WordPress MU

I'm running wpmu with BuddyPress, but I don't think think this is an issue exclusive to BuddyPress, as I've seen it discussed on various forums. Here's the problem:
When users register on the site and create their profile, they add their first and last name (display name), but that data isn't written into the user profile accessed through user profile.php and user-edit.php; there, the first and last name fields are blank. This means that when one of these registered users comments, their username appears with the comment, rather than their display name.

As far as I can tell, there's no plugin that will automatically add the display name to the user profile, but it's been suggested to me that it could be done. Unfortunately, I don't know enough php to write a plugin.

I have gathered from my searches in forums that a key to this process is update_usermeta( )--but I don't know what to do with that. Any help would be *most* appreciated, both by me and undoubtedly others who are looking for similar solutions.

"When users register on the site and create their profile, they add their first and last name (display name), but that data isn't written into the user profile accessed through user profile.php and user-edit.php; there, the first and last name fields are blank."

Did you tell BuddyPress to sync the user profiles with the WP profiles?

If you did, and that's not filling it in, then it's a BP issue.

also, on the user profile page in the backend, there's an option to pick what to show the user's display name as.

Or: edit your theme. Yes, in the comments area, to pull the user's firstname lastname instead of username.

Andrea_r, thanks for the reply.

I do have profile syncing on. The weird thing is that one or two of my students each semester will end up with their WP profile fully populated with the data from the BP profile--but for most, this doesn't happen. I've asked a few if they did anything special/out of the ordinary when they registered, and I've looked at logs, but it appears that they didn't do anything different from the rest.

Re: user profile page: the issue here is that my students don't have access to that because they don't have blogs; they can only edit their BP profiles. I'm going in and manually changing their user profile pages one at a time.

Re: Theme--it's not a theme issue; when I make a comment, my display name (full name) shows up.

It must be some sort of issue between BP and WP.

"user profile page: the issue here is that my students don't have access to that because they don't have blogs; "

But the user profile page isn't tied to a blog per se. When users do not have a blog (like on single WP) they should have a dashboard they can access somewhere specifically so they have that user profile page available for things like password changes.

So yeah - it's something between BP & WP. Did you check the BP track tickets to see if one's been filed for this?