BuddyPress.org

Hi
in short everything you have asked can be done.

But I’m a little bias as I honestly believe regarding technology there is nothing that can’t be achieved it just comes down to how much time and budget you have to invest… 🙂

Below is a bit of a ramble…. But might provide insight. after you organize your coffee and come back.

I have nearly completed a project that sounds similar in nature (few weeks from launch in final beta testing), however it was a highly customised solution (private membership site) .
With nearly 70 plugins, 100’s hours coding integration code (lots of trial and error) between the plugins and also compatibility tests with multiples of plugins to ensure no issues, because of slow load times the project requires deploying from CDN,fast servers and customised caching solutions.
most of work load appeasr to be bbpress – so an near out of the box solution, you prob don’t need to go that far.

But not to scare you. Here are some pointers that might answer your questions, based on my understanding of the OP.

In my case I spent many months researching solutions with many platforms (open source / paid / managed premium) – buddy press was selected simply because is built on WordPress that’s already has the core abilities you need, you just need to “hook in to’em” and take advantage of this concept – you can keep working on bettering and adding separate components / features as time goes by, great for client, works out a bit cheaper in the startup phase and great for developer – land ya self a permanent support / ongoing development contract……

Is it possible to update profile content/meta? : In general yes, buddy press allows this out of the box

Either the user or the admin can update, you can have admin only fields (the user doesn’t access them – but the admin can)
if you use a membership plugin eg, s2member – you can extend this idea much further eg, only require email on signup, then all other fields are accessible from profile and can set fields on a per membership level,

In your case, you might have different profile fields for students, teachers, Parents and only require a couple of basic fields to be completed on signup and all other fields can still be “required” when they reach their profile page.
For profile field management I recommend the s2membership pro plugin (free version available) http://s2member.com/

My project has a “todo list” for each and every member – however I’m still to this day unable to find a plugin that interacts with a completed wp/bbp/buddypress site. So I had to code one. The todo list was designed / engineered in a way that interacts with “wordpress” in general, by storing a completely unique data feed much like the activity feed with time stamps and can be programmed to be linked to any site link, media download, page view, forum post, reply any activity on the site can be logged and applied to the feed which the to-do-list interacts with and auto completing (crossing of the item) each item also has dependencies, so you rattle off a list of activities before the task is crossed off and each to-do-list also has dependencies so it is not seen by a user until certain tasks are completed, eg, purchase a course from the store, or complete a previous to-do-list.

In short: Yes it can be done, however I’m not aware of any 3rd party plugin that does this successfully.

In my case I have the to-do-list shown in the sidebar so as a member goes through the tasks the list is also available to them no matter what page they are on. But possible to publish it in the profile page if required.

Regarding email notices, I recommend looking into the woo commerce sensei http://www.woothemes.com/products/sensei/ plugin for your courses that way you have management of email notices, in fact prob most of the things you require will be available via sensei – note this is a premium paid plugin with yearly ongoing licence costs.
Without a free trial version to try before you buy.

But maybe gravity forms developer licence might be fine in your case as it has, gateway plugins, qiz and survey plugins – it would be possible to build certain simple courses on the gravity framework including delivery of custom emails – if building a form based system than certainly worth a look into – but would require a developers licence to get all the plugins you would prob require.

In fact what I do is use gravity forms email chimp plugin to send the members email address to an email list (automation campaign) in mail chimp (paid account) that auto sends a welcome emails that I have customize to suit the activity they have completed, this way I can send pretty html + marketing emails + scheduled follow up emails and take the work load off WordPress other than a quick API connect on demand.

Regarding: is it possible to have multiple logins or users access the same account/profile?
In simple: Yes, but it all comes to context of the profile, will each member be able to see other members profiles or will parents be able to edit a child profile etc.

Although my project does not require the need for 2 or more members to edit a single profile, I do have multiple levels of context (horizontal and vertical memberships) all with their own set of rules who profiles they can see and what buddypress features are available to them – some members don’t have activity feeds or messages, But I needed to ensure that members that do have access to these features can’t access the features of cross membership and so on.

This is 100% custom code (no plugin) but while coding this up I recall thinking I’m 100% confident it is possible to add another level of check “if current user can edit displayed user” and go from there, all you would need is a profile field / meta that links multiple accounts together –
Eg, a parent account has a profiled field “child user name” – they just enter the child username / user ID – and now we would add the profile check if a parent is viewing the child’s profile.

Regarding paying a deposit, and payment, this is my findings.

There was no single one membership / payment plugin that integrated perfectly into what I wished to achieve – I have tested many. please note I’m suggesting there are no plugins that do this stuff just none that achieved the outcomes I needed for my project.

– Tips: – start the project design based on the payment systems / gateway (the complete project and direction of development is 100% dependent on this) because the simple reason every feature you implement needs to check “is a paid member and what level (cap / role) ” – including free membership with paid features “is not a paid member” but has paid for… this includes recurring and non-recurring subscriptions with consideration of what you intend to do if a subscription expires.

