BuddyPress.org

@sbraiden – I had similar 24 second page load times, and tried to get advice for enqueing, dergistering, and compacting the multiple and overlapping java and css all these plugins attached to buddypress are mixing in on top of the themes stuff.

Y Slow gives my BP site with basic plugins an “F” – WP professionals shrug it off – meh.

(more one all that here: http://premium.wpmudev.org/forums/topic/deregister-enque-compact-css-and-java-jquery-buddypress-load-time )

I have a sneaky suspicion however that my load times were an issue for me when logged in, and perhaps being logged in as an admin, I THINK that the (stupid) wpmudev dashboard plugin was slowing down my page load speed dramatically more than anything else. It was strange that after I complained of my long page loads, that 2 days later wpmudev had an update for their dashboard thing, and then my page load time went to like 3 seconds. – Coincidence, maybe, nothing definitive. – Everyone else said the pages loaded fine – so maybe it was just an admin thing – or maybe my ghostery blocking gravatar loads or something.

ANYHOW – in regards to hosting, I have a small buddypress site running fine on a shared server with amerinoc. I have one that is fairly busy running fine on a dedicated server at certified hosting.

I personally think that most important thing for a WP based site to perform well is blocking all the bad bots.

I have found that blocking all the naver and badu spiders (And most others) with a robots/txt file has decreased the sql over load (at peak times) on my servers by more than 80%.

I found that hosting a few wp sites on a shared server or dedicated could cause problems not just with spiders crawling pages too much too fast for indexing, but also all the attempting account creations / account brute force logins – even if they are blocked with something like sucuri or limit login attempts – every time they tried to login – they were using up server resources to load the login page, then hit the database to check credentials.

I also suggest using a pwd auth like explained here: http://support.hostgator.com/articles/specialized-help/technical/wordpress/wordpress-login-brute-force-attack

locking down the login with a double thing like that is fine for most WP installs, and a private family / friends BP site should be fine – when the bots can’t login through the first thing there is no need for wordpress to load a bunch of php / css files and pull from SQL a bunch of times just to give a bot a failed login – It becomes a problem for general open to the public buddypress comms I guess.

Now I set all my non-BP sites to use the double auth, I block all search engine bots aside from the top three selectively with robots.txt – and now just about any server can run fine with wp / bp – especially if some attention is paid to plugin overhead, wp-cacheing tools.

I have my fingers crossed the new bp-mediapress (sp? and Beta!) plugin thing will decrease the plugin overhead of rtmedia and offer a better alternative for pics and stuff.

Same random thoughts – I’m not an expert so take my 2 cents with a grain of salt or two..

Here’s my stab at it, in actual code (demonstrating what I mean by my rambling above):

function my_add_meta( $user_id, $key, $user ) {
    add_user_meta( $user_id, 'first_login', 'not_yet' );
}
add_action( 'bp_core_activated_user', 'my_add_meta', 10, 3 );

function my_check_meta( $redirect_to, $redirect_to_raw, $user ) {
    $meta = get_user_meta( $user->ID, 'first_login', true );
    if ( $meta == '' ) {
        // The user has logged in before
    } else {
        // The user is logging in for the first time.
        // Do something here.
        delete_user_meta( $user->ID, 'first_login' );
    }
}
add_filter( 'bp_login_redirect', 'my_check_meta', 10, 3 );

References

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/add_user_meta
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_user_meta
https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/delete_user_meta

There are lots in the WordPress Plugin Directory. The problem with social login plugins is they’re very hard to maintain from the developer’s point of view. Often, social networking sites update their APIs which results in the plugin code no longer working. My suggestion is, find a plugin that’s actively maintained – that way, you’ll be in a better position should it need updating in future.

This isn’t really a BuddyPress question as such. Try googling/searching the WP plugin repo for WordPress subscription / membership plugins, there are a few that will serve your purposes S2Member is generally suggested as a good one.

hi @tarinarmolanya,

do you really think a hacker needs to read a username on a profile to hack an account ?

