BuddyPress.org

@gcbz BuddyPress is commpatible with nearly all WP themes. Other WP themes have their own proprietary templating system (instead of WP’s loop with the_title and the_content in the theme’s page.php file) which trips BP’s theme compatibility process.

One way to address the issue is by creating a new file named buddypress.php which would be a custom template for all BP content in your site. You’d need to copy the content of your theme’s page.php file and paste it into buddypress.php; then change proprietary template tags to the_title and the_content within the WP loop. After you’re done upload buddypress.php file into your theme’s folder in server.

Theme Compatibility & Template Files

Or you could customize each BP component in detail https://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

That can be done via filters.

For example, look at function bp_is_friend in buddypress\bp-friends\bp-friends-template.php

For the members loop, you could use that filter to hook into a custom function that determines whether the members is a client or lawyer or already a friend and return true or false or empty depending on whether you want to show the add_friend button.

We saw your bug report and left an initial response on the ticket at https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5208.

We need a bit more information to work on this issue. Thanks!

look at the original index.php there will be a call to template parts

https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/buddypress/tags/1.8/bp-themes/bp-default/_inc/css/default.css

Only use the css from below 6.0 BuddyPress. Before using it place #buddypress before each style declaration. This ensures it will only effect BuddyPress specific HTML. You may still need to edit or remove styles because this is based on BP-default and not the new template files.

#activity-stream {
margin-top: -5px;
}

becomes

#buddypress #activity-stream {
margin-top: -5px;
}

BuddyPress css is very minimal as to not force design on a users site. You will need to add your own css to make it look more inline with your sites theme.

Read this to learn about template hierarchy https://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/template-hierarchy/

Think you are, but not quite sure what to suggest, but using options table is a possibility? But even then you have to remember that the page doesn’t really exist or at least technically you only have one template file to add logic to, although you can extend that with the additions made to template hierarchy in 1.8.

You possibly need to be targeting filters at the content based on a page check perhaps in combo with a series of option values?