Clash with new BP group types taxonomy?

I’ve just realised that when we took our BP plugin out of being locked to 2.9.4, and updated to the latest and allowed auto-updates, the latest at the time was 6.3.0.

The new core management of group types is part of 7.0.0, which has just been released. This is why our problems suddenly appeared this week.

As far as I can tell, the core group types taxonomy clashes severely with this plugin’s post-type-based group types system.

Is this going to be a case of the plugin being updated, or we should migrate to the core system? If the latter, will there be a tool to help migrate plugin data to the core system?

For now I’ve rolled us back to 6.4.0, which seems to be working OK, but it’d be good to nail down the situation here.

@gyrus we have added support for BP 7.0.0

Hi, I just noticed that our page with group type tabs is now no longer showing the group types. This is locked into BuddyPress 6.4.0 still, from before you released a fix for BP 7 compatibility. I assume since our BP version is locked, a further update to the Group Types plugin caused this issue?

Locally I’ve updated to BP 7 but the issue persists. In admin when I click on ‘Settings’ for the Group Types plugin on the plugins page, it goes to wp-admin/edit-tags.php?taxonomy=bp_group_type and I get an ‘Invalid taxonomy’ WP error.

Any idea how to fix this?

Just to let you know, since part of our client’s site is broken due to this issue, I tried rolling your plugin back version by version, to see if I could find the last working version. However, the version where I started seeing the group type tabs on our front-end interface was 2.3.0, which is before you introduced support for BP 7 – and then I’m facing the same issues I outlined in the initial post here again.

Obviously I don’t want to roll back BP as well. Ideally, since it looks like you’re having problems with the plugin, we would try to move away from it and use the Group Types functionality in BP 7 core. However, given our current schedule, and not knowing how much work this would involve, I’m hoping you’ll be able to see where the problem is and release a fix before then.

@gyrus after updating BP and Group type plugin both, navigate to Groups >> Groups Type and edit those group types one by one and save them again.

We have set to use BuddyPress default group type menu option and our plugin extra option is also added to default BP group type options.

Thanks for the reply. As stated above, when I navigate to Groups > Group Types I get an error screen saying, ‘Invalid taxonomy’.

@gyrus deactivate create group type and check the Groups > Group Types menu again

No luck. Deactivated, tried Groups > Group Types, same ‘Invalid taxonomy’ error. Reactivated and tried again, same error.

OK, sorry, it looks like part of the problem is we added some code in December because of the problems we were having with your plugin:

function my_bp_loaded() {

	// Disable core group type taxonomy
	// Seems to clash with Create Group Types plugin, temporary hack
	remove_filter( 'bp_get_default_taxonomies', 'bp_groups_register_group_type_taxonomy', 1 );

}
add_action( 'bp_loaded', 'my_bp_loaded' );

When I remove this I can access the Groups > Group Types admin screen. However, while we had about 4 group types, there are 12 listed. I can see which are the 4 ‘actual’ types via the ‘Count’ field, only 4 of them have any associated groups.

On the front-end interface where the tabs should appear, all 12 are shown, without labels. Presumably this is related to the items not having anything for the ‘Name’ field in admin.

Is there a conversion process I need to follow? Should I simply delete the 8 ‘false’ group types and edit to include the ‘Name’ field for the 4 ‘true’ types? This seems like a way to do it, but I’m wary as I’m not sure of how this data’s being managed between the plugin and BP, and I don’t want to mess the data up.

More info if it helps: all the group types tabs on the front-end, as well as having no labels, have the same URL: /groups/type/bp_type_directory_slug/

In wp_posts I find 4 posts of the type bp_group_type – these are our group types.

In wp_term_taxonomy there are 12 items with taxonomy bp_group_type. They relate to terms in wp_terms. There’s the 4 actual group types, plus 8 others which, from the slugs, seem to somehow have been copied from posts of other types (e.g. blog posts). All items have the name the same as the slug.

Please let me know how I might tidy this corrupted data up, I’m wary of doing it without fully understanding how your plugin manages the bp_group_type posts and the bp_group_type terms.

@gyrus next steps

do not delete existing group types, just edit them and fill the missing values like bp_type_directory_slug with group type name in slug format and save.
That’s all

I need to delete the mystery ‘false’ group types. I have 4 ‘true’ group types (those we have always used, with group associations indicated in the Count column of the group types admin list). But there are 8 ‘false’ ones. They have no group associations, and they seem to have been created based on data from normal posts. They are all being output as tabs on the front-end groups page.

For example, one ‘false’ group types has the Type ID and Slug ‘get-involved’. This is also the slug of a key landing page on the site. When I delete the term under Groups > Group types, the page gets deleted as well. How can I purge these ‘false’ group types without deleting the content they seem to be connected to?

• This reply was modified 3 years, 9 months ago by Steve Taylor. Reason: typo

now it’s your call to update them or delete them to create again.

you can test the process with one group type, and follow the same.

Thanks. I removed your plugin, deleted the mystery group types, then edited the actual group types to make sure the fields were properly filled in using the BP core taxonomy. Now everything works using just BP core functionality.