BuddyPress.org

I’ve always been of the opinion that drop down menus are evil. To each his own? Drop down menus hide options from users. They also stop people in their tracks and encourage them to start poking around looking all of the second level options… essentially studying your site map instead of browsing your site. The thought process goes from “oh… this must be the link to click” to “oh… there’s more options in here. Hmmm… I wonder what all of my other options are”. Worst of all are the fly-out style menus (like in the Buddy Bar) that are difficult to use and require pixel-perfect mousing. If you mouse even a single pixel out of bounds… they close. DOH!! Also, most web-based fly outs will close if you try to make a diagonal beeline from a menu option to one of it’s sub-menu options. The Buddy Bar suffers from this problem since it’s pure CSS I assume. A little javascript can be very helpful in this case to add a delay on mouseout and allow for diagonal mousing. But if you must use drop downs, I prefer a single level that is stacked vertically. No second level. No fly outs to the side. I really hate the Buddy Bar menus actually.

As for your issues with the theme. Personally… I think it’s pretty well done. I think the two side-by side menus in the profile sections are actually pretty revolutionary and work really well. It takes a second to “get it” because it’s not a scheme I’ve ever seen before… but I think it’s great. But it’s just the default theme. It’s not hard to make new themes that would have drop downs, fly outs, vertical bars, horizontal bars… whatever you wish. That’s not to say the default theme couldn’t be improved. I’m sure it could be.