Performance does not boil down to one thing, in general for BuddyPress pages you can think of reducing the number of plugins, minifying script, Installing an object cache such as Xcache and maybe compressing your images with Gzip or similar.
You might also look into using WP Hosting Performance Check to see the actual load times for individual pages on your site.
There’s two main ways of adding content to the members page, you can add it as a wdiget in the sidebar, or you can do a template overload of of the loop page that loads the main page content.
They will be users who have registered but have not actually been active on the site yet. The display of members depends on them having a time since last active, if they have never been active they will not get displayed.
BuddyPress comes with Profile images and Cover images by default.
If you are looking for ideas, maybe you would like to visit my site, I’ve got many BuddyPress plugin reviews to look through and a good section on setting up and managing BuddyPress:
For option 2, one option might be to display the registration form in a widget area on the front page, it’s possible to only display this widget for logged out users:
I think of BuddyPress as an enabling platform, as such the groups features handles the basics and you get to add the features you need by loading plugins such as bbPress for Forums, maybe a media plugin for photo sharing etc. As such whilst the basic features are limited in reality you get to create a custom set of features.
Trying to get a theme to support BP can be a bit of a challenge, if it were me I’d start with adding the register and login links in the menu then hide them for logged in users to keep it tidy, you can do that using WPFront User Role Editor. I run a few sites with theme’s that don’t support BP, it is possible but often you find yourself having to make css changes in order to display parts of the site correctly.
I’ve set up a site, which is about setting up BuddyPress, you might want to take a look, it might give you some ideas. http://buddyuser.com
