Re: Why is it a bad idea to copy “bp-default” theme?
@crashutah – that all depends how much you’ve specialised your child theme away from the default. It also depends if there are new features you want to take advantage of – in which case dig around and see how they are being used in the default, and ‘steal / adapt’ as necessary.
Remember for the most part, a theme is about presentation rather than underlying function / features. That said, this can be blurred as you dig into the activity loops and directory template files.
We typically derive our child themes from the bp-default theme, but make very considerable changes – chopping out big chunks of the over heavy markup, and making somewhat dramatic changes to the layout. By deriving, we do however get to make use of some of default templates especially within the social loops, etc.
For some of our newest sites, where you would struggle to know BuddyPress was even there, we are building our own themes from scratch.