Adding Sitewide Menu Items to a buddypress site

Jotted by brajesh on June 2, 2009

In this post,I will show you the quickest way to add menu items to a buddypress site,sitewide.

As you may be knowing,buddypress-wpmu powered sites need at least two themes,one for the site home page and one for the members profile,group etc(called member theme usually).So,when you want to add more menu items to the top navigation, you have two options.

1.Add the menu links to each of the theme(yes, you will have to add the link in the home theme and the buddypress member theme separately).

2.Simply write a small snippet of code and upload it to mu-plugins directory.It will add the link globally.

Well,let us start with the basics,I will take an example of the buddypress default home theme and buddypress default member theme.

Here is what you get as the top nav,when you install buddypress and activate the default themes

BP default menu

Well,so suppose now you want to add a few links(menu items) in the top navigation.As I mentioned, you have two options.

Option 1:-Go and edit the nav (for default theme,It is in header.php, look into your theme for the location of the menu) in the Buddypress Home theme and buddypress member theme.You are done.But suppose, you have to add/remove some links later ,you will have to again edit both the theme.

Well ,I have a shortcut for you.
Option 2:
Buddypress default theme(or any of the well coded buddypress theme) , provides an action hook “bp_nav_items” ,we can use this action hook to hook our new links into the menu.

Well,again we have two choices now.We can either use the functions.php of each of the theme(Home and member and add our function to add links),but again,this causes redundancy.

So,the better option is , let us define the functions in a new file say  my-extra-links.php(you may name it what ever you like) and define the action function there as

 
<?php
//add the action hook
add_action("bp_nav_items","extra_nav_links");
 
//insert the links now
function extra_nav_links()
{
?>
<li><a href="#">My Link 1</a><li>
<li><a href="#">My Link 2</a></li>
<?php
 
}
?>

Relace the hash(#) with the url of your link,and you are done.ahh ,yes, we have yet to upload the file somewhere.Since,In wordpress Mu,the files(or let us say properly ,the plugins) kept in the wp-content/mu-plugins directory gets automatically activated sitewide,we will use this functionality and upload our file to the mu-plugins directory.
Once, you are done with the uploading of the file to the mu-plugins directory, refresh your site page in the browser ,and you will see something like this
Adding sitewide links

Why you should use this approach:-It will allow you to keep your extra menu items ,even if the themes for buddypress gets changed(the only requirement is the new themes should also be using the action hook “bp_nav_items“).Well,I think, this approach, may reduces a couple of minutes in your development time.
So,what do you think? which approach is better? looking forward to your thoughts on it.

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Tags: , ,
Posted in Tutorials, buddypress | 33 Comments »


33 Responses to “Adding Sitewide Menu Items to a buddypress site”

  1. BuddyPress links #15 · Buddypress Links says:
    June 3, 2009 at 8:51 am

    [...] sitewide menuitems to BuddyPress [...]

    Reply
  2. Joss Winn says:
    June 3, 2009 at 1:01 pm

    Thanks. Saw your post and five minutes later have added a couple of useful links to my navigation bar. :-)

    Reply
  3. brajesh says:
    June 3, 2009 at 2:06 pm

    Hi Joss
    Thanks for the comment.I am glad it helped you :)

    Reply
  4. Right Brain Talker says:
    June 4, 2009 at 8:15 am

    Thank you so much for the info!

    Reply
  5. Right Brain Talker says:
    June 4, 2009 at 8:16 am

    Now do you know a way to add slimbox effect sitewide on buddypress?

    Reply
  6. Marc P. says:
    June 9, 2009 at 3:13 pm

    Hi Thanks!
    But I get this errors:

    Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘\’ (ASCII=92) state=1 in /hp/an/ac/cm/www/my/wp-content/mu-plugins/sdfsdfsdf.php on line 14

    Warning: Unexpected character in input: ‘\’ (ASCII=92) state=1 in /hp/an/ac/cm/www/my/wp-content/mu-plugins/sdfsdfsdf.php on line 14

    Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING in /hp/an/ac/cm/www/my/wp-content/mu-plugins/sdfsdfsdf.php on line 14

    Please help me! Thanks!

    Reply
  7. kunal says:
    July 9, 2009 at 10:16 am

    I am using the default theme as a blog theme also. Will this also affect the blog theme automatically?

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      July 9, 2009 at 10:36 am

      hi Kunal
      It will not affect the normal blog theme(I mean the blog theme for users),but it will affect the Home theme(main site theme) and the member Theme.

      Thanks
      Brajesh

      Reply
  8. kunal says:
    July 9, 2009 at 10:44 am

    Brajesh,

    Thanks for the quick response. Ill give this a try. Btw, we are using BP to power an indian startup community. Would love to get your feedback.

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      July 18, 2009 at 12:46 pm

      Hey Kunal,Sorry I could not reply earlier.checked the site thoroughly today.It looks very promising.The only thing,I will suggest to improve is the theme,as it looks typically like buddypress theme, A better option will be give it a look and feel of your purpose.As far as other features are concerned,they are very nice.Thumb Up! to you and your team for such a wonderful site :)

      regards
      Brajesh

      Reply
      • kunal says:
        July 18, 2009 at 12:54 pm

        Hey Brajesh,

        Thanks for checking out my site and for your encouragement. Theme customizations are progressing slowly. I am an amateur web developer and am still learning how to modify the theme and other components from generous experts like you, one mod at a time :)

  9. Andres says:
    July 15, 2009 at 8:13 am

    How could I use the same process to remove links? For instance, if I want to remove the default links on my page, how can I do so without modifying the original header.php files?

