BuddyPress.org

Hey everyone, been a long time lurker but I’ve reached a snag on a current site and I can’t seem to solve it.

The site is an alumni website for a medical school. This is the first site that I’m using buddypress for and so far it’s fantastic. The issue I’m have is with customizing the member directory. My client wants alumni from each class to only be able to see the profiles of other alumni from their same graduation year. For instance, a graduate of the class of 1982, would only be able to browse through a directory of graduates from the class of 1982.

I’m using the user account type lite plugin, and I’ve managed to create a directory for each year. This process, however, creates a new menu item for each new directory, so in the end I would end up with a menu item for each year visible to all the users, which is very very impractical and not what we want.

What I need is a solution with a member directory menu item that is dynamic in that it changes based on who is logged in, and displays only the users from that graduation year. So if a graduate of the year 2004 logs in the menu button would say “2004 Alumni” and would display only a list of graduates from that year. If a graduate of 1994 is logged in the button would say “1994 Alumni” and the page would display only alumni from 1994.

Anyone have any ideas on this? I’m pretty new to php but I’m trying my best to get a grasp on it since static sites just aren’t really cutting it anymore. I was thinking something along the lines of having the code for the button call the graduation year data when the user logs in and print that on the menu item. And along the same lines, in the member directory use the same data column to bring up only users from that year, but I have no idea how do execute that.

Sorry if I rambled a bit.

Thanks
-Dan