bbPress.org

Compared to BuddyPress, or a membership plugin like MemberPress, this is a surprisingly tedious thing to do in bbPress. I got 3/4 of the way to building it when I decided I really wanted the function on the membership account page and not in bbPress after all.

But suppose you wanted to add a tab for a page on which a user could upload an avatar using one of the many WordPress avatar plugins. Here, roughly, are the steps you would follow:

1. First, you have to create the tab. This is done by adding another list-item in bbpress/templates/default/bbpress/user-details.php.
2. In the other menu items on this template, you’ll notice that the href for the link is created by a function like ‘bbp_user_profile_edit_url()’. That’s because the user’s display name has to be part of the link. So, what you’ve got to do next is look in bbpress/includes/users/template.php and find that function. Then you’ve got to copy it, rename it, and modify it so that it creates the link you want (e.g., ‘/forums/users/username/avatar/’ ).
3. Next, you’ve got set up bbPress to parse that link. The parsing function is bbp_parse_query(), which is found at the bottom of bbpress/includes/core/template-functions.php. This function reads the URI and sets conditional tags (e.g., ‘bbpress_is_single_user_edit’) depending on what the URI is. The function is called from bbpress/includes/core/actions.php. You’ll need to copy this function somewhere else and rename it. Then remove the action that calls it and add an action that calls your function. Then, you’ll need to modify your function such that if the URI ends in ‘avatar’ it sets a conditional tag, e.g., ‘bbpress_is_single_user_avatar’.
4. Templates are loaded based on the conditional tags, and there are functions that return true or false depending on what conditional tags are present, e.g. ‘bbp_is_single_user_edit()’. These are found in bbpress/includes/common/tempate.php. You’ll have to create one of these that returns true for ‘bbpress_is_single_user_avatar’.
5. Once you’ve got that, then you can conditionally load the templates you want for the page. Templates are loaded in bbpress/includes/core/template-loader.php. The function is bbp_template_include_theme_supports(). It has a filter, so you can add a conditional that loads a template when ‘bbp_is_single_user_avatar()’ is true.

As I said, I got about 3/4 of the way to doing this when I realized that it would be clearer in my application to have the avatar in the account area of my membership plugin. But I think this is roughly how you would do it in bbPress.