Could you explain further what you mean?
Lots of plugins have filters and other techniques that can be used from functions.php
okay well all member pages on my site have a three column layout, I can show you a picture if you need some more visual, but it’s something like how the cosmic buddy theme has their member pages set up.
I’ll use achievements for instance, the achievements page is set up like the default buddypress theme is, well since I made changes to the overall html structure of those pages to allow for the use of a three column layout, those changes would have to be made to the achievements index page as well.
Obviously that would be bad if I forgot that I made changes and then the plugin gets updated, well not all those changes go down the toilet and I have to go back to my editor and make those changes again.
I’ts not the same with the child theme structure that buddypress has obviously, when an update is made to buddypress there’s no worry about it messing up since they child themes that I made changes to are stored in my theme folder.
So therein lies my problem, I have no problem doing it for now but down the road one of these plugins is going to get updated and I’ll have to copy my code and update and then paste back over.
Not good
Let me know if that helps the mental picture a bit, I’m not too great at explaining things over just simple text haha!
That’s the risk. It depends how well the plugins are written. Ask the authors.
In the case of Achievements, copy the contents of the /includes/templates/* folders into your current theme. They’ll override the templates that are bundled with Achievements. Boom!
will that work also for say the buddypress links plugin or even like cubepoints?
that’s what I was wondering if it was possible to do
It works where plugin authors have bothered to provide some form of overloading of files, in general WP plugins don’t have need for screens whereas BP plugins will often need to create a component , creating new dir pages or user account screens and the approach Paul mentions above is catered for so you should in theory always be able to copy template files to your theme and modify them.