Eg, a recurring subscription will either just auto subscribe and pay for the next time frame (or fail)
A non-reoccurring subscription will auto expire after a given time frame (or X cycles)

The difference between to the two –
Is generally on a recurring subscription when it expires it also linked to a member account to “do something” eg downgrade membership

A non-recurring subscription is generally used for a onetime payment you have access forever feature- eg, a course and resources, you pay once on a deposit, subscription over several weeks when the subscription expires the member still has access to the course as long as they remain at minimum a free member on the site. (anyhow that’s how I have implemented things)

These two concepts are completely different in the way they interact with the member as well at many levels although on the surface appear to be almost the same, add in a deposit feature you are also opening another level of context to play with, mostly limiting the available options regarding the payment gateway service you will need to use or more so which services have this feature on offer.

As mentioned – my suggestion is start with the gateway solutions first and reverse the design back to the front end. – this is the big lesson I took away with this project (4 rewrites in total) as it was always a block relating to the gateway limitations (and laws relating to online subscriptions in my country).

My project:
Woo commerce (free) for shopping cart system including purchase of courses, subscription to site and deposit/ subscription to courses, plus all other products, deliverable products, workshops, webinars, one on one sessions, resource downloads from pdf to videos. Anything you can think off can be sold through woo

Woo commerce quick cart – plugin (paid)– now I can add a buy now button on any page for any product including subscriptions – the membership info page has a standard 3 column price comparison chart with nothing more than a “sign up now” button – clicking the button auto adds the subscription to cart and opens the checkout popup with one click and without leaving the page (no need to send to store)

Sensei (paid)– for courses and fits well into woo commerce system (but requires a couple more plugins and custom integration code if implementing paid / subscription based courses )

Groups plugin (free) to easily manage roles and caps (as I have to teach client staff how to do this and manage the site) WordPress has this capability built in if your a coding ninja (I’m not)

Groups Woo commerce (paid plugin) to link groups to a purchase – apply a role / cap or groups of, to a user based on the purchase.

Then some custom code is required – to perform a check and if a user has a particular role or cap than apply the s2membership level – this check is done at the store level so if a member cancels or defaults on a payment – the membership level is auto adjusted depending on what role or cap is supplied to the user from the groups woo commerce automation. groups plugin manages non-recurring subscriptions so a expired subscription does not remove the users caps and roles (but a default on payment does)

S2member pro – for membership level management including profile fields management and most importantly complete site access management – I can apply access to each and every competent of the site this includes , forums, topics, replies, posts, pages, media, courses, and content within pages eg, home page displays different content based on the membership level / logged in or general public. s2member pro is also used to override default bbpress / buddy visibility settings eg, hidden forums only available to certain member levels – but requires custom code to apply or traverse access levels on submitting topics / replies to ensure widgets and other snippets don’t display private areas to members that don’t have access. (it allows you to write custom queries with zero concern or consideration to access levels)

For subscriptions (paid)– I use woo commerce Subscriptions plugin – this manages on its own site access based on paid recurring subscriptions (or in simple turns on or off user account based on payment) – pay x amount monthly to access certain site features, courses and resources, forums, pages, blog articles etc.

However – woo commerce subscriptions does not manage deposit / time based subscriptions (non-recurring subscriptions) eg, pay a deposit for a course and gain instant access then pay off on a subscription for x amount of weeks / months –
I was not able to find any plugin (free or paid) that does this, so I had to write a plugin currently under experimental concept stage.

Other tips: often it’s better to find compatible, well supported and pay for premium plugins that have overlapping features and disengage these features you don’t want to achieve your goals and do as little integration code as possible, but anything you do needs to be well planned and though out as to not to touch core code in any platform, framework or plugin.
At the end of the day you want the ability to upgrade all systems as time go by.

Eg, s2member plugin has its build in membership system that is “required to be active” for the plugin to work. – all I did was setup a single paid (never to be used membership) on a paypal sandbox store this includes setting up all the s2membership registration pages etc – then put a simple redirect in the .htaccess on any of these pages. Now to purchase membership you must go to the store (woo commerce) and purchase a subscription via woo – s2member has now has nothing to do with membership registration / payment systems.

And of course I have “force account creation” turned on at the store – you cannot make a purchase without signup at a minimum free site membership.
by disengaging the buddy, bbp, Wp, and all other means of registering (by redirect) but only leaving the woo commerce customer account registration available – The pop up registration form I use for free members is just a woocommerce customer account registration form (with no products attached) with a fallback to the s2membership cut down reg form (in case ajax / jquery etc not working on client side)

And now all purchases, subscriptions, shop account, courses etc are now available from the buddy press profile page also via a “woo to buddypress” plugin (or in my case built into the theme)

May sound complicated but as mentioned I would really suggest starting with payment solutions and nut out this part of the project first as this will most likely force development direction,

one of my project goals was a solution that can cater for anything…. so,

Regarding variable deposit / costs amounts based on user input – if using similar approach as I did – you would just setup woo commerce discount codes per variable outcome / result and would just reveal the correct coupon code to the user on the checkout page. they just cut and paste this code into the discount field and click apply.

or setup up multi products – one product per price base. – have the user input their details first and the result would be – apply a groups cap / role then only offer the courses products in the store with the associated price base based on user caps / role –

woo discount coupons can be setup on multiple bases – eg, deposit amount / on going subscription amount or total amount or per product or per cart total etc.

for me was plenty of research into this including concept builds of other community platforms and as above is only a bit of a sample of features used relating to the OP.
I was under very strict key point goals and achievements requiring very specific outcomes many of these affected development direction how / why I implemented the above.

