BuddyPress.org

Hi @coolhunt 🙂

I think it depends on the level of user interactions you need. If your need is simply to list businesses, then yes a plugin like the one above should do the job.

But if your need is to build something more “social”, like having business fans listed, discussions about the businesses, reviews. Then I’d probably choose BuddyPress and use one of my plugins to add profiles to group 🙂

There’s a ticket on BuddyPress Trac about it: https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/6783

About SEO, I’d love to see a plugin making BuddyPress more friendly in this area and we’d be very happy to help improving this part as soon as we could have guidelines about the needs.

You could set a profile type as Business and then set profile fields for it that make sense for a business. That’s one option.

One issue people sometime run into is that they want users to have a profile that represents a person, and then also have some business content like listings etc which are associated with that person. So then you’re back to using BuddyPress for the profiles and needing another plugin for the business content.

So it really depends on what you’re trying to do. In most cases I think it’s cleaner to use a listing plugin and have it link to the buddypress profiles as the authors of the business listings.

You could also use Groups to represent businesses. But that makes more sense if they are representing a company with members (employees), like a Facebook page. If you just want “listings” it’s overkill and then you’ve also lost the ability to use groups later on for what they’re really meant for.

There is a plugin I really like for listings that is just simple to configure and use in my opinion. I have no affiliate with it, just have used it on some custom projects and found it easy to work with. This one, worth a look:

Advanced Classifieds & Directory Pro

Email should work but much can go wrong including things connected to plugins, themes and functions.php or bp-custom.php files.

Presuming the email didn’t go into spam, and WordPress sent emails before installing BuddyPress, then one thing that can be tried is disabling all plugins except except buddypress and the ( un-customised ) bp-default theme.

If this is a localhost/dev site then php / server has to be correctly configured and/or upgraded for email. Alternatively WP Mail SMTP may be useful in this situation…

The main email address is set on the wordpress Settings > General page.
I would advise you check you have correct PTR record for your IP address, and also set a SPF record along with your MX records doing these two things can drastically affect how mail servers receive your mail or reject it if not happy these two items exist and check out as valid.
There may be other issues in some situations. For more info see: How to fix WordPress Not Sending Email issue

Email should work but much can go wrong including things connected to plugins, themes and functions.php or bp-custom.php files.

Presuming the email didn’t go into spam, and WordPress sent emails before installing BuddyPress, then one thing that can be tried is disabling all plugins except except buddypress and the ( un-customised ) bp-default theme.

If this is a localhost/dev site then php / server has to be correctly configured and/or upgraded for email. Alternatively WP Mail SMTP may be useful in this situation…

The main email address is set on the wordpress Settings > General page.
I would advise you check you have correct PTR record for your IP address, and also set a SPF record along with your MX records doing these two things can drastically affect how mail servers receive your mail or reject it if not happy these two items exist and check out as valid.
There may be other issues in some situations. For more info see: WordPress Not Sending Email – Mail SMTP Not Working

There might be problem in your theme, its better to check your wordpress theme first of all. This post might help you – https://secure.wphackedhelp.com/blog/detect-malicious-code-malware-wordpress-themes-plugins/

Thanks a lot for your interesting suggestions @coolhunt. I agree we need to talk about how we can improve BuddyPress documentation and about how to find help to start using/resolve issues.

We are currently working on the next major version of BuddyPress (5.0.0). As soon as it’s released, I’ll start a discussion about it from our Development news blog.

PS: really happy you like the work accomplished in Bowe Codes (although it would benefit from some improvements, but that’s another topic 😉 )

Hi @m4soN – The easiest place to add custom CSS is in the Customizer. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/how-to-easily-add-custom-css-to-your-wordpress-site/.

Once there, you’ll need to learn a bit about how CSS works to make the changes you want to change. Without knowing more about what “very ugly” means, it’s hard to give specific instructions. But let’s say you wanted to increase the field padding. You might introduce the following CSS:

.buddypress-wrap .bp-tables-user tr td {
  padding: 20px;
}

Here’s some more info about getting started with CSS: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/CSS/Introduction_to_CSS

Hi @sibahmed, and thanks for the post!

