2.2 Configure Pages

Hello and welcome back to this Tuts+ course on adding social media to your WordPress site with BuddyPress. So far we've installed BuddyPress and we've configured the components. We've chosen which components are relevant for our site and activated them. In this part of the course we're going to move on to looking at pages. And I'll show you how to activate pages for BuddyPress, and how to associate them with physical pages on your site. So to do that, we go to this next tab here. And you can see that BuddyPress has already created some pages for me, and associated the different functionality with them. Now on my site you'll see that registration is currently disabled. So I need to go into my settings for my site and change that, because I want to allow registration for my BuddyPress network to be available to anybody who wants it. So I'll save my settings here and then I'll go down to my general settings. In the normal settings pages, I'll tick anyone can register, I'll save changes again. And then I go back to BuddyPress in my settings menu over here, and click on the pages tab again. So, you can see here that BuddyPress has created Register and Activate pages for me. So the great thing is that BuddyPress does a lot of this stuff for you automatically. So I've got the different components that need pages all set up to use specific pages on my site. So I'll save my settings there again, and that's saved. Now let's take a look at those pages in my site. And here they are in the Pages tab. So you can see I've got Activate, where people activate an account, Activity where people see their activity streams. Groups, where people can see the groups that they're a member of, Members, where somebody can see other members on the network. And finally, Register, where somebody can sign up for my BuddyPress network. You'll see that on this side, I've only got one page that isn't a BuddyPress page, and that's my blog page. And I'll show you how to use that in the next part of the course as part of looking at navigation. Now, if you try to edit any of these, you'll see that there's nothing in them. However, if you view the page it does have content, and that's because BuddyPress is automatically generating content for those pages. You don't need to add anything to those pages or do anything to them to get them to work. This is my main activity page, and as you can see, there's no activity found on my site at the moment. Now I've got my pages set up, I'm going to add some dummy data so that I can test my site. So, let's go back into the dashboard, and I'm gonna use the BuddyPress default data plugin. So I click Add New up here, and then I type in the name of the plugin I want. Not finding it at the moment. Let's try getting rid of that space there. There we go, that's a bit better. So I click Install Now. And then I'll click on Activate. So you can see I've got the BuddyPress plugin activated, and I've also got the Default Data plugin activated. So, to access that I go to the Tools menu over here, and I click on BP Default Data. And I'm gonna import some users, including profile data, connections, activity posts, and private messages. And I'll also import some groups. So I'm gonna check everything. And I'll click on Import Selected Data. Now obviously when you come to set up your site for people to actually use, you don't need to do this. But it's useful to do it when you're testing your site and you're setting it up. So you can see the pages with some activity on them. So let's go back to the front end of our site, and click on the Activity page. So here there's a whole load of activity. And when we come to select a theme a bit later on, you'll see how this helps you choose a theme that makes BuddyPress look really great. At the moment my sites got 2017, the default WordPress theme at the moment. And I'm gonna change to a different theme to make it a bit more unique. So that's how you add pages. You'll also see that if I go on the Members page, all of my members are listed here with me at the top. And in the Groups page there are groups as well, and these are themed around films. Not sure why, but it's just dummy data. And what you can do, when you finish setting up your site, is you can go back into Tools and BP Default Data, and you can clear BuddyPress data. And that empties out your site, ready for it to be used by live users. I'm not gonna do that just yet, because I want to use that data for testing. So that's how you set up pages, populate them with some dummy data, and you associate them with the different components of BuddyPress. So, that's our default data added. In the next part of the course, we're gonna move on to configuring a suitable theme. Instead of using the default theme, I'm gonna find a theme that's BuddyPress compatible and that will look good with my site. See you next time, and thanks for watching.