Custom BuddyPress Profile Menu: Add & Remove BP Menu Pages

In our previous BuddyPress Profile Menu tutorial, we provided examples to change the default BP menu and subnav names and positions. In this tutorial, we cover how to add complete new profile pages to the BP user menu, including submenu items, and how to remove default nav items entirely.

1. Remove Default BP Menu Items
2. Adding New Profile Nav Items
3. Attach Profile Pages / Screen Functions

Remove Unwanted Default Profile Menu Items

The best way to disable/remove a menu item in the BP members profile, is to disable the component from the BuddyPress Settings. This guarantees that not only would the menu items not display, but its pages would no longer exist, which could still be accessed directly via its URL.

In a scenario where you'd like to remove a menu item from the BuddyPress profile, but would like to keep the component enabled, e.g. Forums, Site Tracking, then the safest way is to use the unset function:

unset($bp->bp_nav['blogs']);

Simply apply this function to the bp_setup_nav action, as explained in the previous BuddyPress tutorial (we will show a complete function below).

Adding New Profile Nav Items

To add completely new items to the profile navigation, we will use the bp_core_new_nav_item function. The function has multiple parameters, which are described here.

Let's use this code to add a new profile menu item that we will use to display a users posts:

add_action('bp_setup_nav', 'mb_bp_profile_menu_posts', 301 );
function mb_bp_profile_menu_posts() {
global $bp;
bp_core_new_nav_item(
	array(
        'name' => 'My Posts',
        'slug' => 'posts', 
        'position' => 11, 
        'default_subnav_slug' => 'published', // We add this submenu item below 
        'screen_function' => 'mb_author_posts'
	)
);
}

The code will add a menu item right after the first default menu item (after the Activity tab) and it will attempt to display the content from the mb_author_posts function.

Assigning New Subnav Items

To attach a subnavigation to our new menu item, we will use the function bp_core_new_subnav_item and add it to the action bp_setup_nav after the function to create the parent menu tab has run:

add_action('bp_setup_nav', 'mb_bp_profile_submenu_posts', 302 );
function mb_bp_profile_submenu_posts() {
	global $bp;
	if(!is_user_logged_in()) return '';
bp_core_new_subnav_item( array( 
	'name' => 'Published',
	'slug' => 'published', 
	'parent_url' => $bp->loggedin_user->domain . $bp->bp_nav['posts']['slug'] . '/'; ,
	'parent_slug' => $bp->bp_nav['posts']['slug'],
	'position' => 10,
	'screen_function' => 'mb_author_posts'
	) 
); 
bp_core_new_subnav_item( array( 
	'name' => 'Drafts',
	'slug' => 'drafts', 
	'parent_url' => $bp->loggedin_user->domain . $bp->bp_nav['posts']['slug'] . '/'; ,
	'parent_slug' => $bp->bp_nav['posts']['slug'],
	'position' => 20,
	'screen_function' => 'mb_author_posts_drafts'
	) 
); 
}

Adding Profile Menu Tab Content

Now that we have our navigation items in place, we need to attach the functions that displays the content. We do this by attaching our functions content output to the BuddyPress template /members/single/plugins:

Here an example of how our function could look like:

function mb_author_posts(){	
	add_action( 'bp_template_content', 'mb_show_posts' );
	bp_core_load_template( apply_filters( 'bp_core_template_plugin', 'members/single/plugins' ) );
}
function mb_show_posts() {
	echo 'Function to Generate the displayed users posts.';
	// echo do_shortcode('[mb_feedburner count=5 user="MaximusBusiness"]'); // Displays a shortcode output.
}

You would duplicate the above structure for the second subnavigation item if applicable.

Feel free to comment or request more examples/explanations for any of the above.