This is supposed to be a plug-in for some extra features. I keep reading you can use normal WordPress themes but when I try to use one it says I must activate a BP compatible theme. I’m not liking the defaults & I’m not finding anything to replace them with. I’m trying one now & just got 25 emails talking about somebody’s trying to visit this page http://dawnswebdesigns.com/family-site/family-site/Banner-2%20image & is getting an error message but it’s not their fault & I should fix it. I didn’t know that page existed. So I guess this must be robots/a search engine.

I thought there’d be some instructions so we could edit something & keep using our normal themes. I’m finding this: BuddyPress Template Pack & it says it don’t work with my versions plus there’s a bunch of complaints & somebody says it’s broken. Thanks, in advance, for any help.

[@dawnswebdesigns Participant 14 years, 6 months ago]

Hmmm…almost 24 hours & no answer. But hey…at least I was able to post here. I tried to get help from 2/3 theme creators & couldn’t even post on their sites.

The themes don’t work. Also because WordPress didn’t create these pages so if they have #’s I don’t know what they are…I can’t get any drop down menu plugins to work. I got several pages so my nav menu looks stupid. I’m done with this. When this becomes a plugin instead of it’s own lil software that requires a manual & a bunch of time I might be back. But I just spent over 2 mo’s playing with Joomla & Drupal & their mods. I’m trying to build a family site & actually open the doors. Time’s up.

[@justbishop Member 14 years, 6 months ago]

Not sure what to tel you about the theme issues you’re having (I just modified the BP default one), but I get what you mean about the BP groups/forums confusion.

The audience I’m after is used to vbulletin forums, so I actually found some code posted here on BP.org that made groups open onto the group forum by default, and then I put a conditional around the activity stream posting thing on the group activity pages that only allows admins to see/use that. This way, all group activity id funneled into the forums, unless the group admin just feels the need to post something to the activity stream. I also just did away with the ability to post activity stream updates from the sitewide stream page, but you could just modify the ‘post update to’ dropdown menu there to hide and make it post to the user’s profile only.

All in all, I’ve found that Buddypress can be a bit of work if you want to change the way it does certain things, but for most people the features are worth the trade-off of some extra work. I hope you get it all figured out and working the way you’d like