BuddyPress.org

For those that want to use this solution with a theme like ‘default’ or ‘classic’, I think this is enough to get you going. For me, I find it a bit discontinuous to start from the buddypress theme home page and then bounce into the ‘classic’ theme of some individual user, and still think about it all as being the same site. I completely respect that that is a legitimate model & approach. It’s just not what I have in mind for my particular implementation.

Unfortunately, it’s not quite enough to just make the facebuddy theme default for all users. The ‘thing’ I want to ‘resolve’ is that for any user’s new blog, wordpress basically gives that user their own buddypress front page, that the user then needs to configure with their own widgets and stuff through the wordpress admin.

For my needs, I would like to make something that is more turnkey for new users, such that they only have to register & create the blog & start posting. I don’t want them to have to think about layout. I may offer them the option, but I want their blog home page to look polished off the bat. Furthermore, this ideal default setup would have a unified feel with the entire site so that as you went from user blog to user blog, a visitor feels like all the content look & feel is homogenous across all blogs in the wpressMU install.

Another way to put this idea is … when you go to the user’s specific blog page, there should more emphasis on the fact that it is a user of the main site discussing on some specific site topic, within the context of the site branding, etc …. rather than making the distinction that you are visiting someone else’s blog. Like a newspaper … only the by-line and the article content vary.

I have some ideas on ways I can approach this. If anyone else is interested in this, I’d be happy to share ideas and collaborate on knocking out a solution. Maybe someone has already solved this problem, but if they haven’t, I imagine it could be useful to a few other folks as well.

BuddyPress is just Awesome!