Some of the best customizations to a site are built through thinking about the users of a particular site. When users log into BuddyPress they are automatically redirected to the homepage and are often left with a “what now” feeling.

Users love to be able to customize their profile and blog easily, so it only makes sense to add easy to use navigation menus to logged in users landing pages. I created the following code to make it semi-easy to add a edit profile menu.

The menu has been tested with BP 1.0.1 and WPMU 2.7.1

We’ll look at each link individually first

Here is the full code in a unordered list that is only displayed to logged in users.

Now you can wrap it in a div and style to your liking. If you would like to use it as a widget I recommend downloading the Samsarin PHP Widget, which allows you to add PHP to certain widgets.

One last css design hint, the default BuddyPress widget title is styled as class=”widgettitle”

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BuddyPress is a new program that is in dire need of some SEO optimization. Luckily there is a new plugin that is going to take a lot of the duplicate content and title tag issues out of the picture for us BuddyPress site developers.

Seo for BuddyPress: a great plugin

The new plugin is called Seo for BuddyPress and was created by Sven Lehnert. With Seo for BuddyPress you can enter

• Titles
• Descriptions
• And Keywords

for the following pages:

• Profile Pages -profile, activity, blogs, friends, groups, wire
• Groups Pages – groups home, groups wire, groups forum, groups members
• Events Pages from the bp-events plugin
• Bb-dev Youtube & Flickr pages
• Your own buddypress pages, such as your profile

Also the plugin comes with these great special tags to automaticly insert the user name, group name, or event name.

• %username%
• %groupname%
• %eventname%

I highly recommend you install Seo for Buddypress on your BuddyPress site. It has worked flawlessly for me and appears to be headed in the right direction for future updates.

The big G will love you for it.

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Recently I have been thinking of ways to add greater usability to my BuddyPress project ebodia.com. One thing I noticed is that when new users sign up, they are redirected to the homepage.

I felt this left new users with a “What now?” feeling, so I thought it would be a good idea to add a second navigation bar with some helpful links to the buddypress home theme. The Main roadblock I found was how to create custom links for users that were logged in. I did some digging and was able to find a snippet of code that will automatically parse the correct user id into the link.

How is this useful?

A few of the direct links I added for recently logged in users was -

• A link to their Profile
• A link to their list of blogs
• A link to their BuddyPress account settings

I felt this would be useful for new users that weren’t sure where to start.

Code for Custom Links in BuddyPress

This code will work for most custom links you will need, but not all of them. For example, I was not able to create a link to a users blog directly, so instead I created a link to their list of blogs.

Here is the Old example code to add a link to the logged in users friend activity. The new version is after this one.

<a href="<?php global $bp; echo bp_core_get_userurl($bp->loggedin_user->id); ?>activity/my-friends">Your Friends Activity</a>

Update: Andy P. suggested a alternative to the code above. Instead of declaring the bp global variable and requesting the logged in user id, why not just use a handy template tag? This code will output the same thing as the code above, but uses a very useful BuddyPress template tag.

The above code will output this link

http://yousite.com/members/logged-in-user-id/activity/my-friends

If you take a look at the links in your own profile you should be able to see the small bit of code you will need to customize the links. Activity/myfriends can be replaced in the original code by profile/public to create a link to the logged in users profile, for example.

I want to thank Burtadsit for providing the original code used in the above example and Andy P. for providing the template tag AND BuddyPress.

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(3:35pm_PST)Buddypress beta has reportedly been scheduled to be released sometime this evening according to Andy Peatling. This will actually be the 1.0 beta launch of each individual plugin as Buddypress was reported to be released in that fashion.

Yes, it will be today (BETA), but I am on the west coast. There will be download links on the site sometime this afternoon.

Andy

For those of you unfamiliar with Buddypress, Buddypress is a set of plugins for WordPress MU that adds social networking features such as the ability to have a personal profile as well as message features. Quite a revolutionary idea indeed.

I’ll be posting updates if there are any changes to times or (place) for the release. In the meantime you can test out Buddypress on the buddypress homepage

UPDATE: (9:05pm_PST)
You can now download Buddypress V1.0b1 at Buddypress.org.

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