WIth that said, the issue: Using a simple 301 htaccess redirect, I have author.php going to the UP profile page. Not the best practice, but for lack of another reliable way, it works. The problem occurs when a username has a dot in it–as many Facebook usernames do: e.g., james.joyce. By default, WordPress themes take the dot and converts it to a dash, so james.joyce is generated as james-joyce at author.php and therefore results in an “not found” error in the UP profile.

It’s such a basic thing that I know I’m missing something obvious. What is it?

Thanks!

UserPro does not convert the dot to dash. You can use the ID permalink as a workaround for now.

Thanks again.

http://userproplugin.com/userpro/docs/api.html#userpro_user_profile_url

I used this plugin last year before the introduction of UserPro. The author notes: “Legacy Format (i.e. John.Smith) is Not Recommended. Although the original ‘BuddyPress-friendly’ username format included a period, I later learned that this creates issues with author links in WordPress. I’ve left the option here for legacy support, but advise against using it (unless you have only one author on your blog, in which case Facebook-connected users won’t have author links and so it doesn’t matter).” The issues with the author links he mentions are what I’m referring to, as UserPro imports the period as-is when a user connects, and it is this period that is breaking the author links in the blogs (I use UserPro primarily for multi-author blogs). The plugin I reference converts the period in the username to an underscore for author links.

I use the example of the plugin only to illustrate the issue, as it has only one main function and UserPro has many capabilities, and the two cannot be compared otherwise. Using the user ID doesn’t work, as the issue occurs at the moment the username is imported into WordPress by UserPro’s Facebook connect.

Thanks!

I would think the most straightforward way of accomplishing this is to change any instance of a (Facebook) dot to an underscore, i.e., ‘ . ‘ to ‘_’ . I tested this manually in the wp_users dbt. This change would have to occur the moment a user on a UP-powered site logs in/registers via Facebook so that Facebook user steve.jobs is registered as WordPress user steve_jobs.

I hope I’ve made the “why” clear; if not, I’ll gladly send you my admin login credentials so that you can see what I’m referring to. For those who prefer the dot, maybe add an option to use it (although I can’t imagine why anyone would prefer the dot unless they have some special setup). I raise this as “my problem,” but I sincerely think it would make UserPro even better, since WordPress by default doesn’t like dots in author names when linking to a profile page.

Thanks.