I’ve spent about an hour now googling and reading on the buddypress site, and scouring other sites online for information about this, but i havent found anything that quite addresses my issue. I am certain this has had to be asked before, so if thats the case, can someone point me into the right direction?

I already have an established wordpress site which I have been using for releasing news information about a sport. I also have a phpbb3 forum that is on site but obviously is not synced with wordpress. It exists on a subdir on the domain.
Right now I have a menu item that brings up a page on wordpress with forum registration info and then forwards you to the site.com/forums/index.php

Ive been watching buddypress for a while, and I want to try it out and completely replace my existing forum. bbpress can handle the forum stuff within buddypress, and all the social networking bits of buddypress can take things to the next level.

My problem is when I install buddypress it pretty much takes over the entire site. (or at least I havent figured out how to not make it do so).
Id like to have my site exist as normal, and then be able to have a menu item that when clicked opens a page (or whatever else) and buddypress and all its menus can then exist within that…

So in a sense the buddypress install becomes a feature of the wordpress news site and not the entire site. Is this possible, and if so is there any documentation on it?

[@sofianjanom Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

What about by changing your WP site to the multisite and activate BuddyPress on a sub site? In order to not appear as a separate site, you can set it as a sub directory rather than a subdomain.

WP Multisite:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network

Changing BP Internal Configuration Settings:
https://codex.buddypress.org/extending-buddypress/changing-internal-configuration-settings/, especially on the “Set the which blog ID BuddyPress will run on:”

[@q5sys Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

@ Sofian J. Anom
That might just work out perfectly, however I do have a further gui integration question for you.
With a simple WP page you have a menu bar with items on it (pages, catagories, etc) Of course those can also have sub entries below them when you mouse over them.
If I go with a multisite i be able to have a menu entry on the main site thats, lets say; ‘Buddypress’ (for lack of a better example, and then on mouseover have drop down items for ‘groups’ ‘forum’ ‘activity’ ‘friends’ etc. and clicking them takes them to the appropiate spot on the subsite?
I’ve never seen a menu item that links to a page on a subsite. If this can be done, and I can find a coding example then that’ll work perfectly for my needs.
Thanks for your input, I’ll make sure to read up on those links tomorrow.

edit: i just glanced through those pages and I have alot to read, are you aware of anyway to integrate stats across a network of WP sites onto the main one visable in the main dashboard?

[@sofianjanom Member 12 years, 5 months ago]

For the second question, you can use the custom menus:
https://codex.wordpress.org/Appearance_Menus_Screen