3.2 Add BuddyPress to Navigation

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on adding social media to your WordPress site with BuddyPress. So far we've got BuddyPress installed and activated, we've configured the components, I've actually added all of them. We've configured the pages to go with those components, and we've also installed a theme. Now we're gonna move on to navigation, I'm gonna do two things, firstly setting up my home page and my posts page. And then secondly setting up a navigation menu so that people can navigate around the BuddyPress pages. So let's go to the dashboard, and here I want to go into Settings and then Reading. Now by default WordPress sets your latest posts to be displayed on the front page, but we want to change this because it's a BuddyPress site. So I'll select a static page here and then I'll select the page I want to use as my front page, which is Activity. Now make sure you select Activity and not Activate because otherwise, whenever somebody visits your site. They'll be activating a new account, which is not what you want, so I'll select activity there, and then I'll want a page to show my blog posts. And you may remember on my site, before I even install BuddyPress, I had an empty page called Blog which I'd added. If you haven't already got that page, you can add it now by coming out of the Reading Settings. And going into Pages and then Add New to add your empty blog page. So I've done that and you'll also see on my Reading Settings page that at the moment, I'm discouraging search engines from indexing my site. That's because this is a demo site for the purposes of this course, and I don't want Google to be finding it. At this stage, when you're setting up your site and configuring it, it's a good idea to keep that checked. But once you launch it, make sure you come back here and uncheck that box, so now I'll save my changes, and I'm gonna configure the menus. I'm gonna do that via the customizer, so I click on Appearance and Customize, and then I'm gonna go to Menus. Now, where your main navigation goes in your site will depend on your theme, mine is up here on the right-hand side. So I've already got a menu called Main Navigation, which I've already set up. And I need to select Primary here so that displays in the primary location of my site and you can see that it's up here. At the moment however it's not quite right so let's add some items to it. So I'm gonna add a home link, now remember that will take people to my activity page so I don't also need to add that activity page as a separate link. I'm gonna drag that off to the top, I'm gonna move profile, our messages and in fact, now I'll keep messages here underneath notifications. So let's have activate and register, so I'll go to Activate underneath Register, I'm gonna write Groups and Members as well. And then I'll put Blog all the way down here, and I'm gonna put Profile underneath Home, I think. Now the activity page, I don't need to add because that's my homepage, and the blog page, I don't need to add because that's already there. So that's my menu added, and I've selected here, Primary so that will go in that primary location. Yours might say Primary, it might say Main Menu or Top Menu depending on your theme. And then finally, I'll click Save and Publish, now because of the way by theme is designed. It doesn't look as neat as it could do because they're stacked underneath each other, so I could do with less top level items. Now, if your theme got a menu that stretches all the way across the top here that wouldn't be an issue for you. But I'm just gonna have a little bit of a rejig, I'll put Register and Activate under Members. I'm gonna move Profile under Home, I'm gonna move Groups under Members as well, and that just gives me four top level items, which looks a lot neater. Now bearing in mind, that's on a medium sized screen it's gonna look different on different sized screens. So now I'll say, Publish, and that's my navigation menu added, I'm gonna close the customizer. Go back to my site, and there's the front end of my site with my menu added here, so you can see that I've got various items underneath. Now you might be thinking that it's not all that easy for people to navigate this, and they won't be able to find things. But we'll fix that in the next part of the course by adding some widgets. Which means that they can get at elements of BuddyPress without having to navigate around the site, see you next time, and thanks for watching.