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Customizing Buddypress Activity Wall

  • @ihavetodothis

    Participant

    9 years, 9 months ago

    Hello everyone,

    This is my first post and I’ve only been working with BP for about a week, so I am still new to all of this. My issue is that I want to customize my activity wall, add color, borders,change the color of highlighted tabs, and change the title, “Site-Wide Activity”. Pretty simple stuff…or so I thought.

    First, I haven’t found any simple means of changing the title without some hardcore coded. I’ll jump into a .css file with no problems, but .php I am more weary. (I’ve killed a site already trying to create a child theme!) I luckily read in a forum about making changes in Chrome’s inspector tool and it works like a charm! I can fix all the text and text boxes and borders as I want, but the only problem is, these changes are just in the browser, nothing is saved.

    Is there someway I can save my inspector tool work? Or do you know WHERE I can find the correct the .css or .php file to play with these elements? Any guidance on the .css or .php files would be greatly appreciate if they came with a file pathway!! Like I said, I am new to both BP and web design in general and just need to be pointed in the exact correct location.

    Many thanks and good luck to everyone out there!! -GSE

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • @ihavetodothis

    Participant

    9 years, 9 months ago

    Hey Everyone,

    I still haven’t found out how to save edits in chrome inspector or how to customize my wall more…BUT I did find out how to do what was most important to me, which is change the text ‘Site-Wide Activity’ on the activity stream page. I found the solution here on a forum through a google search. Unfortunately I was on a work computer and left before copying the link and now of course I can’t find that forum anymore. Thank god I wrote it down!

    Anywho, you find it in: wp-content>plugins>buddypress>bp-activity/bp-activity-loader.php and its toward the top the in $GLOBAL array.

    Thanks to the stranger who found this!

    And any help on how to design or what files to mess with to play the design of the activity stream is greatly appreciated!

    @buddypresslost

    Participant

    9 years, 9 months ago

    I’m wanting to customize mine as well… I’ll be following.

    @r3reiko

    Participant

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Hi, So I did this, to change the title of the site-wide activity, and it worked, but now none of the posts are showing… 🙁 Any ideas? Thanks.

    @ihavetodothis

    Participant

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Hey,

    Have you had any luck fixing it? Im not sure what would cause that to happen. Is it that your buddypress activities won’t post or that your blog posts disappeared?

    The only thing I can think to do would be to go into a fresh copy of WP and copy the complete bp-acitivity-loader.php page and paste it on the file on your site. See if that brings back up your posts. If it does, then try to change the name again and see if it works.

    Best of luck!

    @rogercoathup

    Participant

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Changing these titles isn’t the easiest thing, but BuddyPress does provide 2 ways you can do it. However, hacking core files like bp-activity-loader.php is definitely not one of them. [Never hack core files — have a Google if it’s not obvious to you why you shouldn’t]

    Ok the 2 solutions are:

    1. Use a language / translation file
    2. Use the template hierarchy

    The string “Site-Wide Activity” is translatable — all the strings are. You can implement a language file that translates ‘Site-Wide Activity’ into whatever string you’d like. Have a search for translating BuddyPress strings / POT files / poedit. There’s also a documentation (they call it the Codex) page on it: https://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/customizing/customizing-labels-messages-and-urls/

    The second solution is to use the template hierarchy. If you don’t provide a specific template for your activity directory, BuddyPress will use the page.php file from your theme and ‘inject’ the title “Site-Wide Activity” where page.php makes a call to the_title().

    You can override this by implementing your own template — create a file called index-directory.php inside /buddypress/activity in your site’s theme. Copy the basics of page.php into that file, and replace the_title() with your hardcoded title for the page.

    You can read more about the template hierarchy here: https://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

    Neither solution is simple, you’ll either have to get your head around using poedit, or need some basic PHP coding skills and an understanding of the principles of templates and themes in WordPress. In the future, it would be nice to see a settings panel in wp-admin to configure these basic strings.

    [p.s. if you don’t want to use poedit, you could take a look at plugin solutions for string translation, e.g. codestyling localisation]

    @mrgiblets

    Participant

    9 years, 8 months ago

    Just to add to Roger’s brilliant post above…

    Don’t be afraid of Poedit.

    It can look a bit intimidating at first but it really isn’t.

    I’ve always edited language files directly in a text editor but I decided to give Poedit a whirl.

    What caught me out was the fact that when I first opened it I was editing the actual strings and then exporting the PO & MO files.

    This wasn’t doing anything because it was the wrong way to do it.

    For every string there is a blank translation box beneath it, this is where you need to put your “translation”, then export, upload and boom, works a treat 😉

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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