BuddyPress is considered to be the one-stop solution to create your own social community on WordPress. In simple words, BuddyPress lets you create an out-of-the-box social networking website and provides you with a private administration area that gives you complete control of all the features. You can create all types of formal communities like LinkedIn and Shine.com and informal communities like Facebook and Twitter within a few clicks easily.
BuddyPress has been designed specifically for website creators and developers. This is why their primary aim is to ensure ease of integration, use, and extensibility for its users. However, BuddyPress lacks certain important features related to user profiles and hence restricts ceratin user profile activities that may prove to be game changers. Hence, let us explore some features that BuddyPress does not support but are necessary for running a social community site.
Additional Features To Enhance Your BuddyPress Site
Before beginning this, we would again like to stress on the fact that BuddyPress is indeed the best social community software for WordPress. Equipped with strong core features, it enables even a layman to develop his own social community on WordPress. However, there are certain additional features that enhance your BuddyPress site and make it more interactive for your users. So without any delay, let’s begin with one of the most requested features for BuddyPress related to the extension of user profiles.
Under this, features like the ability to add and customize repeater fields or groups of fields to front-end forms dynamically on member’s profile page on your BuddyPress site without a predefined number are added. To visualize the use of repeated fields and group of fields you can look at your Facebook profile. It has divisions where you can enter information under different subheadings like Contact Details, Education, Occupation and Work History. This is exactly what is a group of fields.
Now, under these groups, there are certain fields like multiple phone numbers or email addresses that you may want to connect with your user profile. For this, BuddyPress offers only the core features which include only a single detail for all data without any groups. However, sometimes the user may need more than one fields for certain information like telephone numbers. These features make a huge difference in your social community’s success so let us understand how these features can enhance your BuddyPress site.
Importance of Extended Your User Profile Features For Your BuddyPress Powered Social Community
Extended User Profile Features are not only extremely important but are also essential if you have a niche social networking site like Monster.com or LinkedIn. Imagine you run two successful websites and you want to display both of these on LinkedIn but it allows you to display only one out of these. Wouldn’t you be disappointed in LinkedIn?
Well, we would certainly be if that is the case and so will be your users. Hence, to ensure this does not happen, you would enable repeater fields for multiple phone numbers and multiple website URLs. Not only this, group fields and repeated fields have several other advantages. Some of these are:
- Clean and Neat Look
- User Engagement and Satisfaction
- Greater Connectivity Among Users
- Better Lead Generation
- Collection of Additional Data
- Easy Management of Data and User Profiles
- Segregation of Similar Data
How to Enable Extended Your User Profiles Feature On Your BuddyPress Powered Social Community
Now that you have understood the Extended Your User Profile Features on your BuddyPress powered social community, it’s time that you understand how to implement these on your site. Since BuddyPress does not support these features itself, you will need an impressive BuddyPress addon like BuddyPress Profile Pro to take care of these essential features for you. This easy to use plugin is dedicated to BuddyPress Profiles and enables you to add and customize groups of fields and repeater fields dynamically to front-end forms. What’s even better is that you can do this without even having a predefined number.
Not only this, but you can also add different field groups easily and show them on your BuddyPress member’s profile. These groups can act as both unique and repeater groups. The best thing about this useful plugin is that it generates a dynamic id for every field and repeater fields. Backed by an excellent support team, it has advanced developer documents with all default hooks and filters too.
Installation
To install this essential plugin, you can simply go to the WordPress Dashboard and click on Plugins and then Add New and upload this plugin. Another way to install this plugin is by downloading its zip file, extracting it and then uploading it to the WordPress Plugins Directory. You can then click on Activate and the install will be successful.
Conclusion
We would recommend you to use the BuddyPress Profile Pro addon as group fields and repeater fields are essential elements of your BuddyPress community website. These features may look small but are highly responsible for user satisfaction and engagement. Also, these features make your social community well connected and interactive for members. Create multiple regular or repeater groups easily with group fields individually and allow your site members to add multiple details without any limits instantly with the BuddyPress Profile Pro now.
