Merged Activity Feed

The core feature of this plugin is adding a Newsfeed tab to each member’s Activity section. Instead of your members switching between separate Favorites, Friends, Groups, and Mentions tabs, they see all of that activity combined in one place.

What gets merged

When the Disable for Activity-Specific Tabs setting is on, the Newsfeed tab shows activity from all of the following scopes at once:

Scope	Requires
Personal activity (just-me)	Always included
Favorites	BuddyPress activity component
Mentions	BuddyPress activity component
Friends	BuddyPress Friends component active
Groups	BuddyPress Groups component active
Following	BP-Follow plugin or _bp_enable_activity_follow option set

Scopes are only included when their corresponding BuddyPress component is active. For example, if your site does not use the Friends component, the friends scope does not appear in the merged feed.

The individual sub-tabs

When merging is enabled, the plugin removes the separate Favorites, Friends, Groups, Mentions, and Following sub-tabs from the member Activity nav, and also removes them from the WordPress admin bar’s account menu. This keeps the interface clean rather than offering both a merged view and the individual views simultaneously.

The Personal tab remains. It still appears as a separate sub-tab so members can filter down to only their own posts if they want to.

Tab ordering

You control which tab appears first when a member visits their Activity section. In WB Plugins > Newsfeed > General, the Default Tab Selection setting has two options:

• Newsfeed: the merged feed is the landing tab, and Personal appears second.
• Personal: the member’s own posts appear first, and Newsfeed appears second.

The plugin also updates the admin bar links to match whichever tab is set as default.

Activity post form

When a member is viewing their own Newsfeed tab, they can post new activity directly from that tab. The Enable Activity Post Form on Newsfeed toggle in General settings controls this. When it is on, the standard BuddyPress activity post form appears at the top of the Newsfeed tab.

If the toggle is off, no post form appears on the Newsfeed tab. Members would need to navigate to a different page or tab to post.

Note: If a visitor lands on the Newsfeed tab while logged out, they see a login prompt rather than the post form or the feed.

Mention notifications

When a member is @mentioned and clicks the notification, the link points to their Newsfeed tab (or the root Activity page, depending on the Default Tab Selection setting) rather than to a standalone mentions page. This keeps notifications consistent with how the feed is organised.

This behaviour depends on the internal tomerge setting including mentions. That setting is not exposed in the admin UI in the current version, so mention notification links use BuddyPress defaults unless the option is set directly in the database.

When merging is turned off

If you turn the Disable for Activity-Specific Tabs toggle off, the plugin stops removing the individual sub-tabs. Members see the standard BuddyPress activity navigation with separate Friends, Groups, Mentions, and other tabs. The Newsfeed tab still exists but only shows activity through the standard BuddyPress scope rather than a merged scope.

What this feature does not change

• It does not create a sitewide activity directory page. The merged feed works on member profile pages only.
• It does not modify who can see whose activity. BuddyPress privacy rules apply.
• It does not store any activity data itself. All data comes from the BuddyPress activity tables.

Related settings

Setting	Path	Default
Disable for Activity-Specific Tabs	WB Plugins > Newsfeed > General	On
Default Tab Selection	WB Plugins > Newsfeed > General	Newsfeed
Enable Activity Post Form on Newsfeed	WB Plugins > Newsfeed > General	On

See General Settings for full field descriptions.