There may be better simpler ways to suit your specific project, but thought it might be worth a mention for some direction. or at least insight into some of the plugins I use / ideas and concepts.

my usual disclaimer – if there is something in there for you, that’s great! if not that’s fine too!

enjoy!

@functionmunchkin

Thanks for the feedback. I’m assuming this is feedback regarding the BuddyPress forum, rather than the BuddyPress software. In your own forum, you can change the location of the new topic form by modifying your theme. See the Theme Compatibility article for more info. Any questions you may have feel free to ask on their support forum:

https://bbpress.org/forums/

Yes i understand what you want to do, but you’re on a BuddyPress help forum. Your questions are not related to BuddyPress but to myCred. For such custom usage, please user the myCred help support.

Hey, sorry I’m new to Buddypress too and I can’t help you. But I’m also interested in your questions. Had you got any answer for you question? If it is yes, I want to know how you solved these problem. If it’s not, let’s find it out together.

hopefully I’m not asking too many questions… You do, but with a guitar, so i don’t be too afraid (i have 3 near me)

If you use rtmedia, there is no reason to use mediapress as both do more or less, the same thing. And vice versa.

I don’t use rtmedia so i don’t know how it works and display content in BP.
What is the tab with bio, info ? Do you mean the original WP profile page ? Are you speaking about the admin profile page ?

Embeding a wp content is not very difficult. Search the forum for embed post on profile. I answered one of this question a few days back with a complete solution.

Questions specific to another plugin are best asked of the plugin creators.
Try http://www.learndash.com/ or https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/buddypress-learndash

Hi @julia_b sure… Its http://www.skateboardhoard.com let me know if you have any questions about it!

One thing that I have found is that with so many features it can be confusing for the users. I have only been live for about a month now and have made several UI adjustments and will continue to do so.

Doubt there is a plugin this specific. I’m not sure the specifics but are you saying anyone can review a woo product if they are not logged in?

BuddyPress doesn’t have a specific method for logging in its the same login as WP.

You might try this http://stackoverflow.com/questions/24747095/woocommerce-require-registration-to-buy

@ch1n3s3b0y Hi there, im gonna chime in on this as im starting to believe that buddypress can most definately scale vary well (even though its not been proven yet to scale to say a million users+ i think its quite possible), as henry may remember from previous threads i have commented in i have decided to look into the ultimate server configurations to try and find the best way to actually move forward into my own buddypress build.

This has meant concentrating and learning about lots of different server configurations for the past couple of years in-between my other projects.

Do you think Buddypress can support hundreds of thousands, if not millions of users?

Lets just switch this notion right on its head, rather than ask yourself if buddypress can scale to a millon users start asking yourself if your server setup and configuration can scale to a million concurrent users instead.

The key to success on a buddypress active and busy site becomes more of a server and administration task rather than how you have buddypress setup on a basic server config (before long you will bottleneck somewhere if you do not setup for expansion).

I know it seems daunting to think about all of this rather than install it build it and launch it and expect it to scale! But to me doing something half hearted isnt the way forward with a serious build on any project. If you prepare and understand the potential problems before you have that killer network built with 100s of thousand of concurrent users its much better to be prepared than to sit back and go NOW WHAT! when you finally grind to a halt and noone can use your site anymore and you dont know how to fix and expand it. Proactive is the way forward.

I am currently testing my buddypress install on one of my servers with nginx and HHVM (hip hop virtual machine) that was created by and is used by facebook instead of standard php, this speeds up the PHP execution speed PHP code is translated into C++ compiled into a binary and run as an executable to really speed up the way php works, therefore making everying load much much much much faster! I have only just started messing around with HHVM and will keep you updated. is anyone else actually running HHVM? if so please do share with me your finding, to me this seems the way forward with any buddypress installed website.

Also as i have stated before once i have decided on my final server configurations and im 100 percent happy with exactly how my setups work with wordpress/buddypress to scale to massive amounts of users i will create a post and guide on how i have it all set up, but still will take me more time yet. and also as stated before if anyone else does want to give there 2 cents on it feel free because on these forums there is not much talk about actual configs that people are using, even though i do realize this is server tech department, i also believe it is a valid issue for buddypress because instead of questions about scalability there could also be a few answers which is my ultimate goal. 😉

– Is it possible as admin to change their username in the back office?

No, WordPress does not allow it. Usernames must be unique.

– Why the dot/period or special characters are allow in the username during the registration? and how i can block this?

There are various methods to restrict the characters allowed in a username when registering. Here’s one example:
http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/124697/limit-username-to-specific-characters-a-z-and-0-9