To hush the “No BuddyPress theme” nag you need to add a “buddypress” tag to your theme css header.
If you want to use BuddyPress with an existing WordPress theme you need to copy over the theme files. You’ll need to adjust the HTML to match you theme though.
This is never going to be the ideal way to do things though, the best experience with BuddyPress is always going to be building a site from scratch with BuddyPress in mind.
Unloading the plugin is not that user friendly as it doesn’t tell you why it won’t activate. Instead with a “return;” call in the code above it will still activate, but will not execute any code. That way everyone is happy, and nothing chokes.
If you’re not using the default themes, or you haven’t created a theme that is a child of bp-sn-parent then you need to install the back compat plugin to get this back again:
A good idea is to change the signup slug to something else. This will help significantly. Also, if you don’t need to provide blog registrations, then turn this option off.
The problem with bundling a solution in the core is spammers will eventually get around this and it will become useless. The best way to fight spam is to have something unique on your site that stops them in their tracks. A completely unique signup slug is a good way of doing this.
There is already a global activity search, but it is not available in the template. It would be really quite simple to build a plugin to add this, and to add an extra @mentions tab for each user.
My suggestion would be that these are built as plugins to see how people react before putting it into the core. It is too late for these additions in 1.2.
Yes, it runs a database upgrade when you update the plugin, it has always done this since 0.1. If you didn’t back up then you’ll need to fix the problems you are having with trunk.
It will work if you copy it, but when you upgrade BP in the future you will probably run into upgrade problems, or will not see any new theme based features.
Did you create a child theme? If you did, then you should have no problems. It looks to me like you do not have any of the javascript, which means nothing is loading properly.
If you need privacy then use Jeff’s plugin. It has great potential, but it’s not ready for 1.2 core.
With all due respect, the developers seem more interested in “new features” and cool coding challenges than straightforward usability and making sure the core is rock solid.
Adding “with all due respect” at the beginning of a sentence doesn’t stop you sounding like a troll. A considerable amount of time has been spent improving the core code and the usability of the default theme. If you’re following the trunk and the dev process (which I assume you aren’t based on your own assumptions) you’d already know this.
