Reply To: Artisteer Buddypress theme compatibility
The docs can always take improvement, and I think no one involved with them would claim they are anywhere close to covering all that’s required, but writing them can be very time consuming . The theme compat ones that exist, I thought pretty much covered the detail necessary, but as in all things can always stand reviewing and improving.
In your opening post it struck there was a possible level of confusion between the older approach to custom themes using template pack plugin and theme compat as of 1.7. ?
Essentially if allowing BP to run with the newish theme compatibility ( i.e you do not select bp-default theme, or you do not have any bp directories in the theme root e.g /my-theme/members/index.php ) then BP component screens should fit to match a themes content area. In this sense one doesn’t need now to worry about the markup structure as BP uses what exists in page.php (or any of the proscribed file names it looks for first) So here the important question is to ask whether it’s possible you are mixing BP templates i.e some in your theme root, some in theme compat directory – in your theme the only place you should have BP templates is located within a top level directory /my-theme/buddypress/ or /my-theme/community/
In your page.php example the important section is the get_template part that includes the page content loop that’s where /what BP grabs to inject it’s data to.
Now what isn’t known is how your chosen theme is managing styles for those sidebars, but if you want absolute control in being able to configure a primary template file for BP screens then you can copy page.php rename to ‘buddypress.php’ and locate that in /my-theme/buddypress/ now in that file you may call specific sidebars as in get_sidebar(‘buddypress’) along with a new sidebar sidebar-buddypress.php
At the end of the day I think the initial issue to resolve is the (possible) confusion between the two ways of managing BP templates and that you probably want to ensure that full theme compatibility is being allowed to run ( again the bottom line to ensure that this is the case is that one has NO BP templates in the theme whatsoever, letting BP handle injecting it’s content via whatever files the theme provides )
