The theme was build for an old buddypress, right now the theming changed so that old theme won’t work anymore. Ask him to update or switch to deprecated theme settings within your buddypress.
Thanks i have just tried facebuddy which they say works with buddypress v1 but my site is still blank. Do you know of any other themse that may work?
cheers
I believe (but can’t recall exactly) that it was 1.1.0 (and so 1.1.1 and 1.1.2) that changed to parent/child theming, so unless a theme explicitly declares compatibility with that revision or higher, you may have issues (which you can overcome if you’re conversant with the way that stuff works). I’ve only just wrapped my head around the child theming stuff (and it’s very cool).
There aren’t many great-looking themes out there for BP yet. If you’re willing to pay, wpmudev premium has a couple, but I wouldn’t say the themes alone are worth the price of admission.
Thanks for your help, i shall look at building my own 
So how do i get the default theme to work? I installed buddypress via wp-admin on my site and can not see the defualt theme anywhere and the instructions go on about themes and members themes but they are not there.
Thanks
They still don’t say how you get the defualt theme to work. Is that the latest versions do not have a default theme anymore? I have used phpfox, mybb and vb before and never come accross templating issues lol
Does your site work when using the default buddyPress theme? If so, you should contact the developer of the Shouty theme and ask when it will be upgraded to work with BP version 1.1.x.
