BuddyPress.org

Once a user (student) has registered, you cannot change their username. Well, not without some fancy behind the scenes stuff. You can, however, have them change their display name. In the default BuddyPress install, this is automatically set to required when a user registers. It does seem like all 48 of your students do have their real, full names entered in that field.

So, it is just these 4 students. My guess is that they used their real, full names when registering their username. So, as an example, “John Smith”, instead of “johnsmith” or “smitty2cool”. If you look in MySQL’s backend and see this for the usernames of these four students (using my example):

John%20Smith

Then this is what happened. They used their real name, space and all. Now, the existance of the space in usernames can cause issues in WPMU. But, that is a different topic.

when I look at comments made by the students, I get only their usernames

Do you mean comments to blog posts displayed in BuddyPress themes, or comments seen outside of the BuddyPress environment?

Dan-

I’m going to make just a few comments now. I’ll look at this in more detail tomorrow.

It look’s like you are using the default themes that come with BuddyPress–bphome and bpmember. Is this correct?

Pardon me if you know all this already but, when a user (one of your students) logs in, a link appears in the upper right corner of the buddybar with a link to their profile page. This link displays either their username or nickname. What is displayed depends on whether or not a nickname has been entered by the user. For all but four of your students, there is no nickname.

Now, when a student clicks this link, it will take them to their profile page. Once there, they can edit their profile. In the default BP install, there is a “Full Name” field in the profile that can be filled in.

WordPress Mu uses this data for the display in the backend–your picture #2. If the “Full Name” field is blank in their profile, then you will only see data in the “Username” and “nickname” fields, with the username used as the nickname. If a user has add anything to the “Full Name” field, then Mu will use that, and if it can, split it automatically into a “First name” and “Last name”.

The fact that 4 students have data in these fields indicates to me that they went to their profile page and clicked “Edit Profile” and then added their full name to the “Full Name” field. It is not a mystery.

Finally, when logged into WPMU’s backend, go to the “BuddyPress” menu group. Once there, click on “General Settings”. You will see a field named “Full Name field name”. Then, click on “Profile Field Setup”. There, you will see all of the currently-setup profile fields that your students can utilize. You can add, edit, or delete fields. You can make certain fields required.

You should spend some time not only in the WPMU’s backend, but also in the members’ area of BuddyPress to see how all of this works.

I hope this helps.

Dan-

Okay, I’m just thinking out loud, just going through the registration process.

As long as BuddyPress is installed and activated, is does not matter if your users register via the wp-signup.php form (which is found in WPMU) or the register.php form (which is found in BuddyPress). The extra fields from BuddyPress will show up on either form.

Here is where the data is stored:

The datum for “Full Name”, which is a required BuddyPress field, is stored in the table wp_bp_xprofile_data. The data for the “Nickname” field, which is the username if no full name is provided, the “First name” field, and “Last name” field, are stored in the table wp_usermeta. The data for “username” and “Display Name” are stored in the table wp_user.

So, here’s a question:

Did you at any point uninstall BuddyPress and delete the BP tables in MySQL? Did you delete any of the WPMU tables? Did you do either or both of these and then reinstall? If yes, did most of your students register before that time and then only those four register after a BuddyPress reinstall?

I’m just grasping at straws now. Perhaps someone else will have insight into this issue.