BuddyPress.org

I completely Disagree! BuddyPress has served me well in over 250 projects. I only use 3 plugins on average and never use any pre-made themes. I have developed over 250 perfectly working and extremely customized communities and learning websites as well as intranet sites using BuddyPress and have never had any issues with it. I have never had any issues making it do just exactly what I want to to do “Well, there maybe one or 2 items I would change”.

Anyways, my point is, if you know how to work with WP’s flavor of messed up PHP, if you know how to use the codex, the extensive list of attributes and hooks, actions and filters that are listed all over the web, BuddyPress is a pretty puppy that can pretty much act, do or become anything you want without all the plugins.

As far as the help goes around here, Well, yes, It has a lot to be desired. When you post a question, you must realize that not everyone here can help. A lot of the members here are looking for help themselves. The guys who can help are often times bogged down trying to help others and along with having work of their own to complete for their jobs at the same time. So yes, the help here is sparse but no one ever said that this was the help desk or the help line. Its just a forum for people to ask questions and get replies from other members and sometime staff that will help out someone when we can.

And Finally……
Wordpress and BuddyPress are basically developers platforms. It just so happens that its simple enough that basically anyone who has a desire to learn or are at least brave enough to look into some files can make changes and even figure out how to make a theme if they want. No one ever said it was easy for everyone which is why a lot of people pay other people to do the work for them. If you fall into this category, please just pay someone to do the work and stop whining about not getting help because you dont know what your doing.

Did you try this solution?

Hey Frank, I guess the best question to ask you after all this is how comfortable are you with digging into or working with html, css and basic php?

If a pre made theme is what your looking for, how comfortable are you with taking hours and days looking thru theme demos to find your golden pony or at least making child themes or customizing code?

And then to answer you more specifically to your “How long would it take to develop a theme like the one I described?” , I guess that just depends really. Over the years I have accumulated many libraries of code and theme snippets and I know where everything is in WP/BP core and template files. So for me, A fully custom and dressed out theme might take anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks if I know exactly what I am working towards at the beginning and have a clear, though out, planned out idea. If I hen peck it or free hand it” like I do from time to time” It may take a day or it might take 8 months, lol.

As a bit of comfort to your quandary, everything you asked for in your opening inquiry is all ready done for you in BuddyPress “for the most part”. A theme like the one you describe sounds like a 3 day to 1 week job to me. Keep in mind however that with me saying that, things always have a way changing and evolving into monsters, lol.

So lets break down your theme and see how it look on paper…. He He, my favorite part…

1. I want users to come to my site, register, and log in…… (Its all ready there) just have to set it up to your liking. It can all be customized quite a bit as well.

2. I would love to be able to customize the way these pages look!(background image, logo, and content inside them)……… (The logo, background and most of the design items are easy breezy as long as your ok with basic html and css and not looking for flying dragons and wizards shooting lightning bolts across the screen. Alas, even those can be done with css, flash and JS, lol. )

3. I’m not looking for a full-blown social media site (yet)…….No need to have what you dont want to use. BP has a full host of controls to limit what can be done onsite by users or what is implemented frontend in its settings. WP Dash/settings/buddypress. Select what you want to use. You also have the ability to write functions, and use hooks and actions and filters to limit or build on anything you like.

4. I want to build a site that where users can log in, create a “blog” excerpt with media …… There are several ways to do this in buddypress, just have to plan it out and test the methods and see what works for you. Mu, Activity and Groups/Forums.

5. They should also be able to put a location tag on it. ….. it sounds like this is what x-profile fields are good for. Just create your custom location field and add it with a template tag in the loop you want to use it in. They fill out the filed on their profile page and it will display in that loop.

6. When they post it, the only people I want to see that are the people they added as friends or if they have their profile set to public……BuddyPress frontend “user profile area” has a settings tab, under it are quite a few privacy features, not fully comprehensive in my opinion but there are a few plugins that add on to this and you can code it in as well. either way. Easy task.

7. And when it shows up on their friend’s news feed it should just show a featured image, title, and the beginning of their text with a like counter….. Easy enough, just write the loop that way, lol. Easy to do.

8. When their friends click on that post it brings them to the full blog post, not just the featured image. Their friends can favorite the content or comment on it. …..The natural behavior of WP and BP posts so we are good there.

9. On a users profile, I would like to show their recent posts, and posts they’ve favorited…. Thats what the friends tab shows but you can add custom queries, and stuff and otherwise tear it apart and pick it of the pieces you want and use them in other places to make custom loops and queries and all kinds of goodness, lol. As long as you make sure things are firing in the right places and make sure certain things are in the loops where they belong, No worries.

10. Site homepage is basically just a file called front-page.php. Copy the page.php from the theme root and then customize the heck out it. Work it up however you like.