@fuzzielogix ‘s CSS trick may hide the display, but the username still appears in the source code. Could eventually be usefull if you need some space on your template, but is completely barren for any other purpose.

And what about the usernicename in the profile URL and of course in the page title ?

Don’t waste your time with such pseudo security legends. The interesting place to go for a hacker is your DB and datas, not your template.

The only thing to do, and if possible to follow, are the recommendation given on this codex article. Dot.

Hi @ndh01,

I think you could do this just with buddypress.

(just please backup database before….. etc)

Go to Profile Fields—> (Click) Add New Field Group

Add New Field (text) say Field Name virgin

Then add the following to your functions.php

function vub_login_redirect($redirect_to, $set_for, $user){

	global $current_user, $bp, $wpdb;
	$val = 'no';
	if (bp_get_profile_field_data (virgin, $user -> ID )!=""){
	$redirect_to = bp_core_get_user_domain($user->ID) .'/groups/';	
}else{
	xprofile_set_field_data( 'virgin', $user -> ID, $val);
	$redirect_to = bp_core_get_user_domain($user->ID) .'/profile/change-avatar/';
}

	wp_redirect( $redirect_to );
	exit();

}

add_action('login_redirect', 'vub_login_redirect', 20, 3);

Alternatively you could as you have suggested create a new meta.

A useful plugin for that would be User Meta Manager

Add Custom Meta say a text field Name — firsttimer

then add the following (instead of the above) to your functions.php

function vu_login_redirect($redirect_to, $set_for, $user){

	global $current_user, $wpdb;
	$firsttimer = get_usermeta($user -> ID, 'firsttimer',single);
	$val = 'no';
	if (!empty ($firsttimer)) {	
	$redirect_to = bp_core_get_user_domain($user->ID) .'/groups/';
}else{
	update_user_meta( $user -> ID,'firsttimer',$val);
	$redirect_to = bp_core_get_user_domain($user->ID) .'/profile/change-avatar/';
}
	
	wp_redirect( $redirect_to );
	exit();

}

add_action('login_redirect', 'vu_login_redirect', 20, 3);

Obviously change the redirects to wherever you want the user to go.

@sbraiden – I recently helped migrate a site off of wpengine because of performance issues and the price wpengine wanted for more horse power under the hood. Their next level of service was going to cost $3200 a month. I suggested linode.com and was also amused by the fact that wpengine runs on top of linode.

The page generation times for wordpress/buddypress/bbpress along with various plugins (gravity forms, buddypress xprofile custom fields type, gravity forms upload rules, gravity forms wysiwyg, gd bbpress toolbox, cloudflare…) was not good. It is still not where we want it either, unfortunately.

The site is quite active, pushing 30,000 members and over 1.3+ million rows in the posts table. On average the page generation times are about 1.5 seconds for logged in users. Adding a new bbpress topic/reply can time out sometimes though. (still on the list to track down and fix)

We utilize Cloudflare out front for a CDN and their threat/spam protection. Their service is free but if you need more page rules to balance out caching the pro service level is $20 a month.

On linode we have a node balancer in front of two 4 core app server nodes. The app server nodes each connect directly to their own 8 core database nodes in a master master setup. This will be changing down the road once the database indexes are trimmed down with some denormalization. The cost for the node balancer, two 4 core and two 8 core nodes is $260 a month but that’s also allowing for some room to grow, capacity wise.

Server software is a combination of nginx, apache (threaded), php-fpm, glusterfs (upload directory only), memcache, zend opcode cache and mariadb. Nginx is the web server in front of apache which serves up static files from the glusterfs file system. Nginx is caching the static content being served up by apache along with full page caching (fastcgi) for anonymous visitors. Cloud flare is also caching the static content and to date we aren’t having any performance issues with IO and glusterfs.

I hope this helps. It can be done but it takes some effort (and money) to do so.

