WP MS + BP should be installed at the root: example.com/
Default user role on main site is: subscriber (see wp settings for that)
BP settings allows you to let users create a blog.
A new user create a blog which goes as subfolder: example.com/the_new_blog/
User from the main (subscriber) created the new_blog and is now blog admin of his blog and subscriber on the main blog.
He can only access his own blog dashboard but cannot go to the main site dashboard.
They are several WP plugins which let you customize the toolbar and many WP snippets you can use to do it by yourself. For example removing some of WP items, or adding some conditionnals to shows them to certain roles only.
BuddyPress uses templates and depending what a member does and where, such a template is fired.
Most of these BP templates are using a loop which you can customize. See Codex for details on each and what you can do with extra template params.
Adding members automatically to sites in a multisite installation can be quite complicated.
This is the solution recommended by many people.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/multisite-user-management/
If a plugin requires you to add / remove role capabilites specific to that plugin, then each member must at least belong to the main site.
Otherwise current_user_can() will return false because the member does not belong to the main site.
If a member belongs to the main site, but none of the sub-sites, then the only issue is that while viewing a subsite custom tab(s) may not appear in the BP dropdown in the upper right corner. But the tab(s) will appear on the actual profile page.
If anyone knows of a BuddyPress plugin that requires setting role capabilities and works without members belonging to the main site, please post a link here.
If anyone knows of a BuddyPress plugin that requires setting role capabilities
Buddypress itself does not require setting role capabilities – so a Buddypress plugin usually should not need this. Most of the commonly used buddypress plugins like photo/album (rtmedia), location plugins, imath’s Rendzevous ( sort of an Event plugin with a difference) do NOT require setting role capabilities and works well in the above scenario.
https://wordpress.org/plugins/multisite-user-management/
I actually tried this extensively even before I saw this post – its purpose is something different. It will not add users to the main site.
If anyone knows of a BuddyPress plugin that requires setting role capabilities and works without members belonging to the main site
Event Manager does this. It requires setting role capabilities and yet no one has to manually set the members belonging to the main site. It has a very wide range of configuration options that makes it rather “heavy” – still I could have used it but it has no Attendee options. It lacks “Attending : Yes | NO | Maybe ” and an Attendee list that others can see. Apart from this, from frontend it offers same functions and users can add Events from the profile too with Location Map etc.
A huge amount of thanks and gratitude to @shanebp, who is actually doing tremendous amount of help and work for the buddypress events plugin. Kudos!
