New Plugin Adds BuddyPress Activity as a Wire/Wall to User Profiles

For the past four years, BuddyPress developer Brajesh Singh has maintained a popular tutorial for allowing BuddyPress activity as a wire. This was the default behavior for activity during the early 1.x era of BuddyPress, which allowed users to “write on each other’s walls” without having to use @mentions.

Singh’s updated tutorial shows you how to set up wire/wall functionality without having to edit any theme code, as was required in previous tutorials. He’s packaged it up and put it into a convenient plugin that emulates a user wall/wire by performing the following:

• Shows the activity post form on other user’s profile
• Filters the text that says “What’s new {username}” to say “Write something to {displayed_user_name}”
• Removes the BuddyPress function that handles the post update action and hooks a custom function that allows saving the activity posted from user profiles as a mention.

The result is very similar to the wall/wire feature originally included in BuddyPress:

Posts on user wires/walls will show up in the activity stream as having originated on a user’s wall, differentiating it from regular activity @mentions.

Inevitably, BuddyPress developers will have clients asking them to make their social networks more like Facebook. Some users are more comfortable using the wire/wall style of interaction, as it is the default behavior on Facebook and mirrors the way activity worked in the early days of BuddyPress. This plugin will restore that feature to BuddyPress so that users don’t have to bother with @mentions.

BuddyPress Activity as a Wire is compatible with BuddyPress 1.9.2+ but will require a minor update to take advantage of the activity performance improvements in 2.0. Download it for free from BuddyDEV.