As you may be knowing, BuddyPress does not forces users to create unique group names. If you are the webmaster of a social network, you may not want to allow same group name for multiple groups as it will cause confusions among the users. So, here is a small code snippet to force buddypress to allow creation of unique groups only.

add_filter("groups_group_name_before_save","allow_unique_names_only");
function allow_unique_names_only($name){
    global $bp;
 
  $groups=BP_Groups_Group::search_groups($name);//search groups
  $duplicate=false;
  if('group-details'==$bp->groups->current_create_step&&!empty($groups)&&$groups['total']>0){
      //we have match, but is there an exact match
      foreach($groups['groups'] as $g){
         $group=new BP_Groups_Group($g->group_id);
 
         if($group->name==$name){
              $duplicate=true;//found duplicate
              break;//break the loop;
          }
      }
if($duplicate){
        bp_core_add_message("A group with this name already exists. Please Choose another name.","error");
        bp_core_redirect( $bp->root_domain . '/' . $bp->groups->slug . '/create/step/' . $bp->groups->current_create_step . '/' );
  }
 
}
 return $name;
}

Put the above code in your bp-custom.php and you are good to go. Go ahead and test by creating groups with same name. It will inform you that a group with same exists, please use another name.

Credit: Thanks goes to “gwu” for asking this question in buddydev forum.

I am looking forward to your comments.

Have you got the message “Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute“. Well, It is far too common with wordpress 3.0 if you are using mass updater and if the update fails.

WordPress puts your site to maintinence mode while you use mass updater and if the update fails(or one of the update fails) wordpress does not put back the site to live mode and making everything practically inaccesible

There is an easy workaround.

Check the folder in which wordpress is installed and look for a file called .maintinence. Once you locate it, just delete it and your site will be back to normal.

I believe the mass plugin updater is a welcome addition but leaving the site in maintenance mode when update fails is not a good thing. Anyway, that’s my opinion. What do you think of it? Have you faced the similar problem. If yes, what was your workaround, I would love to hear from you.

So you must have seen that the default landing page for a user profile in BuddyPress is User activity page. Sometimes you may want to change it to rather the profile page or wire or some other page.
The good thing is, it’s easy, well super easy to do that. What you need to do is put a line in bp-custom.php

//define the default component
define("BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT","profile");// Now when you click on a user name link, You will land on User's profile not user's activity page

Similarly, you can use any of the active component as the landing page. For example, if you are using my wire plugin, you can define BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT to be “wire” and the wire will be the landing page. Or if you want, you may define “groups” and User’s Groups page will be the landing page but I don’t think you will ever want to do that.
I see only two three practical uses of it.

1. Using xprofile page(or profile page) as default landing page
In that case define BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT to be “profile”

2. Using Wire as the landing page
In that case define BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT to be “wire” or what ever you have put as BP_WIRE_SLUG(in case you have customized the slug).

3. For creating a landing page which aggregates user activities, shows users groups and others
In that case, I assume you have created a custom landing page(which is pretty easy and I will be discussing about it in one of the articles) and want it to be the default case.

So try changing and experimenting with “BP_DEFAULT_COMPONENT”  and may be you can have better usage ideas for it . As always, any comment suggestions or anything, please let me know in comments.

Everyone likes shortcuts(and may be a few not), and so do I. Since my personal preference of WordPress Multiuser(or now multisite/multi network what ever you call them) I missed one thing the most while working on my BuddyPress site with WordPress single User and It was the My Blogs drop down menu. It provided me with a quick option to navigate to WordPress Dashboard or to new post screen and so on. On single user WordPress I had to manually type wp-admin in the url to get to the dashboard.

Fade up with the number of times I had to type this, I rather created a small code snippet which enabled me to navigate to the dashboard/posts screen with the same efficiency(well even took less time as it has to be a single level navigation).
here is a screenshot from my test site.
And here is the code snippet to enable this

add_action( 'bp_adminbar_menus', 'bp_adminbar_blogs_menu_single_wp', 6 );
function bp_adminbar_blogs_menu_single_wp() {
	global $bp;
 
	if ( !is_user_logged_in()||!current_user_can("publish_posts") )//show this menu to author
		return false;
 
        $blog =bpdev_get_single_wp_blog_info();
 
 
	echo '<li id="bp-adminbar-blogs-menu"><a href="' . $bp->root_domain .'/wp-admin/">';
 
	_e( 'Blog Admin', 'buddypress' );
 
	echo '</a>';
	echo '<ul>';
 
 
 
		if ( !empty( $blog) ) {
			$alt = ' class="alt"';
			$site_url = esc_attr( $blog->siteurl );
 
			echo '<li' . $alt . '>';
 
			echo '<li class="alt"><a href="' . $site_url . 'wp-admin/">' . __( 'Dashboard', 'buddypress' ) . '</a></li>';
			echo '<li><a href="' . $site_url . 'wp-admin/post-new.php">' . __( 'New Post', 'buddypress' ) . '</a></li>';
			echo '<li class="alt"><a href="' . $site_url . 'wp-admin/edit.php">' . __( 'Manage Posts', 'buddypress' ) . '</a></li>';
			echo '<li><a href="' . $site_url . 'wp-admin/edit-comments.php">' . __( 'Manage Comments', 'buddypress' ) . '</a></li>';
 
 
		}
 
 
	echo '</ul>';
	echo '</li>';
}
//create dummy blog object, we can even avoid it too, as we only need site_url and nothing else
function bpdev_get_single_wp_blog_info(){
    global $bp;
    $blog=new stdClass();
    $blog->siteurl=$bp->root_domain."/";
    $blog->name=get_bloginfo('name');
    return $blog;
}

In fact, the code for bp_adminbar_blogs_menu_single_wp is actually taken from “bp_adminbar_blogs_menu”[bp-core-adminbar.php] and modified for our purpose.
You can put the above code in your themes functions.php or in bp-custom.php or just create a plugin and drop it. That’s it.
Hope it helps, please do let me know if you use it and find any issues.