Unfortunately, BuddyPress doesn’t have these kinds of fields built in. They’re called “nested” or “conditional” fields, and they’ve been requested in the past – see https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/579. It’s a large job to build it as a feature for BuddyPress, though it’d be easier to build a custom tool for yourself that does this.

If you’ve got the technical experience, you could a custom BP_XProfile_Field_Type, whose edit logic would contain the markup and JavaScript to enable these sorts of fields. I did some quick searching, and it looks like someone was writing this at some point – see https://rimonhabib.com/coming-up-next-buddypress-nested-conditional-fields/. Maybe worth following up there?

Hi @cassel – Thanks for the post!

I’ve just installed All In One SEO to try to reproduce. Looks like the line numbers have changed – I’m seeing 5711 now, instead of 4735! – but the error is still there.

Looking into the all-in-one-seo-pack code, it appears that this error only occurs if you haven’t yet saved the options for this plugin. Once you’ve done so, the error ought to go away.

For the record, I was able to trigger this notice even without BuddyPress.

I’ve opened a ticket with the All In One folks to let them know about the bug on their end, so stay tuned at https://github.com/semperfiwebdesign/all-in-one-seo-pack/issues/2805 ! In the meantime, you might consider forcing errors not to be displayed on your production site – always a good idea. See https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-turn-off-php-errors-in-wordpress/

Hey,

Michael from BuddyBoss chiming in here. I can’t speak for BuddyPress, but I do want to clarify some of what was mentioned about BuddyBoss.

It does not seem their fork will survive on its own(been following their updates from the first release till now) if the BuddyPress development ceases

This is definitely not the case. Right now if BuddyPress development ceased, it would have no impact at all on what we’re doing. We are no longer pulling code from BuddyPress since forking (besides security patches) and our development team is substantially larger than the core team of developers at BuddyPress. Also our developers are all paid, full time staff, so we are able to build features very rapidly. And we will eventually open up the plugin to allow others to contribute to it. We’re not going anywhere.

Other than that, no membership plugin has a vast eco system than BuddyPress(It has 500+ addons on wordpress plugin repo).

BuddyBoss Platform has the same ecosystem. We have taken great care to make it backwards compatible to BuddyPress and to make sure that any existing BuddyPress plugin works out of the box with BuddyBoss. And if it doesn’t, you can submit a support ticket and we’ll patch it so it works.

Hi,
BuddyPress.org is not shutting down. The next version of BuddyPress will be available on 15th.
You can follow the development here
https://github.com/buddypress/BuddyPress

and for the upcoming REST API here
https://github.com/buddypress/BP-REST

BuddyBoss’s fork is mega bundle of BuddyPress and a few other plugins(bbpress, bp-profile search, and a few others) with minor enhancements. It does not seem their fork will survive on its own(been following their updates from the first release till now) if the BuddyPress development ceases. Consider it as a distribution that bundles some needed functionality together than a real fork(atleast until now).

There have been many community plugin available in past(ultimate members, user ultra and I can recall 4-5 others) which have been doing well. There will be even more.

The choice should be based on your needs. Using a commercially supported plugin provides better support which BuddyPress lacks currently. If support is important, BuddyPress may not be the best choice.

Other than that, no membership plugin has a vast eco system than BuddyPress(It has 500+ addons on wordpress plugin repo).

Hope it clarifies and helps you decide.

Regards
Brajesh

https://www.wpbeginner.com/wp-tutorials/how-to-fix-the-wordpress-white-screen-of-death/
Has a list of things that could potentially help fix the problem.

Not sure if this is still relevant, but you can easily remove the email address field without having to remove the entire page. This can be accomplished by editing the BuddyPress template files you copied into your WordPress theme (wp-content/themes/mytheme/buddypress).

The file you will want to edit is named general.php and is located in “wp-content/themes/mytheme/buddypress/members/single/settings”. Once you locate general.php, simply delete the following code located around line 27 and 28.

<label for="email"><?php _e( 'Account Email', 'buddypress' ); ?></label>
	<input type="email" name="email" id="email" value="<?php  echo bp_get_displayed_user_email(); ?>" class="settings-input" <?php bp_form_field_attributes( 'email' ); ?>/>

Presto! No more email field 🙂