BuddyPress.org

These are a few basic steps one can take to trying to resolve issues you may be having with your BP enabled site.

• Theme layout issues:
  Buddypress works in theme compatibility mode for the vast majority of available themes, however some premium themes can have proprietary templating processes which interfere with the normal WP loop which BP uses.

  To establish whether issues you are seeing are theme related the first step to take is to disable your current ‘custom’ theme and then to activate a known good theme, known good themes BuddyPress will always be tested against are any WP default themes e.g currently ‘TwentyThirteen’. If running a WP default theme shows the issue to be resolved then we have established this is an issue related to your theme specifically, this may not resolve any issues as such but we know know where to focus attention.

• General Broken functionality:
  When one encounters functionality in BP that appears not to be working often the cause is third party plugins; this is often the case in respect to Ajax or JavaScript actions which can be tripped up by other plugins.

  The steps to take in this instance to identify whether this is the issue is to disable all non essential plugins i.e only have WP and BP running then if the issue resolves itself you know that it’s plugin related; to further identify just which plugin is the cause start to re-activate them one by one checking each time for the issue reoccurring, when it does you have found the problem plugin.

• Customizing BP theme templates:
  BP theme compatibility templates can be copied over to your theme for modification, often in the case of theme related layout issues one would need to copy the themes ‘page.php’ file renaming it to buddypress.php so that adjustments can be made that affect only BP screens; to understand how to do this please read the two guides in the codex that will help you understand how to achieve this:

  Theme Compatibility & Template Files

  Template Hierarchy