There’s quite a lot of development activity going on right now with BP “under the hood” so to speak. Have a read of this blog post which announces the recent release of BP 2.0:
I like the idea of the left-hand side navigation (viewing on desktop). It seems to allow everything else to have more space on the screen. The colour scheme is good too, very easy on the eye.
Maybe add a little left and right padding for when people are viewing from their mobiles or tablets. To do that, you could probably make use of Bootstrap’s media queries to target the various device sizes.
friends_check_friendship_status() will handle the ‘friend check’ for you. bp_activity_at_name_filter is the @-mention filter you speak of. It’s hooked to various stuff such as bp_activity_comment_content and pre_comment_content. Hope this helps. If you need anything else just shout.
Which theme are you using? It isn’t great practice to display member’s email addresses on a site by default. Perhaps you should try a different theme which doesn’t do this.
Yes you can tweak the default sign up to do that. Also, consider using something like this to redirect logged-out users away from content you want accessible to logged-in members only.
It isn’t possible by default. You could set up a new page and direct member’s to it on successful registration. That page would have a form on it which lets the member add profile info. Then when that page’s form has been processed successfully the member is taken to the third page and so on.
template_redirect is the hook you’d need to use and wp_redirect() will enable the page ‘hopping’.
