Thanks for the feedback guys. What I’ve resolved to do was code a new WP blog template to be used exclusively for the blogs on the site while using the default BP for the member pages, similar to the setup of http://testbp.org/
I originally wanted to use BP’s beautifully-created default theme for both the member pages and the blogs, but apparently this cannot be done (which I find shocking)…unless you want to hard-code the BP template. I would do this but it’s simply out of my league and I wasn’t able to find the help on the forum on how to do this.
I signed up for a test account with http://testbp.org and found they aren’t even using the default BP theme for blogs but a generic WP blog theme. I’m surprised because part of the appeal of using BP is that all the components are nicely integrated both in design and functionality. Using the default WP theme for the blog breaks the design aspect and makes the functionality that much more difficult to do for frontend guys like myself.
I’m going to stick with WPMU/BP for now and hope a plugin is made that remembers widget positions for all blogs created, thus allowing me to stick with the default BP theme for blogs, or a non-widgetized version of the default BP theme. I would pay for that to be done and I might have to look into that rather than create a whole new theme for my blogs that doesn’t even keep the look and feel of BP.
I am using a plugin that makes all of my new blog signups an ‘editor’ of their own blog. I want to use Buddypress and have all of the widgets the same for all of my new blogs, so they look the same. Is there a way to do this so I don’t have to set up each blog’s widget positions as it’s created? I can’t imagine every Buddypress install out there gives their users admin access to change the templates? Clearly I must be doing something wrong.
My next question is about calling the different sidebar widgets to where the sidebar code was. I believe this was where I got stuck the last time. What is the best way to go about doing this with the right code?
