Custom post types, comments, and the activity stream in BP 1.5

There was a quirk in the way that BuddyPress 1.2.x’s Blogs component recorded posts and comments in the activity stream. With you published a new post, it only got published in the activity stream if $post->post_type == 'post'. In other words, Pages and all custom post types were ignored. On the other hand, no such post_type check took place in the case of comments, with the result that comments on pages and other post types did show up in the stream.

This odd inconsistency was fixed in the BuddyPress trunk with changeset 4959; BuddyPress now checks to make sure that the item being commenting on is a WordPress ‘post’ before adding the comment to the activity stream. However, anointed chimed in to let us know that some BuddyPress admins were taking advantage of the quirk. The result of this discussion is r4971, in which the post type checks are enhanced by turning them into checks against a filterable whitelist.

Plugin authors should be aware of this changed default behavior. If your plugin creates custom post types, and if you want comments on those custom post types to be recorded in the BP activity stream by bp_blogs_record_comment() (if you are using your own function for this purpose, you don’t need to worry about the change), you will have to update your plugin to do something like this:

  function bbg_record_my_custom_post_type_comments( $post_types ) {
      $post_types[] = 'dolphin'; // Add your custom post type name to the array. If you have a post type called 'dolphin' then you have a weird plugin
      return $post_types;
  }
  add_filter( 'bp_blogs_record_comment_post_types', 'bbg_record_my_custom_post_type_comments' );