BuddyPress.org

Hey, newbie here to the whole WordPress / BuddyPress world. I have an existing on-line portal/mag/social network at http://www.doorQ.com. We’re looking at moving the entire thing from its limited dotnet framework over to the open source BP. We know there will be a few issues with the data conversion, but I have some people comfortable enough with SQL to make that work.

What I was looking at is combining the social networking with the magazine features, to try to replicate what we have going now. I wanted to use a theme like this: “www.woothemes.com/demo/gazette/” as the main page for the site, have a few of the social networking aspects pop up on that page (like most recent or active members along with their icons) and then have a second page that aggregates all of the social network activity.

Make sense so far?

Here are my questions:

1) If I use the gazette or similar theme, make it the default theme for the BP install, and add the various components to the appropriate theme folders, I can then draw on the PHP script to add whatever buddy features I’d like to any of the pages created by that theme? Like having the currently on-line members appear on the page?

2) For what is now the BP home page — listing recent activity, users, etc — I can then hard code that as a page on the site, so that, from the main magazine page, there is a link that says something like “Social Network?”

I want everything to be interlinked, the way things are now, on my existing site. In theory, this should work, right?