Default front.php for Groups & Members

[imath]

I think it could be interesting to add a front.php template and a dynamic sidebar and custom widgets to provide a more advanced home page for single items.

[hnla]

Absolutely agree. Part of the reason I wanted user account front.php matching to groups was to have the ease of providing a much better user account landing page experience.

The main index page on user accounts should be far more general, a mix of things, little bit of activity loop, a few latest messages, latest notifications; ata a glance what you need to know bout and deal with.

Lets make this a task to accomplish for this template pack, we could tackle or it could make a great task for someone to take on?

[imath]

I really think we should register specific dynamic sidebars and provide user/group widgets. By the way i think the Groups Component API has a widget() method :)

[hnla]

dynamic_sidebar as in? For the user/group single screens ? I'm in agreement, can we give a broad rough example of usage then we can break out to a sep task or just run homepage for group/user plus sidebars as a task.

[imath]

I've been thinking about it. And i think we can create two dynamic sidebars one for the group front, the other for the user front.

Then we could create a specific template tag function that would wrap the dynamic_sidebar between a add_filter()/remove_filter block that would make sure all widgets added inside would display the content for the current displayed item id.

I also think we should programmatically add some default widgets inside these dynamic sidebars so that there are not empty.

[imath]

here are some screenshots about the above commit:

The new BuddyPress Template Pack panel

The sections

And finally, when you're on a single item page, you can enable/disable & preview the front page setting:

[imath]

some ideas i drop here.

groups/single/default-front.php:

• what about moving the description that is in header into this template ?
• what about adding a box for admins to help them find manage actions such as the avatar/cover image management areas
• what about a box for statistics about the group ?
• then the widgets :)

members/single/default-front.php:

• what about adding a way to the user watching his profile to edit the WordPress bio field, and display it to other users.
• what about a shortcut box to edit avatar/cover image/ email settings ?
• what about a box to display statistics ?
• then the widgets :)

About the widgets layout, we will be adding 1 dynamic_sidebar for group and another one for member, but how widgets will be displayed ? Is there a way to include a customizer setting into our sections to choose between layouts like :

It it only doable by the way! :)

[imath]

this commit 7e7b073969301097b4e04fd15e3f2b0a2e11279f put the sidebars in place, now i need your help for the styling part :)

[mercime]

A bit late, but this is how I did the layout for the screenshot https://buddypress.org/support/topic/front-php-and-buddypress-2-6/ Also for consideration, alternative ways of presenting content in the group/member front.php thinking about those who want their images set across instead of vertically.

[hnla]

Closing... The primary functionality here is in place i.e dynamic sidebars etc, however an approach to producing a layout for these hasn't been explored and should be looked at in future versions.