Re: How do I clear the menu bar?
lol Oh Ren… haha!
@brandtd, this is certainly possible. As a matter of fact, this should happen as default unless you change the width of the body or html elements themselves. This is because the “Buddy Bar” isn’t contained by anything that has a relative position attached to it.
In bp-core/css/admin-bar.css – Try…
#wp-admin-bar {
position: absolute !important;
top: 0 !important;
left: 0 !important;
width: 100% !important;
z-index: 1001 !important;
height: 26px !important;
color: #fff !important;
text-align: left !important;
background:url(../images/admin_bar_back.gif) #818181 repeat-x !important;
}
@brian, duh I get what you’re saying now. If I can give some feedback about the Buddy Bar for a moment, I feel that it should be an all or nothing kind of deal. Either it’s always there for people to use, or it’s never there and people have to naturally find their profile area and do things from there. Toggling a whole new set of what are essentially just short-cuts and adjusting the entire layout of the screen, even if by 26px, provides for a moment of awkwardness from a user perspective. For the 3 seconds it takes for someone to think to themselves “Hey what’s that? Do I need it? What does it do? Oh gosh there’s tons of menus now? What is this stuff?”
Now if you’ve used WordPress.com or signed up for a Gravatar before, then the bar idea isn’t new. But for what I consider the core crowd we’re catering to by using BuddyPress as a social networking platform, if it isn’t uniformly worked into the design of the site from the beginning, it only serves to confuse.
Again, this is just my opinion. Not saying it’s right, and certainly not saying that there is a better way. Just saying… 
/rant
Back on topic. In theory you could put a…
<body>
<?php if (is_user_logged_in()){ ?>
<div id="buddy-bar-buffer"></div>
<?php }?>
In your header file, and attach the CSS to that, rather than to the body itself? That would then only show that buffer when the user is logged in, and once they are logged in, that buffer will push the body down (as styled by the CSS you will give it in your base.css).
Does that make sense?
