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How to disable the Random Visit menu in the BuddyPress admin bar

June 24th, 2011 by Marian Buchanan

Here's a post for web designers and Do-It-Yourself website owners wishing to disable the Random Visit menu in the BuddyPress admin bar. I've posted it in the BuddyPress forums as well, but thought I'd put it here for extra ease in finding it in a search.

BuddyPress is a plugin for WordPress that turns your WordPress blog into an interactive social media community -- i.e. a membership site like Facebook. It requires a BuddyPress-enabled theme to display all pages properly. Conversely, if you deactivate the BuddyPress plugin while using a BuddyPress-enabled theme, it will break your site because it will be calling for functions to which it no longer has access. If you need help converting your theme to a BuddyPress-enabled version, please feel free to ask me for help.

By default, BuddyPress replaces the regular WordPress admin bar with its own admin bar, since the latter has additional menus for all the BuddyPress community features: community activity, messages, friends, groups, your profile, privacy and other settings. But the BP admin bar also has a feature that shows up whether or not you're logged in: a Visit menu that takes you to either a Random Member profile or a Random Group main page. Unfortunately, as of the version that is current at the time of this writing (BuddyPress 1.2.8), there is no administrative option to disable only that part of the admin bar nor to disable it only for visitors who are not logged in.

So here's how that can be accomplished. Don't worry, it may look a little technical, but really it's just a matter of copying and pasting some code in the right place. You don't have to know any coding, you just have to follow the simple instructions:

In your theme’s footer.php file, right BEFORE it says <?php wp_footer(); ?>, add the following code:

  • If you want the Random Visit menu to be removed for all users, whether or not they’re logged in, use this code:
    <?php
    remove_action( 'bp_adminbar_menus', 'bp_adminbar_random_menu', 100 );
    ?>
  • If you want the Random Visit menu to be removed only for users who are not logged in, use this code:
    <?php
    if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
    remove_action( 'bp_adminbar_menus', 'bp_adminbar_random_menu', 100 );
    }
    ?>

I'm sure a plugin could be made instead, but this is a quick solution in the meantime. Let me know if you find it helpful!


3 important things to remember in your SEO research

April 20th, 2011 by Marian Buchanan

Are you looking for information about Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and how to do SEO research? This post is not intended to be a comprehensive article on the subject, but I do have some tips I wanted to share — prompted by, of all things, spam.

In my last post, I talked about the ignorance of some kinds of spammers, after receiving an unsolicited email that was different from most, but still failed. It was from an SEO consultant offering to get my client’s site ranked higher in Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs).

I usually just ignore this kind of spam, but this time I was tempted to reply with a little feedback (from one SEO consultant to another), because of the failure of the sender to demonstrate that he knew what he was doing. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to reply, but at the very least I thought I’d share my thoughts with you here. Maybe some of you are SEO consultants yourselves and need a reminder about the three important things this person failed to take into account in his SEO research; and maybe some of you are website owners looking into SEO and need help separating the wheat from the chaff when you, too, receive this kind of unsolicited mail or need to do your own SEO research. Read the rest of this entry »

The ignorance of spammer SEO consultants

April 20th, 2011 by Marian Buchanan

Do you ever get spam from Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consultants? If you are a website owner or webmaster, you probably do.

Among my clients are several non-profit organizations for which I sometimes receive messages from SEO consultants trying to persuade me that the organization needs their services. Although the email address I use as the web manager usually has the word “website” in it instead of “webmaster,” it should still be fairly clear to spammer SEO consultants that they are writing to someone who is in charge of managing the website. So it always strikes me how ignorant their approach can be. I can think of a few possibilities: Read the rest of this entry »

Where can I find royalty-free clipart?

March 23rd, 2011 by Marian Buchanan

A while back I referred you to Dreamstime for royalty-free photos. They do have some illustrations as well, but for clipart you might prefer the huge selection at iCLIPART.com. You have to subscribe, but you can do so for just a week if you want (there is a daily limit for downloading), and you get access to over 7.8 million royalty-free clipart images, photos, photo objects, fonts, web graphics, videos and sounds! Check it out!

Toxic Waste Irony — a comment on branding

January 15th, 2011 by Marian Buchanan

I hardly ever eat candy, never even heard of Toxic Waste ® brand candies, so this doesn’t affect me directly. But, as a subscriber to the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA) health alert newsletters, I received information about the recall of some of the brand’s chew bars and couldn’t resist commenting on the irony of the brand’s name. Read the rest of this entry »

Where can I find quality royalty-free photos for my design?

July 7th, 2010 by Marian Buchanan

One of my favourite places to find royalty-free stock photos for web design and graphic design, is Read the rest of this entry »

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