BuddyPress.org

@ngoegan the logic in the Buddypress is correct why an user would like to go to register page when he is already registered and logged in. According to your stated problem your can make register page as static homepage and add the above code in your child’s theme function file or bp-custom.php. It will redirect all your logged in user to activity page.
To know about how to add bp-custom file read this beautiful post

Hey Frank, I guess the best question to ask you after all this is how comfortable are you with digging into or working with html, css and basic php?

If a pre made theme is what your looking for, how comfortable are you with taking hours and days looking thru theme demos to find your golden pony or at least making child themes or customizing code?

And then to answer you more specifically to your “How long would it take to develop a theme like the one I described?” , I guess that just depends really. Over the years I have accumulated many libraries of code and theme snippets and I know where everything is in WP/BP core and template files. So for me, A fully custom and dressed out theme might take anywhere from 3 days to 3 weeks if I know exactly what I am working towards at the beginning and have a clear, though out, planned out idea. If I hen peck it or free hand it” like I do from time to time” It may take a day or it might take 8 months, lol.

As a bit of comfort to your quandary, everything you asked for in your opening inquiry is all ready done for you in BuddyPress “for the most part”. A theme like the one you describe sounds like a 3 day to 1 week job to me. Keep in mind however that with me saying that, things always have a way changing and evolving into monsters, lol.

So lets break down your theme and see how it look on paper…. He He, my favorite part…

1. I want users to come to my site, register, and log in…… (Its all ready there) just have to set it up to your liking. It can all be customized quite a bit as well.

2. I would love to be able to customize the way these pages look!(background image, logo, and content inside them)……… (The logo, background and most of the design items are easy breezy as long as your ok with basic html and css and not looking for flying dragons and wizards shooting lightning bolts across the screen. Alas, even those can be done with css, flash and JS, lol. )

3. I’m not looking for a full-blown social media site (yet)…….No need to have what you dont want to use. BP has a full host of controls to limit what can be done onsite by users or what is implemented frontend in its settings. WP Dash/settings/buddypress. Select what you want to use. You also have the ability to write functions, and use hooks and actions and filters to limit or build on anything you like.

4. I want to build a site that where users can log in, create a “blog” excerpt with media …… There are several ways to do this in buddypress, just have to plan it out and test the methods and see what works for you. Mu, Activity and Groups/Forums.

5. They should also be able to put a location tag on it. ….. it sounds like this is what x-profile fields are good for. Just create your custom location field and add it with a template tag in the loop you want to use it in. They fill out the filed on their profile page and it will display in that loop.

6. When they post it, the only people I want to see that are the people they added as friends or if they have their profile set to public……BuddyPress frontend “user profile area” has a settings tab, under it are quite a few privacy features, not fully comprehensive in my opinion but there are a few plugins that add on to this and you can code it in as well. either way. Easy task.

7. And when it shows up on their friend’s news feed it should just show a featured image, title, and the beginning of their text with a like counter….. Easy enough, just write the loop that way, lol. Easy to do.

8. When their friends click on that post it brings them to the full blog post, not just the featured image. Their friends can favorite the content or comment on it. …..The natural behavior of WP and BP posts so we are good there.

9. On a users profile, I would like to show their recent posts, and posts they’ve favorited…. Thats what the friends tab shows but you can add custom queries, and stuff and otherwise tear it apart and pick it of the pieces you want and use them in other places to make custom loops and queries and all kinds of goodness, lol. As long as you make sure things are firing in the right places and make sure certain things are in the loops where they belong, No worries.

10. Site homepage is basically just a file called front-page.php. Copy the page.php from the theme root and then customize the heck out it. Work it up however you like.

As far as the themes go, I never use premade themes. I do however make full use of the libraries of code I have accumulated, (_s) and bootstrap for a lot of my work. Cheesy I know but hey, it saves me time and money and gives me freedom. I rarely find the need to actually make a complete custom theme or write much in the way of custom code from scratch anymore. And I certainly never purchase any themes. So I am not the best person to ask about themes really. I know that there are tons of themes that do all kinds of stuff available around the web. Just have to give them the litmus test and see if they fit your project.

Let me know if you have any other questions or what have you. I will be around.

Hi @billybelly – It’s difficult for us on the buddypress.org forums to provide concrete advice on a non-free product, because we don’t have access to test it. If you paid for the UX Builder project, then they ought to be the ones providing you with support.

That being said, it’s possible that BP templates are inherently incompatible with this plugin. BP technically uses WP pages like Activity, Register, etc, but it sorta hijacks the page loading process in a way that can make it incompatible with certain kinds of “builder” plugins. If you’re looking to customize the interior portions of a BP page, it’s best to do it either using CSS (which you can access via the Customizer and a plugin like https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-custom-css/) or by overriding the templates in a child theme. See https://codex.buddypress.org/themes/theme-compatibility-1-7/a-quick-look-at-1-7-theme-compatibility/#overloading-template-compatibility-theme-files

I think you need a child-theme and change the header.php to include your custom navigation, I have created a similar menu but did require a lot of work in the header.

When new messages the number of messages shows in the message-icon, links to profile page, also woocommerce integrated and a dashboard link for admin only.

The following is in my custom header.php

First code links to profile.
<li><a href="<?php echo bp_loggedin_user_domain(); ?>" class="activitylink" title="My Account"><span class="dashicons dashicons-admin-users"></span></a></li>

This code deals with messages.

<li><a href="<?php global $current_user; echo home_url() . '/members/' . $current_user->user_login . '/messages/'; ?>"><span class="dashicons dashicons-admin-comments"></span><span class="commentcount"><?php if (bp_get_total_unread_messages_count( bp_loggedin_user_id() ) > 0 ) { ?> <?php bp_total_unread_messages_count( bp_loggedin_user_id() ) ?><?php } ?></span></a>
</li>

Since I did not want too much in my nav I only used these buddypress features, more would clog up my website too much.

But where it comes down to is with a child-theme you can make it exactly as you like.

Good luck
P.H.

You will need to add something like this to your bp-custom.php file. If you haven’t already, create this file and place it in the wp-content/plugins/ folder. I added “aside” to the name to tell buddypress this is a custom function and not re-declare an already existing function.

function bp_get_activity_delete_link_aside() { 
 
    $url = bp_get_activity_delete_url(); 
    $class = 'delete-activity'; 
 
    // Determine if we're on a single activity page, and customize accordingly. 
    if ( bp_is_activity_component() && is_numeric( bp_current_action() ) ) { 
        $class = 'delete-activity-single'; 
    } 
 
    $link = '<a href="' . esc_url( $url ) . '" class="item-button bp-secondary-action ' . $class . ' confirm btn white btn-xs" rel="nofollow" style="padding: .2195rem .5rem;font-size: 0.8rem;">' . __( '<i class="fa fa-fw fa-trash text-muted"></i>', 'buddypress' ) . '</a>'; 
 
    /** 
     * Filters the activity delete link. 
     * 
     * @since 1.1.0 
     * 
     * @param string $link Activity delete HTML link. 
     */ 
    return apply_filters( 'bp_get_activity_delete_link', $link ); 
} 
function bp_activity_delete_link_aside() { 
    echo bp_get_activity_delete_link_aside(); 
} 

What about using a custom member front page? Then you’d have total flexibility:
Custom Front Pages for your users profiles

Otherwise, I think you could conditionally filter bp_displayed_user_get_front_template to specify members/single/activity.php for self and friends and members/single/profile.php for non-friends. See this function:
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/tags/2.9.2/src/bp-members/bp-members-template.php#L1397