D Cartwright: I’m getting the My Blogs menu, anyone else see this?
Bpisimone: You are free to use bp-default as a parent theme, my plan is to make a couple of basic child themes and add them to the theme repository as examples for people.
If you already have a child theme based on bp-sn-parent then there isn’t really much need to “update” it, since it will still be fine for 1.2 and get updated properly.
I’ve just checked the theme in. To answer andrea_r’s question above —
You will still be able to build themes from bp-sn-parent. That theme is not going away, it will continue to be present for the foreseeable future. I have updated it to be compatible with all the latest BuddyPress changes.
The new bp-default theme will actually be a parent theme. For the default it makes less sense making a separate parent theme since you can simply just leave out all the default CSS and keep the templates.
The structure has changed though, and overall is much better and easier to understand. It follows the navigation of the actual site much closer. Plus there is less than half the CSS and only one major CSS file. The JS has also been hugely simplified.
nexia: That’s not the way the system works, if you find a bug you need to report it. Mentioning it on the forums isn’t going to highlight it to the developers.
The sidebar will be widgetized. It should be quite simple to mix it up with your own sidebar and make extra widget areas that only show on certain pages.
@David Lewis – I will probably play with a few child themes over Xmas and produce some new color schemes with a bit more “flair”. Putting that stuff in the default is just annoying for people who want to extend it.
The colors are easily customized. It’s also possible to upload a custom background image for the header. This theme is supposed to provide a much simpler and more usable base for people to create themes from. The old default was not a good base at all.
There are quite a few interesting elements in the design and good ideas to take away, overall though it feels a little loose. I also find it a bit idealistic, I’d like to see some of those things work with real data.