    Thanks

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      July 18, 2009 at 12:32 pm

      Hi Andres
      The default links are hand coded into your header.php of the home theme/buddypress member theme,so there is no way currently to modify them without editing the header file of your themes.
      Thanks for dropping by and let me know,if you have any other issues.
      thanks
      Brajesh

      Reply
  10. Chia says:
    August 10, 2009 at 9:16 am

    Sweet! That was quite possibly the quickest and easiest fix to my WordPress sites I’ve done in a looooong time. Rock on! Thanks a bunch.

    Reply
  11. Jeremiah says:
    September 4, 2009 at 2:52 am

    Hi,your example really has helped me big-time.However,is there a way the menu items can have a “Highlight selected menu” feature just like the original buddypress menus?

    Thanks.

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      September 7, 2009 at 6:03 am

      hi Jeremiah
      Thanks for the comment.
      well,yes, you can have a highlighted menu.It is simple manupulation inside the extra nav adding function.

      you can use conditionals to highlight currently selected item.Say you have added about page there,so instead of the code in example you can use something of this kind.Let us do in same way as buddypres default nav uses highlight.

      I am sorry,the code is not getting posted in comments,I will be adding it to post in a few minutes.

      Hope it helps.
      Thanks
      Brajesh

      Reply
  12. kunal says:
    September 12, 2009 at 4:34 am

    I have created a lot of new links and reshuffled the default links. I am also using the suckerfish drop down nav menu. Instead of using bp_nav_items, is there a way to create a completely new function with all my links formatted the way I want it and then hardcore that function into the themes that need to use it?

    At least this way, I will need to change code only in 1 location when I need to add/edit links across all the themes.

    Thanks for any tips you can provide.

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      September 15, 2009 at 3:37 am

      hi Kunal
      Thanks for the message.Yes, you can .Put the code for navigation in function(put this function inside your functions.php file) and then call it in your theme.It will work seamlessly.let me know ,how it goes with you.
      cheers!
      Brajesh

      Reply
  13. jerry says:
    September 15, 2009 at 3:29 am

    Hey
    just seen ur post and added links to my installation but am getting headers already sent error..what could be the problem?

    Jerry

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      September 15, 2009 at 3:40 am

      hi Jerry
      Thanks for the comment.Well the header already send issue is because the file in which you defined extra navigation items has some white spaces(most probably) either before the php begining tag or after the php closing tag.Please remove any space before/ after php block and the issue should go away.let me know how it went with you.
      Thanks
      Brajesh

      Reply
  14. jerry says:
    September 15, 2009 at 5:49 am

    Hey
    I have tried clearing the white spaces but the error still persists…

    Thanks
    Jerry

    Reply
  15. jerry says:
    September 17, 2009 at 2:29 am

    Hey

    it finally worked.i think the entire problem was in white spaces.
    Thanks

    Jerry

    Reply
  16. Giordany says:
    October 7, 2009 at 6:03 pm

    Great info. How would you get the links to change color once they’ve been selected? Do you have to call the css some how?

    My site is
    http://www.cinematicknights.com

    Thanks for your help!

    Reply
    • brajesh says:
      October 13, 2009 at 7:40 am

      hi
      well, you can use conditionals for the purpose.For example,say on your site you want to highlight events page.
      here I have created the code for that one link,Please check it.You can do the similar thing for others.
      http://cosmiccoders.pastebin.com/f491531c1

      Thanks
      Brajesh

      Reply
      • Giordany says:
        October 13, 2009 at 10:55 am

        Thanks for your help, but I wasn’t able to get it to work. I’m a noob at php and I tried replace the original line of code with the new one you gave me but that didn’t work. I also wasn’t sure how exactly to insert my wp url into the space that you provided. Am I supposed to leave bloginfo? Am I suppposed to leave the parenthesis? In either case when I removed them or left them in, it didn’t work. Can you give me another clue to put me in the right direction? Thank you.

  17. brajesh says:
    October 13, 2009 at 11:00 am

    hi Giordany
    Please do one thing.Post your original code(how you added the extra menu on your site) here on pastebin http://cosmiccoders.pastebin.com
    Drop me a line here,I will check and update the code according to your existing code.So you don’t have to worry about PHP.
    Thanks
    Brajesh

    Reply
  18. Jeremiah says:
    October 21, 2009 at 7:25 am

    Hi again,thanks for the solution you provided last time.It worked wonderfully.I had another issue though,Is it possible to have the members in buddypress arranged in an alphabetical order.I’ve tried using custom functions to do that but it doesn’t work so well because of the database structure buddypress uses.Is there a function in buddpress that supports this maybe in it’s parameters?
    Thanks in advance.

    Reply
  19. Jeremiah says:
    October 22, 2009 at 6:11 am

    I somehow seem to have answered myself.Tried some t wicks here and there and Walla!
    Great forum though.

    Reply

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