The combination of WordPress, BuddyPress and all of your plugins can sometimes lead to a slow website. What follows is the ultimate guide to speeding up your BuddyPress site. In combination, the techniques described below will dramatically improve your page load speed. Some of these methods are easy to implement while others are more difficult. Just do what you feel comfortable with.

The Basics
Stay up to date

WordPress and plugin authors regularly release updates which you can download by going into Dashboard  [read more →]

If you have Activity enabled on your BuddyPress site, you will notice that Activity is the default landing page for user profiles. However for many sites it makes more sense to keep the public Profile page as the user landing page. It’s actually pretty simple to implement. We just need to reorder the tabs so Profile comes before Activity, and set Profile as the default tab.

If you don’t have one already, create a file in your plugins folder called bp-custom.php. Don’t  [read more →]

Many BuddyPress and WordPress plugins come with language files defining the text used throughout the plugin. In some cases you may want to edit the languages used, and this tutorial will explain how to do so.

The code used here is credited to Paul Gibbs, who was nice enough to help me figure out how to do this.

For this tutorial we will be editing the languages used in Paul’s Achievements plugin. You can use the same basic  [read more →]

To automatically join new users to an existing group on your BuddyPress site, you will need to add a function to your functions.php file. Add this function, replacing on line five with the numeric ID of your group.

[php]
//Automatically add new users to a group
function automatic_group_membership( $user_id ) {

if( !$user_id ) return false;
groups_accept_invite( $user_id, <# group ID #> );
}
add_action( ‘bp_core_activated_user’, ‘automatic_group_membership’ );
[/php]

You will need to figure out the group’s numeric ID. Here’s a trick. If you have Firebug installed with  [read more →]

Out of the box, BuddyPress allows for instant integration with bbPress. It automatically themes the forum to match the rest of the website, and even tracks a user’s forum activity throughout the site. These are compelling reasons to use bbPress over other alternatives such as Simple:Press on any BuddyPress site.

Unfortunately, BuddyPress forces bbPress forums to be tied to groups. You cannot participate in a forum unless you are a member of its associated group. Almost every client of  [read more →]

You might want to link to a JavaScript file in your child theme’s directory. You could always hard-code a link to the file, but then if you ever change the name of the theme the link won’t work anymore. It’s better to use a PHP function to automatically call the main child theme’s directory. Unfortunately the normal PHP functions for doing this will always call your BuddyPress Default theme, located in wp-content/plugins/bp-themes/bp-default. Here’s the solution to the problem.

This function will  [read more →]

Setting up recurring billing in BuddyPress takes some advanced knowledge, but if you’re a web developer it will be easier than you might expect. And incredibly powerful. The following is a detailed guide on how to set up paid subscriptions with multiple levels of access on a BuddyPress-powered website. The four things you will need are:

1. A dedicated IP address for your website
2. An SSL certificate
3. PayPal Pro
4. s2Member Pro
   1. Installing s2Member
   2. Getting started with s2Member
   3. Integrating s2Member with PayPal  [read more →]
      

Do you want to completely remove the BuddyPress admin bar from your site? It’s actually pretty easy.

To remove the admin bar, open up your favorite FTP program and go to your bp-custom.php file in your site’s theme. If you don’t have one, create a file called bp-custom.php. Then add the following line to the file:
[php]define( ‘BP_DISABLE_ADMIN_BAR’, true );[/php]

Most themes leave space at the top for the admin bar, so this will present an issue. You will need to open the  [read more →]