Thank you again for your posts and advice. It is very much appreciated.
I read more documentation and re-read your posts, and I have taken two steps so far, however I have hit a wall with what to do next.
Here is what I did:
1) Created a child theme following all instructions from the official WordPress Codex (https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes), loaded the style.css file to my child theme’s directory, and successfully activated my child theme.
2) Made a copy of the parent theme’s “page.php” file and renamed it “buddypress.php” and placed it in my child theme’s directory.
For the next step, are you suggesting I only need to make some edits to the “buddypress.php” file until I achieve my desired results? I noticed in mercime’s post assisting the user in making the BP pages all have full width for my theme, that mercime recommended taking a copy of the “header.php” file and renaming it to “header-buddypress.php” as well as creating a new blank “sidebar-buddypress.php” file, and adding some code to each file. Do you think I would need to do something similar for my situation for having the right sidebar appear (versus having the pages be full width as mercime figured out?) Or would I only need to modify the one “buddypress.php” file to achieve my results?
To answer your P.S. question, no the theme is not BuddyPress ready. It’s a regular WordPress theme. I just really liked the way it looked for my website, and I was unable to find a BuddyPress enabled theme that fit the style I was looking for.
Thank you for the quick response! My apologies, I thought I read a comment by a moderator from a previous post that said not to follow the instructions about 1.7.1, but I was mistaken.
