[Leah]

There’s been some discussions on BuddyPress making it hard for designers. In the companion blog post for the beta release of Canvas BuddyPress, WooThemes writes “BuddyPress is an absolute beast to theme”. Since they (as far as I know) are the first big theme developer theming for BP, it would be great with some feedback and suggestions based on their experience.

[modemlooper]

It’s not really at hard once you figure it out. The bp templates are easy to add. I’ve added bp to numerous woo themes over the past year with little fuss.

[Leah]

But sure would be interesting see what they have to say, don’t you think?

[Hugo Ashmore]

Theres a difference between adding to an established theme, and creating a standalone theme which is what it sounds like wooThemes is referring to and yes they’d be right, BP has yet to tackle this area of theming.

N.B your link is borked!

Fixed ‘http://’ is required for for external links

[Leah]

thanks

[Alan]

It is easy to develop and theme in buddypress just as it is in wordpress ,you have to make use of template tags.
I’m about to release few themes for free soon.

[modemlooper]

Woo themes can be thankful they were not dealing with the classic theme. That theme was a tangled mess.

[@mercime]

I’d like to give credit where credit is due. StudioPress comes to mind as one of the big theme developers who bravely went into BP theme market way before Woo did. Of course way before StudioPress officially did so, there’s WPMUDev who navigated successfully through the waters of bp-sn-parent and the member themes as well and continues to come up with great BP themes with BuddyDress. Much more kudos to the individual theme devs who released their BP themes and child themes to the BP community, even way before WPMUDev rolled out BP themes

[imjscn]

I made a cute bp child them, and I am a super dummy in all aspects of coding. Since bp theme works great with a super dummy, I think it should not be considered as a beast

[modemlooper]

@mercime I hear you

[Leah]

Not really an essay

[Roger Coathup]

We’ve built a lot of sites on BuddyPress now… if I’d time to write about it, I’d unfortunately probably be agreeing with woothemes.

There’s a lot of great functionality ‘hidden’ in BuddyPress, but the API / template tags need some serious work – especially removing all the html they unnecessarily throw in – design & presentation decisions belong in the theme not in the API (and particularly not in the ‘get_’ functions).

If you want to break away from the default theme & basic structures, it’s not easy to theme BuddyPress: too much time is spent stripping out / rewriting unwanted functionality, rather than adding building your site and adding features.

[Alan]

that’s true ,lot’s of things are hidden.