3.3 Add BuddyPress Widgets

Hello, and welcome back to this Tuts Plus course on adding social media to your WordPress site with BuddyPress. So far, we've activated BuddyPress. We've configured it and added components. We've added the pages and associated those with BuddyPress components. We've installed a suitable theme and we've configured our menu and navigation. And our homepage is this activity page here. The final thing to do is add some widgets. And let's do that via the customizer. Now, BuddyPress provides you with a number of widgets you can add to your site, and where you add them on your site will depend on your theme. So you can see my theme here has two widget areas, sidebar and the footer, which is quite common. If you're using a theme framework you might find that this widget here is all over the place. So because my theme uses a full width layout for the pages, in other words BuddyPress content. I'm gonna add my widgets to the footer. If you want to add your widgets to the side bar, you'll need to make sure you're using a theme that not only has a side bar widget area. But also uses that for pages as well as posts. So, let's take a look at the footer widget area. There's nothing in there at the moment. So I'm gonna click the add a widget button. That gives me a whole bunch of widgets I can use, including these BuddyPress ones that you can see. For example, I can login, I can see the groups that I've got, my friends, other members. And I can see activity as well. I could also see sitewide notices. This is a type of message that the administrator can send to everybody and it goes in a widget and lets you notify everybody on your BuddyPress site that there's something going on. I'm gonna let my users what's going on in BuddyPress while they're online. So I'm gonna add the BuddyPress friends Widget, and I'll make the widget title to the members directory as well. And here I have the option to choose newest, active, or popular. So out of my friends, who's been active more recently, who's been most active, or who's posted the most popular. I'm gonna go for newest. I'll also add another BuddyPress widget. Let's add the Group's one. And I'll call that your groups. Again, I'll link the widget title of the group's directory, ie the group's page and I'll share the newest. I'll add another widget which is finally recently active. That shows all the recently active members, not just my own friends. So I'm gonna save and publish that and then go back to my live site and here we go. So you can see there's your groups, and there's recently active members there. Now, why is it not showing up all three widgets that I selected? Let's have another look. That's probably because my friends haven't been active lately. So let's swap that out for another one. Just so we can see it. Now obviously, once you BuddyPress network is up and running, there'll be a lot of activity on it and you'll be able to see what's going on. And the reason my friends haven't been active is because that dummy data that I added using the plugin is separate from my login, my own account. So those people imported via that dummy data, have got relationships, and friendships, and messages they send each other. But the data plugin isn't aware of me so it hasn't set me up as a friend with any of them. So let's add another widget, who's online? Okay so let's save and publish that, go back to the site, and there we go. So I'm the only person online at the moment. But if we have other people online, it means I can contact them and I can send them messages or leave comments on their activity. So that's how you add widgets to your BuddyPress site. And as well as giving people an opportunity to see whats going on, they can also click on these links to help them navigate around. So by clicking on your groups link. You can see all the groups on the site. And that's how you add the Buddypress widget to your WordPress site. So our Buddypress site is now up and running. All you need to do now is delete some of that dummy data, and if you remember how to do that, you go into tools and then BP default data and you click clear BuddyPress data. I'm not gonna to do that for now, just in case I want to do a little bit more playing with my site before I launch it. The other thing you'll need to do is go into Settings and Reading and make sure you let search engines index the site. So, I'll save changes there and that makes my site visible to Google and other search engines. So, now I can launch my site. And start publicizing it with the potential community and you can do the same with your BuddyPress site as well. In the next part of the course we'll wrap up. We'll look at what we've covered and what you have learned during the course. See you next time and thanks for watching.