There are times when you want all of the registered member on your blog network to be members of all the blog. WordPress does it differently. By default all the registered users are added to the main blog with the role you have specified(or “subscriber” by default ). If the user creates a new blog, they are removed from the main blog and added to the new blog they created.

My solution here will allow to automatically add users to all blogs on your network, it does not matter much if they register a new one or they do not have a blog but just a registered member. In case the user registers new blog, this function will do no harm the user will be admin of the new blog as in normal case.

To our help, there are two functions

is_blog_user():-It checks whether the current logged in user is a member of the current blog or not.

add_user_to_blog($blog_id,$user_id,$role):- it allows you to add an existing user to a blog with the specific role where $role can be “subscriber”,”author”,”editor”,”contributor” or “administrator”

Now the code, putting the following code in your theme’s functions.php will do the job or you may wrap it as a plugin in case you want it that way

 
add_action('wp','bpdev_add_user_to_blog',10);//hook our function
 
/*add logged in user to current blog*/
function bpdev_add_user_to_blog(){
if(!is_user_logged_in())
return false;//do not do anything
 
global $current_user,$blog_id;
 
if(!is_blog_user())//check for current membership
add_user_to_blog($blog_id, $current_user->ID, "subscriber");//give subscriber role for current blog
 
}

And if you are using buddypress, you can put the above code in bp-custom.php.

What it does:-

When a logged in user visits a blog on your network, it checks whether he/she is a member of the current blog or not. If not, it adds them as a member to the current blog.

I hope it helps in some of the cases. Let me know it it works for you or not ?

Here I am, once again, but I am not here to say apologies or provide reasons for my past reluctance to blog here. I am writng the new post to let you know, my feelins for this blog has resurfaced again and I am back to have a new begining for ThinkingInWordPress.com

It was always a fun to write here and listening to you all but things changed and I got busy with the other site so never found myself time and energy to blog here and even if I tried to look back sometime, I could not find something good to start with.

Now, as wp3.0 is out and you all must be busy upgrading and having fun with it, I thought it as the right time to start all over again.  I am going to write regular again with all the tips/tricks I accumulated  in the last 6 months of absence from this site.

There are a few questions though.I see there are more than 100 comments which needs to be answered but they have lost the relevance to be answered as   most of them were made 2-3 months ago and even if I reply them now, it won’t be useful. So I am not going to reply those old comments but will be replying any comments from now onwards again. If you have any question/confusion about the things on this site, please feel free to comment, I will be glad to helping you again.

And yes,  I will be writing more than 3 posts a week for now  couple of months to make it even for my absence. Hope to see you all again here

While working with my most recent plugin, I had an issue of finding all the admins of a blog on the wpmu network. after a couple of minutes, I implemented a small hack and It worked like charm.
So here you go.
Please Note, I have used User level, which is backward compatible and is there because of the legacy plugins support(according to codex), But this hack solves the problem to iterate through the Roles/capabilities.
So here is the code.

function get_admin_users_for_blog($blog_id) {
global $wpdb;
$key="wp_".$blog_id."_user_level";
return $wpdb->get_results($wpdb->prepare("SELECT user_id from $wpdb->usermeta AS um WHERE um.meta_key ='". $key."' AND um.meta_value=10"));
}

//and now call it

global $current_blog;

$admins=get_admin_users_for_blog($current_blog->blog_id);

//now you have $admins as an array of object, Just Iterate over it and do some stuff, well, I will just print out  

foreach($admins as $admin)

echo "ID:".$admin->ID;

///hmm you can use it for more productive reasons  

That’s the shortest code I could produce, I know, The better way will be to loop through the capabilities, but hacks are for you know

Thank you everyone for your comments suggestions and everything. Recently, I have not been able to keep this blog updated, but from the mid of Feb, expect me to update it regularly.

So my question to you all, which of the plugins you would like to see updated. Other than the plugins I will go into details of wp 3.0 and buddypress.
Hope to see you guys here then

Thanks
Brajesh

If you are using wordpress 2.9+ , It is just so easy. You don’t have to worry about the evil thing called “eval” and you don’t have to worry about including JSON javascript parser with your theme/plugin.

WordPress 2.9+ contains the json2.js from json.org.

So, just put a line in your plugin

wp_enqueue_script("json2");//must be put inside some function called at wp_print_script

Or here is the complete code, how to enqueue the script.

add_action("wp_print_scripts","load_my_script");

function load_my_script(){

//en queue JSON2.js

wp_enqueue_script("json2");

}

and boy! wordpress will load the JSON parser, Now you are ready to use the JSON parser.

Here is more details about what you can do with the JSON parser

http://www.json.org/js.html

We have just released the Cosmic buddy Theme for buddypress.

Now you can turn your buddypress site to orkut style. Grab the free theme, and the addons from buddydev  here.

http://buddydev.com/buddypress/cosmic-buddy-the-free-theme-to-turn-your-buddypres-to-orkut-style-site/

here is a screenshot.

Cosmic buddy Theme

You can check the demo here : http://bpthemes.buddydev.com/comicbuddy/

It requires wpmu 2.8+ and bp 1.1.x or above.

Hope you will enjoy this.