BuddyPress.org

http://pixelcoder.co.uk/members/alistair is my latest endeavour with BuddyPress. It’s nowhere near complete and I’m at that stage where I’d like someone else to work with and help with the theme. To do code reviews, refinement and design.

A collab build process would be ace.

I’m going to continue writing here as it seems to fit right now. I’m going to outline how I’ve approached BuddyPress theme development at my last iteration. Hopefully someone can see where they could jump in to help contribute to the creation of a new theme.

Concepts
Concepts have always been tough, I usually miss out some important aspect of the design. Like if I was designing a concept for the activity streams, I’d leave of the threaded comments aspect of BuddyPress. However I’ve gotten good at outlining some of the features in the concept stage. Usually I take a BuddyPress install using the Twenty Twelve theme and copy all of the components into a Photoshop document and cross-reference design like that.

The concepts would be an iterative process, with the wealth of templates in BuddyPress designing them all in Photoshop first is very desirable but not very practical. I would love to have the time to really design all components in Photoshop first before moving into code.

Templates
Taking any Photoshop concepts and making them into templates usually is a static process for me, I’ve done the activity stream page design in Photoshop, I then use a boiler plate I have to rough out the html and css of this page. Again and iterative process. If I had 1 Photoshop file to work with, let’s say BuddyPress registration, I’d do the template of that in raw HTML and CSS.

BuddyPress
Taking those templates previously coded has been a bit of a pain for me, I write markup differently to how the bp-default theme shipped, so it really is a case of building these files from scratch. Dropping in the loops, the BuddyPress function calls and actions at each template iteration. This leaves for problems, but I’ve got it down well now and know how BuddyPress works. So it’s like building a WordPress theme on steroids. I’ve even spent a while taking the bp-default theme and removing all the markup it shipped with. This makes building new BuddyPress themes a whole bunch easier to shape. Although I’m still not perfect at this.

Iteration
The above workflow procedures have served me well in getting off the ground with BuddyPress theme development but they haven’t taken me the whole way. I end up failing to use the CASCADE that CSS offers and ultimately reside to the fact I have to repeat my self lots with CSS.

The repetition I don’t fear, but the labour involved really does effect the overall fun in development and really the theme that had so much potential when building the activity stream and registration pages becomes a hard slog to getting something that works. Photoshop concepts suffer in design and the code suffers from bloat (hence my whole piece about designing all the concepts first).

That’s it, in a nutshell. 🙂

@henrywright Not quit.

In global.js there is a line at line 376 jq(‘form.ac-form’).hide();

Which on page load hides all of the comment boxes.

Now when I click on the load more button at the bottom of the page (or one of the .item-list-tabs) new or more Buddypress content is loaded. One of the issues I am having is the comment forms are not being hidden on this new or added content. It is some what a comment issue when not proper calling the .click() function and a .on() or .live() function should be used instead. I have tried a couple of things I have read about causes for Ajax loaded content which doesnt have the existing javascript in the page applied to the newly loaded content, but nothing has worked. So I figured this might be something specific to the Buddypress plugin or something commonly interfering with it.

Okay i made it to where anyone can register now but when i click on the “The following active buddypress componets do not have associated wordpress pages:Activate, Register” it takes me to the pages setting in the BuddyPress plugin but when i click on the register and activate dropdowns there are not pages for register or activate. Do i just need to make blank pages for them or what?

Gravatars (only mystery man) are now working on a live site.

Seems like their are a lot of bugs with BuddyPress. Where can I go to log them?

I have no other plugins other that BuddyPress.

It’s no longer working. Another clean install of WordPress and BuddyPress.

Any ideas?

2 members created, administrator (members were not showing upon creation) and another test account. After login, still not showing.

Thanks for the article although it didnt have my answer it did help push me in a decent direction.

I found that because my $item_template was already filled with the current pages data I had to compare the posted page to the current page and clear the variable if posted page was different then the current. Then my args would be evaluated and the query would be ran. Im sure this has to do with something with the skeleton custom component being set up a little different then the buddypress core components. Ive looked and compared and now that I have my queries working Im not really interested in why they are different.