BuddyPress.org

Not sure if this is the right place, but it’s a complaint for sure, and as this site is a nightmare to navigate here will have to do. I’ll stick my foot where my mouth is and rant, but will happily listen if someone can explain the kind of nonsense I’m coming across while theming BuddyPress.

I’ve spent long, long days for weeks on end setting up BP and modifying a simple theme to suit what we want. Some problems, it seems to me, should never have been ‘designed’ into it. For example, in the Activity stream there are links to View and Delete the post. Fair enough. My theme causes View to wreck the layout and display everything off-centre, with no sidebar. I’ve spent hours trying to rectify it, then had to take a break to help someone out with an old clanker of a PC that stopped working. When I came back I clicked on View, to continue working on getting the View page to display correctly. Then I thought, WHY?! What on earth is the point of a View link, to display something I can already see, on a blank page of its own?

So I’ve done it another way; deleted the code which inserts the View link from the core files. I’ve backed it up for when there’s an upgrade, along with a few other things which make little or no sense. That’s just one example, along with the stupid admin bar which only gets in the way in the WP back end, and confuses users on the BP front end.

Now we’re very grateful for WP and BP, and all the wonderful plugin work done by others. But come on; who designed this thing, and why is it so Heath Robinson, with more unnecessary options and bits than you can shake a stick at? For the next version, wouldn’t it make sense to re-map what’s actually required in a social network site and what’s just a waste of developer time, and our time? Or can someone make better sense of it all (including this site) because we sure can’t!