Hello @emidio007,

you can look here: http://www.digitalpur.de/wordpress-buddypress-rtmedia-limit-upload-images/

This could help you. I have implemented a similar solution for one of my clients. at the File “rtMedia.backbone.js” i have created a loop.

i have searched for “FilesAdded” and have added there this loop. You must costumize it for your needs.
while (up.files.length > 4) { up.files[4].remove(); }

The Problem here: Every time you update “rtmedia”, the “rtMedia.backbone.js” will be overwritten.

hi @alirat,

as no add media button exists.

Is not intended for. Notices are for brief messages, and html is stripped for security reason.

To get that, consider this plugin.

Security out of the box is fairly tight but as @shanebp mentions above there are ways of ‘hardening’ WordPress security. Also, you have to be careful when custom code or plugins are added – be sure the code is secure.

Separate to security but important to you would be the issue of privacy. BP offers some privacy control but you could always extend on that depending how sensitive exactly your info is (and it sounds like your info will be extremely sensitive).

Good question.
BP can be quite secure.
It’s more about your server and then about WP and then about any additional plugins that you may use.
There are lots of articles about WP security.
Here’s one.

Are you using BuddyPress Follow?

Ref: https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-followers/

hi @giftvincy,

see here if it can help:

Tutorial Age Verification in WordPress – How to Enable It

Questions regarding a third party plugin should be asked on that plugin support forum.

Subsidiary question to you: how can a code snippet or WP know the difference between the mystery man picture and your grand’ma picture ?

As you know, WP uses Gravatar and some other services. You can deactivate the mystery man to use one of them in replacement. At least a more colorfull alternative, even if it’s not the answer you expect. 😉

How about WP_User_Query?

Ref: https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_User_Query

hi @osamanuman,

as you asked the same on the polylang support, i would recommend that you wait for an answer of the plugin author.
I’ve never used that plugin, anyway, by reading the description it appears that Polylang is a tool for translating any kind of WP content.

Of course BuddyPress is a WP plugin, but as it use pages differently as ordinary WP content, i don’t think that you can use Polylang to translate BuddyPress pages using the plugin default behave: translating by content. You’ll probably have to try the option translate by directory name.

While searching the support forum, i found this, about BP compatibility. Discouraging.

If you read attentively the documentation, you will see that it becames very difficult/complicated to translate BuddyPress because of some permalink settings.

You could try this plugin. It is kind of what you want.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-announce-group/

Hi @shmk

It’s definitely possible. BuddyPress uses the wp_mail() function to send emails. By default, it uses text/plain as the content type which doesn’t allow HTML. The good news is you can change this. For example:

function set_content_type( $content_type ) {
    return 'text/html';
}
add_filter( 'wp_mail_content_type', 'set_content_type' );

Ref: https://codex.wordpress.org/Plugin_API/Filter_Reference/wp_mail_content_type

Hi @sbraiden

The response time on ANY page/link can range from 10-20 seconds, even with virtually all of the plug-ins disabled.

A standard WordPress-BuddyPress install, running on the most basic hardware with little web traffic would respond far quicker than this so there is definitely a problem. Sometimes (although not always) the problem can be elsewhere (not your host). I’ve seen some badly-written themes cause page load times to lag and the same goes for certain plugins. I think the first step for you to take (before you go through the upheaval of changing hosting company) is to determine the exact cause of the problem. If you’re definitely sure it’s the host, then definitely make the switch. From a personal point of view, I’ve had problems with 1&1 in the past so switched host and have never been happier.

Post author is a wordpress concept. And WP doesn’t allow authors to delete comments.
Search about caps on WP Codex or see on the WP forum if you find some help.

Activity feed is not retroactiv, and will never be i guess ! It’s a feed, not an archive with updates. 😉

If interrested by future of BP development, see here

I’ve had a similar situation in the past this plugin was able to help straiten things out for me it was made by jjj the lead for bbpress:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/bbp-capabilities/