[Dean Robinson]

I’m finally back working on the “HELP” BuddyPress child theme that I started months ago, just thought I’d share some of the details with the community to get some running feedback while its in development.

Live demo: http://help.deanjrobinson.com/

Things of note so far:
– This is child theme built on top of the default BP theme
– The layouts and styling of most of the core functions remains the same as the default theme, with a few tweaks here and there (still working through each section)
– ‘accent’ colour will be customisable via the admin (will change links, main nav highlight, header hover colour – all the burnt orange bits)
– Custom widgetised-homepage, with custom interface added to ‘widgets’ screen (admin screen shot http://drp.ly/1osu2s )
– Three additional widgets (for use with custom homepage, or in the pre-existing sidebar) new widgets are:
— “Recent Forum posts” – from all forums or a selected forum
— “Blog post loop” – from all categories or a select category
— “Groups + Topics” – as seen on my site (link above) show selected groups and recent topics from each
– Relocated BP admin bar, sits alongside main nav, retains drop-down functionality (see demo site)

[@mercime]

@deanjrobinson – cool functions, almost as cool as the Fluency Admin plugin
I would like to suggest adding categories to your Groups i.e. Help Groups for Plugins, Help Group for Themes, etc. for better organization.
Cheers.

[Dean Robinson]

@mercime good call on the categorisation and something that can be easily achieved using multiple instances of my “Groups + Topics” widget (already done ) assuming thats what you meant?

[bpisimone]

@deanjrobinson As mentioned on twitter before I’m really looking forward to this. How is the twitter/facebook integration achieved? Through existing plugins I assume?

[Dean Robinson]

@bpisimone Facebook login is achieved using https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-fbconnect/ and twitter is achieved using https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/twitconnect/