolved threads.

Okay, why don’t both of you go through this list to see if there are other commonalities:

https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2674

Please post your response to those questions here.

Hi Jeff, I did not notice that this was marked as resolved. I still don’t know how to create a buddypress install with a cohesive theme for members. I’ve been checking every week or so to see if someone may have answered my questions about what it is I’d need to hard code. I’ll check to see which theme I modified and I’ll see if that makes a difference. I’m still looking to distill a procedure out of this that I can follow and share with others. Best, Dainis

Thank you very much for responding. I really appreciate it.

This should really be in the readme, forums are a huge part of social networking, and I will be developing a tightly integrated BuddyPress and bbPress application over the next few months. I’m sure you will see a lot of questions from me, and I look forward to helping out along the way.

Well I just stuck this in to be absolutely sure:

/* Array Test */

echo is_array($bp_meta) ? 'Array' : 'not an Array';

I placed this just after $bp_meta is set and the test does come back indicating it’s an array so that is all that really matters.

I then placed this after the offending $bp_blog_signup_meta line:

print_r($bp_blog_signup_meta);

It looked fine. Data from both arrays were being properly merged.

So, I don’t think from my cursory investigation that this is the PHP5 array_merge() issue.

@Josswinn

A few questions:

1. Does this occur in all browsers or just some?
2. Do you have cookies disabled?
3. Which version of PHP are you running?
4. Which version of Apache?
5. Which version of WPMU?
6. Which version of BP?
7. Are there any other errors in your log files?

Well, we have insufficient information about your setup. Please answer these questions.

this post might help you answer some of your questions… https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=3204

@Sean

Are you still having this issue? Everything looks fine when I visit the link you’ve provided.

If this issue is resolved, please set the light on top to green. If not, please answer these questions: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2674

Home themes need to be located in:

/wp-content/themes/

Member themes need to be located in:

/wp-content/bp-themes/

Read this for more info: https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/installing-buddypress/

We need to understand your server and software environment. Please answer these questions: https://buddypress.org/forums/topic.php?id=2674

Thank you for providing good documentation about your issue!

I just did a quick read through of your issue and will think about this some more, but a few quick questions come to mind to get this dialogue started:

1. Are you using custom themes? If so, what hapens when you switch to the default BP themes?
2. Have you made any alterations to your .htaccess file?
3. Do you have any other plugins other than BuddyPress installed and activated? If so, have you tried deactivating all of them except the BuddyPress plugin?
4. Although this may not be useful, have you checked your server’s error logs?

hi airblastor, i can reply about facebuddy.

you must activate the home theme in order to view it.

for the member theme…go in the admin panel:buddypress and be sure to select it from the menu.

be sure you’ve downloaded the facebuddy version that suits your BP release

Ross:

Based on this response to the list of questions,

Was WPMU functioning properly before installing/upgrading BuddyPress? No

and the fact that you have installed so many plugins, I’m going to suggest that you go over to the WPMU forums and ask for assistance there. It appears that you are looking at a WPMU problem and not a BuddyPress-specific issue.