@kjgbriggs – setting up a child theme is just a way to essentially make a new theme – using another “parent” as your template. When you activate, it’s just ONE theme that it handling everything for your wp/bp site.
You do no provide enough details about your theme names, and what you like about the main one and the one that ‘looks better with buddyprees’ – however, if you just like the layout of the bp components with he second theme more, then yes I believe you could make a child theme from your primary theme, and then go into your secondary theme and start to pull some of the layout code for the bp specific components and add those to your main theme.
If it’s overall colors and such you are trying to mix, like have a red header for your main site and a blue header for your bp pages – that is not going to be so easy..
it’s easy to learn about child themes here: https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
and a little more digging to learn about bp specif pages and components here:
BuddyPress Theme Development
for minor changes you can keep things simple by activating your second theme that you like with the bp looking better, go to the bp pages where you like the layout, right click on the element that looks good and click inspect elements – this will give you the css rules that are working the way you like.. things like alignment properties, bold, colors perhaps – copy those – put them into your new child theme styles and such..
of course some things can be more tricky if your second theme has fancy functions.php, java and all that included.
Sorry for not providing enough info.
My main theme is called Divi and is created by Elegant Themes.
The theme I want to use just for BuddyPress stuff is called Oblivion and is created by Sky Warrior Themes.
An example of the BuddyPress forums nd layouts is here on the Oblivion demo:
http://skywarriorthemes.com/oblivion/forums/
I just want the styling for the BuddyPress and BBPress stuff from Oblivion in Divi.
I did a bit of Googling and came to the conclusion that the best way to do this was to use a Child Theme.
Divi is updated quite a lot so I would either have to not update anymore or lose the styling if I were to add the styles to Divi directly.
There is little information I can find on having a child theme for specific things such as buddyPress though and I am unsure of how to do it.
@kjgbriggs – child theme is the same for wp / bp – so you can follow the directions of the link I posted up above to the wp codex – it may look like a lot, but it’s just a few things to do to create manually – once you have your divi child made, start looking at the selectors from your other one and pop the code into the new child – hopefully will be straightforward, mainly css stuff – if your second theme has some fancy javascript called in it’s functions.php (or other unique pages, libraries, templates, etc) in it that divi does not have, that might make for some extra work.
@kjgbriggs – just took a look at your oblivion thing you like – it appears to be the forums layout you are concerned with here – which may end up being more of a “bbpress” theme-ing issue – not so much buddypress… last I checked you can add “bbpress” as an auto-addon for buddypress – but if it’s not profiles and activity stream stuff – you may need to look up some “bbpress” specific theme things if you run into issues – not sure if they go over all that at bbpress dot org these days or not.. I have not checked those forums / docs in years.
checking the Functions file, there is a huge amount of php requirements specified at the top (13 of them), I am guessing this will mess with me trying to make a child theme out of it.
On a lighter note.
The CSS files are included separately so I have the styles for BBPress and BuddyPress separated out for me.
I have tried adding these to my custom CSS, but they don’t seem to change that much, just the overall placement of things.
