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General Settings

The General settings tab is the only settings screen in BuddyPress Newsfeed. You will find it at WB Plugins > Newsfeed > General in your WordPress admin.

All options are stored in the single WordPress option bnews_general_settings. Changes take effect immediately after you click Save Changes.

Disable for Activity-Specific Tabs

Section titled “Disable for Activity-Specific Tabs”

Option key: bnews_general_settings[disable_all] Control type: Toggle (on/off) Default on activation: On (yes)

When this toggle is on, BuddyPress Newsfeed removes the individual activity sub-tabs (Favorites, Friends, Groups, Mentions, and Following) from the member activity page and from the WordPress admin bar. The Newsfeed tab becomes the single entry point for all of those streams combined.

When this toggle is off, all the individual tabs remain visible alongside the Newsfeed tab. Members can still switch between Personal, Mentions, Friends, and so on in their own separate tabs, while the Newsfeed tab continues to show the merged view.

What changes when you turn this on:

  • The nav items favorites, friends, groups, mentions, and following are removed from the BuddyPress activity sub-navigation.
  • The matching items are removed from the “Activity” section in the WordPress toolbar (top admin bar).
  • On the Newsfeed tab, the activity query scope expands to include all those types at once, so members see a combined stream.

What changes when you turn this off:

  • All individual tabs return. Members choose which stream they want to browse.
  • The Newsfeed tab still appears but only shows its merged scope when a member is on that tab.

Note for BuddyBoss users: The Personal admin-bar node is always removed regardless of this toggle. BuddyPress Newsfeed removes the my-account-activity-personal node and replaces it with Newsfeed and Personal links that match the Default Tab Selection setting below.

Default Tab Selection

Section titled “Default Tab Selection”

Option key: bnews_general_settings[first_tab] Control type: Radio buttons - Personal / Newsfeed Default on activation: Newsfeed

This setting controls which activity sub-tab loads first when a member visits their activity page. It has two choices:

  • Newsfeed: the merged activity stream (friends, groups, following, favorites, mentions) loads by default. The Newsfeed sub-tab is positioned first in the navigation.
  • Personal: the member’s own activity loads by default. The Personal sub-tab is positioned first and the Newsfeed tab appears after it.

The setting also controls how the admin bar links work. When set to Newsfeed, clicking “Activity” in the toolbar goes directly to /activity/newsfeed/. When set to Personal, it goes to the root /activity/ URL which displays the Personal stream.

When to use Newsfeed as the default: Choose this for community sites where you want members to land on a social feed of their connections rather than their own posts.

When to use Personal as the default: Choose this when most members use their activity page as a personal journal and the merged feed is a secondary view.

Fallback: If no value has been saved (fresh install before any save), the plugin treats this as newsfeed.

Enable Activity Post Form on Newsfeed

Section titled “Enable Activity Post Form on Newsfeed”

Option key: bnews_general_settings[post_form_enable] Control type: Toggle (on/off) Default on activation: On (yes)

When this toggle is on, the BuddyPress activity post form appears directly on the Newsfeed tab. Members can write and publish an activity update without navigating to another tab first.

When this toggle is off, the post form is not injected into the Newsfeed tab. Members who want to post must navigate to the Personal tab (or any other tab that includes the standard BuddyPress post form).

Conditions for the form to appear:

  • The toggle is on.
  • The member is viewing their own profile (bp_is_my_profile() is true).
  • The current action in BuddyPress is newsfeed.
  • The site is not running BuddyBoss Platform. On BuddyBoss, the platform’s own form logic manages post form visibility and this toggle delegates to that instead.

BuddyBoss note: On BuddyBoss Platform, this toggle does not inject a post form. BuddyBoss controls the form through its own activity tab system. The plugin instead ensures the BuddyBoss form is visible on the Newsfeed tab via a footer script that removes the bp-hide CSS class.

Enable Relevant Activity

Section titled “Enable Relevant Activity”

Option key: bnews_general_settings[_bp_enable_relevant_feed] Control type: Toggle (on/off) Default on activation: Off (not set) Visibility: This setting is hidden when BuddyBoss Platform is active.

When this toggle is on, BuddyPress Newsfeed filters the activity directory page (/activity/) so that members see updates that are most relevant to them rather than the global stream. The filter runs on the bp_after_has_activities_parse_args hook.

The relevance filter includes activity from:

  • The member’s own posts.
  • Friends (via BuddyPress Friends, if active).
  • Members the user follows (via BuddyPress Follow or a compatible follow plugin, if active).
  • Groups the member has joined (via BuddyPress Groups, if active).
  • bbPress forum topics the member is subscribed to (if bbPress is active).
  • Any activity update that @mentions the member’s username.

If none of those optional components are active, the directory shows only the member’s own activity and any @mentions.

When to use this: Enable it when you want the main activity directory to feel personal, showing a tailored stream rather than every piece of community activity.

When to leave it off: Leave it off if you want the activity directory to remain a global public stream, or if you are running BuddyBoss Platform (the setting is hidden and has no effect on BuddyBoss installs).

Performance note on large sites: When this feature is on and a member has many friends, follows, and group memberships, the query includes a large number of user IDs and group IDs in an SQL IN(...) clause. On very large communities (thousands of connections), this can affect page load time on the activity directory.

Saving Changes

Section titled “Saving Changes”

Click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the General tab to save all settings at once. There is no per-field save.

Settings are stored as a single serialized array in the bnews_general_settings WordPress option. On multisite networks where the plugin is network-activated, the option is read from get_site_option() instead of get_option().