[alanchrishughes]

I’ve been wanting to design a theme but can’t seem to find a lot of the files, like this for example

http://buddypress.org/community/groups/how-to-and-troubleshooting/forum/topic/where-is-the-code-for-the-wp-admin-bar/

You have to edit a “core” file so the idea of creating a child theme is impossible. Recently I was trying to re-design the layout of an activity page, but I can’t find the file any where. I actually deleted the entire activity folder from the theme folder, but the page still appears haha, how is that even possible? The same thing happened for other pages. How do you find anything?

[Hugo Ashmore]

If you state some specifics people here will be able to help and point you in the right direction At the moment all that can be said are a few generalities.

Essentially ‘things’ rely on functions and actions generally speaking you are able to cancel and call your own functions using a functions.php file in your root child theme folder. give a few specifics that you want to achieve for the adminbar and someone will show you how.

Child themes work on the principle of overriding existing parent theme files so if you remove the child theme files you should fall back to using the original parent files, so removing /activity in your child theme will not cause these pages to cease to render. Again state some specific items you are looking for and people will help you find them; although to some extent a little trial and error and perseverance is the order of the day, eventually the structure will begin to make sense, it isn’t really that hidden and convoluted for the most part.

[lincme.co.uk]

@alanchrishughes; It’s not difficult to create a child theme. I’ll try to put it in newbie terms as I’ve become increasingly aware that a) lots of WP and BP newbies seek help here, and b) we’re all newbies until we know something, at which point it becomes “easy and why didn’t I think of that before”..!

As @hnla says, a child theme overrides the core default theme. All this means it that if you create a clone copy of the default theme into your /content/themes/ folder, then make some minor changes so that BP knows it’s a different theme and will let you install it. Once done, all files and functions in it are used rather than the default theme’s, and these are what you edit.

Clone the entire default theme folder from /buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/ into /content/themes/my-theme (or whatever name). Ie., copy and rename the bp-default folder. Then edit its style.css file and change the settings in the head to something different. Our new theme’s style.css looks like this;

/*
Theme Name: Facelook
Theme URI: http://lincme.co.uk
Description: A modified version of Avenue B2’s Fishbook.
Version: 1.0
Author: Avenue B2 & LincMe Admin Team
Template: bp-default
Tags: buddypress, blue, white, fixed-width, two-columns
*/

@import url(“../../plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/reset.css”);

As you can see, it still uses bp-default as its template, but everything else is different, so BP will allow it to be installed as a new theme. (There’s no default CSS or admin-bar CSS import because I dumped the bar, and just put all of the CSS in the one file). Note: It’s important to keep the ‘buddypress’ tag in there, or BP throws the teddy.

Any files you change in the new my-theme folder and sub-folders will cause changes, and anything you remove will fall back to the bp-default theme’s style and methods as @hnla said. Obviously, if you only need to change a couple of files then you can remove the rest, and the default theme will take care of those parts for you.

Some of us, me included, have variously whined or shouted about the way BP themes work, and yes, finding stuff in files can be difficult to begin with. Once you find the bits you want it’s easy though, and if you make a pig’s ear of something you can always copy the default file back over your cloned one and start afresh.

You may know most or all of this, but it’s for newbies who may shake their heads at the thought of creating a new child theme. Some folks have done gorgeous new BP themes, and added fancy extras in there too. We’ve gone for plain and Facebook-ish for various reasons, and if it’s of any help to you, you’re welcome to a copy. Just email me at any name at our domain. And stick at it – it gets better as you go along!

[alanchrishughes]

I started to create a child theme for WP once, but I edit things so much I am a basically creating an entirely new theme anyways so I don’t even bother. I just duplicate the default theme folder so I’m not working completely from scratch, name the folder something different, and just go to town on it. A lot of files like the stylesheet and index page I just completely wipe out.

I had been up all night when I wrote this post, but I think what I was trying to ask was does buddypress not work the same way, where you have an actual file for each page? And instead dynamically generate each page out of scattered php? Is there not a page for activity? a page for forums? a page for groups? for the tabbed members page etc.

I thought it may be easier to just convert one of my pre-broken down sandbox themes from wordpress and just add some extra code here and there to make it buddypress’able so I know where everything is, but I guess the only documentation for that now is to just use that new plugin converter. But the first thing it told me to do was to start editing the html, which is the opposite of what I need, so I stopped. I also stopped because the files already had the two divs and id’s it said it needed but wasn’t doing anything, I don’t know if it was a wordpress 3 glitch or what.