As far as the themes go, I never use premade themes. I do however make full use of the libraries of code I have accumulated, (_s) and bootstrap for a lot of my work. Cheesy I know but hey, it saves me time and money and gives me freedom. I rarely find the need to actually make a complete custom theme or write much in the way of custom code from scratch anymore. And I certainly never purchase any themes. So I am not the best person to ask about themes really. I know that there are tons of themes that do all kinds of stuff available around the web. Just have to give them the litmus test and see if they fit your project.

Let me know if you have any other questions or what have you. I will be around.

508 usually means that the hosting provider has put a limit on the resources available to your account. See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20040307/how-to-fix-the-508-resource-limit-is-reached-error-in-wordpress. BuddyPress does generally require more resources (RAM, MySQL I/O) than a standard WP installation. I’d suggest reaching out to your hosting provider to ask about the potential of upgrading your service to support the use of BP.

What theme are you using? It’s possible that this problem is specific to the theme. Try on a default WordPress theme like Twenty Sixteen to be sure.

Can you share a screenshot of the “comment box” and the “reply box”? It’s unclear from your questions whether you’re talking about textareas or about buttons. Also, BP doesn’t have separate Comment and Reply functionality for activity items, which makes me think that this may be a conflict with another plugin.

I’m not sure that previous_posts_link() and next_posts_link() will work in the context of a custom WP_Query loop. See https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/20424/wp-query-and-next-posts-link for a pointer.

Hi @autox420 – The first answer to this question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/21203526/hide-unhide-div-with-button shows a technique that you can use to add a button like this to your theme.

CSS changes must go in a CSS file; putting them into a header.php file won’t do anything, unless you use some specific syntax.

It’s possible that the style.css sheet that you are referencing is not actually being loaded, due to an improperly built child theme. You can tell by viewing the source of the page and looking for a file being loaded in a <link> tag, with a URL along the lines of: example.com/wp-content/themes/my-theme/style.css. If you don’t see this anywhere, then you need to figure out why before you can debug anything else.

If the stylesheet is indeed loading, but the change is not taking effect, there may be a problem with the selector I’ve suggested. The best way to figure this out is by right-clicking the element, selecting “Inspect Element” (or similar, depending on browser) from the context menu, and then using your browser tools to experiment with different CSS selectors until you find the right level of specificity. Here is one tutorial on how to do this, and you can find thousands of others on Google (“how to use browser developer tools” or something like that). https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Common_questions/What_are_browser_developer_tools

My CSS also assumes that the diagnosis of the theme author is correct. I can’t verify that without actually being able to see a live copy of the site. If in doubt, you may consider reaching out to the theme author, who may be able to confirm some of the advice on this thread.

You should send these questions to BuddyBoss and / or LearnDash.

Your questions are about WP and WooCommerce, not BuddyPress.
All three are free, so set up a test site and start using other plugins or custom code to handle your desired user roles.

Your questions are about WP and WooCommerce, not BuddyPress.
All three are free, so set up a test site and start using other plugins or custom code to handle your desired user roles.

I understand you now.

You can try this: Link

You mention forums specifically.

If that is the case, you should use bbPress conditional functions.

See this page for more details:

bbPress Conditional Tags

If you have more questions, post on the bbPress forums as BuddyPress is not bbPress:

– BuddyPress = community
– bbPress = forums

Hi @tel-wright

Try asking over at bbPress. They handle forum-related questions.

Try with this:

function tubs_sanitize_user($username, $raw_username, $strict) {
    $new_username = strip_tags($raw_username);
    // Kill octets
    $new_username = preg_replace('|%([a-fA-F0-9][a-fA-F0-9])|', '', $new_username);
    $new_username = preg_replace('/&.?;/', '', $new_username); // Kill entities

   // If strict, reduce to ASCII for max portability.
   if ( $strict )
        $new_username = preg_replace('|[^a-z0-9 _.\-@+]|i', '', $new_username);

    return $new_username;
}
add_filter( 'sanitize_user', 'tubs_sanitize_user', 10, 3);

Source

Or try with this:

// Force Strong Username
function strong_username() {
 global $bp;

 if ( !empty( $_POST['signup_username'] ) )
   if ( !valid_username( $_POST['signup_username'] ) ){
    $bp->signup->errors['signup_username'] = __( 'Your username is not strong enough. Use uppercase, lowercase, numbers and special chars like - _', 'bp-strong-username-password', 'buddypress' );
   }
 }
 add_action( 'bp_signup_validate', 'strong_username');

 function valid_username($candidate) {
   $r1='/[A-Z]/';  //Uppercase 
   $r2='/[a-z]/';  //lowercase
   $r3='/[0-9]/';  //numbers
   $r4='/[-_]/'; //Special chars, underscore...

   if(preg_match_all($r1,$candidate, $o)<1) return FALSE;
   if(preg_match_all($r2,$candidate, $o)<1) return FALSE;
   if(preg_match_all($r3,$candidate, $o)<1) return FALSE;
   if(preg_match_all($r4,$candidate, $o)<1) return FALSE;
   if(strlen($candidate)<6) return FALSE;

   return TRUE;
}