Loading of more activity items by the activity stream's 'Load More' button

[henry.wright]

This may not be a bug but I wanted to ask a question regarding the functionality of the activity stream's load more button.

I'm using the advanced template hierarchy so have all of my page markup in file buddypress/activity/index-directory.php. Now, when the load more button is clicked on page example.com/activity/ I'm getting activity items loaded on the page as expected. However, the markup used to display these items is coming from bp-templates/bp-legacy/buddypress/activity/activity-loop.php

Is this expected behaviour?

[imath]

Hi @henry.wright,

I don't know how you built your index-directory template, but the load more action is buffering the 'activity/activity-loop', so if in your theme you have this template part in your buddypress/activity folder it should be used instead of the one in bp-legacy. Same logic for the entry template part.

[henry.wright]

Hi imath,

Thanks for explaining - I built a monolithic index-directory file and didn't think any template parts were needed since the template hierarchy went live. I can see now how some template parts are needed - such in the case here of the load more functionality.

Is it worth mentioning something in the documentation? It wasn't super obvious to me.

​http://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

[imath]

Replying to henry.wright:

Is it worth mentioning something in the documentation? It wasn't super obvious to me.

​http://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

I see what you mean : a more detailed codex article to explain how to organize your templates using bp_get_template_part(). Asking @hnla & @mercime for their advices about it.

[hnla]

Yes although creating a index page override would essentially mean one had control over the file from top to bottom i.e get_header() to get_footer() we would still be breaking out the inner parts to bp_get_template_part() and if necessary creating a revised template file to include if requiring specific changes on templates that worked on a component or slug, name etc etc.

I agree a little more explicit detail is required on that article as well as a guide outlining all the means one can approach theming BP.

[henry.wright]

Using bp_get_template_part() isn't mandatory of course - you can in theory have everything inside index-directory.php. But, as the case of 'load more' shows us, markup from outside of your theme may be called upon and used. One big index-directory.php probably isn't good practice either.

[hnla]

Yes general principles of any templating system and indeed the original reason for PHP is to break up code sections that are re-usable so - and although starting to go overboard with too many includes is step in wrong direction - keeping to includes makes sense and makes for neater files to deal with. But yes you're right you can build one monolithic file with thousands of lines in :)but as we can see doing that has issues and includes are nice so best to overload all templates to your theme in my opinion for anything like serious work.