Profile field visibility in BP 1.6

Several weeks ago, a series of changesets addressed what is perhaps the most popular request in the history of BuddyPress: profile privacy. (See #3695.) We’re calling it “visibility”, and you can check it out now in BP trunk. Here’s what developers need to know:

Profile Edit view

• Users can edit their profile field visibility on a field-by-field basis.
• Options available by default under “Who can see this field?” are Anyone, Logged In Users, and My Friends.
• Site administrators can select a default visibility level for each field. Admins can also force a field to maintain the default visibility – for instance, an admin may decide that a field called “Phone Number” should always be limited to Friends. (See the new bp_xprofile_map_meta_caps(), and the bp_xprofile_change_field_visibility cap.)
• Developers can customize the available options using two new filters:
  • bp_xprofile_get_privacy_levels – Register or deregister new privacy levels with this filter. The data being filtered here is an array that looks like this:

    
    array(
      'public' => array(
        'id' => 'public' // Canonical, non-translatable name
        'label' => __( 'Anyone', 'buddypress' ) // Label visible to users
      ), // etc
    )

    Add or remove items as you see fit.

  • bp_xprofile_get_hidden_fields_for_user – This is an array of xprofile field ids that should *not* be visible for the current viewer of the current displayed profile.

  In the upcoming weeks, I’ll write a short example plugin to demonstrate how to remove existing levels and add custom levels.

• While the visibility filtering does not happen at the template level itself, the markup that allows users to modify profile visibility does require theme-level changes. The two key files are: /members/single/profile/edit.php (see the block beginning if ( bp_current_user_can( 'bp_xprofile_change_field_visibility' ) )) and /registration/register.php. In each case, you should be able to simply copy and paste the relevant blocks from bp-default; if you need to support older versions of BP, you may want to wrap it in a if ( function_exists( 'bp_xprofile_get_privacy_levels' ) ) check.

  Note that if your theme does not provide the proper markup for users to customize their profile field visibility, fields will default to the admin-provided visibility level, which itself defaults to Public. Thus, the feature degrades gracefully in the absence of theme support.

Questions or comments? Leave them below, or in a relevant Trac ticket.