28 Jul

Change the core “Name” profile field in BuddyPress

Update: As of BuddyPress 1.1 this can be done via the wordpress aministration area. You can find this in BuddyPress > General Settings on the left side menu.

Those that use BuddyPress along with their WordPress MU installation may have found some limitations with the xprofiles. BuddyPress Devs have improvements listed as an upcoming feature, but in the meantime some things need to be fixed NOW!

One particular feature I needed to get round was the fact that you can’t change the default “Name” field. Whilst very common to have this as a field in most installations, we should at least be able to edit the field names the user sees, but unfortunately this is not so.

buddypress-fields1

There is a way of changing this, but requires you go into your database, via phpmyadmin or something similar.

There’s two places where you need to make changes. Here are the two SQL statements you should run (note you may have to change your table prefixes here if you installed wordpress with different ones):

UPDATE `wp_bp_xprofile_fields` SET `name` = 'newnamehere' WHERE `wp_bp_xprofile_fields`.`id` =1 LIMIT 1 ;
UPDATE `wp_sitemeta` SET `meta_value` = 'Nickname' WHERE `wp_sitemeta`.`meta_key` ='bp-xprofile-fullname-field-name' LIMIT 1 ;

And now go back to your buddypress fields and voila!

buddypress-fields2

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  • http://twitter.com/AdagioPaCuerdas Franco Cedillo

    i'll try something similar in vivacity.pe

  • http://netweblogic.com Marcus

    Nice, looks good!

  • http://twitter.com/cynthiablue cynthiablue

    Thanks for this, that really needs to be changed. That field is not clear at all…

    So now I need to find out where to change the latest activity that says my member “Sports became a registered member” instead of “Marie became a registered member”. :p http://utahdogs.com/members/marie/

  • http://netweblogic.com Marcus

    I should edit this post when I get the chance actually, because you can now (as of BP 1.1 I believe) change the field from buddypress.

    I believe that is where your “name” in the profile fields come in.

  • Boede

    Hello,
    what does this plugin do?
    Is it now possible to use the Name-Field as an Username-Field?

    Cheers.

  • http://netweblogic.com Marcus

    not that I'm aware of… it´s still just a field with information essentially, it´s not a way for you to log in.

  • anonym

    It’s useless now.
    Currently this field can be renamed under BuddyPress -> General Settings -> Full Name field name

  • http://netweblogic.com Marcus

    as previously stated at the top of the post :)