BuddyPress.org

Good stuff! I hope to upgrade to WPMU 2.8.4a, so I can test BP 1.1-beta either this week or the next.

Will probably stick to legacy theme support until I have time to play with the parent/child theme structure.

I’m now pondering over whether I should use an internal installation of bbPress now that I’ve seen the new BP forums in action (http://testbp.org/forums). I’ll cross that bridge when I get there!

@aero7

The first steps are to distill your install down to the lowest common denominator. That means disabling all plugins except BuddyPress and switching to the default theme framework that comes with BP. If the problem goes away, then it has something to do with your theme and/or plugins.

If that is the case, they the next step is to reactivating each plugin one at a time until the issue returns. If it does not return, then switch to your custom theme. If it returns, then there is an issue with your custom theme.

Another side note from Andy’s last paragraph, these BuddyPress extensions could come in just about any form; additional theme files to be added as a “plus pack” (remember those?!) or a plugin to override and replace existing files as a child theme, or included in the next version of the theme itself.

Also, if you’re paying attention the directory of the included parent theme is “bp-sn-parent.” It stands for “BuddyPress Social Network Parent” which insinuates that theme authors are encouraged to create their own parent themes for something other than social networking, and opens the door for other parent theme sets to be included in the core if they’re rad enough.

Say someone makes a sweet micro-blogging theme ala Twitter, that gives us “bp-mb-parent” to let you switch between totally different setups. Or say someone switches the emphasis away from blogs and users and shifts it to the discussion or support forums; that gives us “bp-df-parent” and “bp-sf-parent”

Andy’s right too. The majority of people so far interested in BuddyPress have been people that are also first being introduced to WPMU and starting a social network. Very few support questions come through asking how to port this existing theme to fit BuddyPress. The ones that do are typically answered by the theme author or the person is so devoted to making it work, that they convert the theme themselves.

I’m really not sure how much harder it is for existing themes to use BuddyPress; it’s just different, but in a better way in my opinion.

The situation can be summed up like this:

The BuddyPress 1.0 theme structure made it easy for existing WordPress sites to use BuddyPress out of the box (but only with the default theme which was never ideal). However, it made life very difficult for anyone designing a site from scratch with BuddyPress, and for 3rd party theme designers.

BuddyPress 1.1 makes it harder (but still very possible) for existing WordPress sites and themes to use BuddyPress, but makes it very easy for sites starting fresh and for 3rd party theme designers.

The number of people starting sites fresh using BuddyPress significantly outweighs the number of people trying to use BuddyPress within an existing WordPress setup. It is only logical to make the lives of the majority easier.

There will be more documentation on using BuddyPress with existing WordPress installations and themes once 1.1 is released. Let’s get it out there first.

On a side note – I’d really love to see existing WordPress theme designers coming out with BuddyPress theme extensions for their WordPress themes. This for me is the ideal scenario, let the top theme designers provide support for BuddyPress, rather than the end users trying to force a square peg in a round hole.

I’d like to delve into this more deeply, but for now, even using the child themes there is an additional complication. It’s reasonable to expect someone to be integrating BP with an extant site using an advanced WP theme, and simply setting this theme to be a child of the bp-sn-framework doesn’t suffice. I’m working in one such setup, where a theme uses several include() statements in a functions.php file, and setting this as a child of the BP framework b0rks the whole deal. Now, I know what to do here, at least in the simplest case: just amend the functions.php calls. That won’t necessarily persist as the theme is updated, so maybe, instead, this can be done via a plugin.

The point here is that there are easily found examples where existing WordPress installations aren’t set up to so trivially extend to include BP. This one has a straightforward solution, but some will not. And as WP theme developers continue to do ever-more-amazing things with WordPress, and as you and other developers continue to make WordPress and BuddyPress more powerful, this sort of nonlinear theme infrastructure will likely become the norm. I don’t think these are quite edge cases, either; the theme I’m testing with is a free Woo theme, so not quite off the beaten path.

I don’t want to add to the confusion. Rather, I wonder if I could help flesh out some use cases, which might later get wrapped into the documentation (if it’s helpful). For instance, there is the site that purports only to offer social networking, without long-form blogging intentions. In that case, Using bp-default with customizations is pretty straightforward–well, as straightforward as the styling for the site needs to be.

However, for folks who have an existing WP site to which the BP functionality will be at most equal in priority, their branding and existing structure may be complicated enough that simply setting their existing theme to be a child of the BP framework doesn’t work by itself (styling issues aside–there will always need to be style adjustments; this is about structure and objects). Again, as my example demonstrates, this complexity is closer to the norm than some might expect, especially among the crowd using WPMu and extending it with BP. In this case, there’s more to document.

I don’t intend to suggest, as some have, that BP developers need to rethink or revise BP’s scope and structure. That’ll probably happen anyway, as things start merging more, but it’s not necessary. I only mean that the adaptation of BP to an extant site is a nontrivial use case, and while there is forthcoming documentation as to how best to manage this, maybe the forum users and devs can spec out some general use cases and work on how best to develop their solutions.

Hi i have took away the admin restrictions.

Can someone help me see why the members, groups and blogs tabs are not working properly.

Am i missing the themes input for that pages?

Ticked as resolved.

@modemlooper, quite the contrary actually. If you make any theme a child of the bp-sn-parent theme, it will inherit the files that it doesn’t already have, and you can CSS your way out of any style issues there may be.

Okay, so everything is standard issue.

I had a similar problem when I upgraded one of my development sites to pre1.1. I ended up reinstalling from scratch–both WPMU 2.8.4a and BP trunk. I did a clean install–sort of. First, I deactivated BuddyPress since I planned on using the same DB.

Then I dragged my wp-config.php and .htaccess files out of the root directory before deleting everything else in the root directory. I reinstalled WPMU just by copying the files back into the empty root. I then put back the wp-config and .htaccess files, logged into WPMU as Site Admin, and reactivated BP and reselected the BP themes.

My problem went away.

By the way, if you are running WPMU in a development environment and you selected the subdomain install option for blogs, you will have an issue if you have not set up a wildcard DNS record and have more than the main blog. I had this issue with one of my dev sites.

What happened was that it threw an error when I upgraded Mu form 2.7.1 to 2.8.4a. It could not properly upgrade any of the test blogs (other than Blog ID 1) since it could not resolve the subdomains. I had not set up a wildcard record for that dev site.

Shouldn’t change anything? I would maybe build a custom function to get around globalizing anything in the theme though…

Something like…

function custom_member_list_xprofile_data($field) {

global $site_members_template;



return xprofile_get_field_data($field, $site_members_template->member->id);

}

Then in your members-loop.php use it like…

<?php echo custom_member_list_xprofile_data('Address') ?>

In members-loop.php, the function “bp_the_site_member()” loads up the next user in the loop, so you have the data there to use; you just need to gather it correctly and prepare it for display.

When logged in to WPMU’s back end as Site Admin and visiting “Appearance > Themes”, the description under the BuddyPress Default 1.1-pre theme should say:

The template files are located in /themes/bp-sn-parent. The stylesheet files are located in /themes/bp-default. BuddyPress Default uses templates from BuddyPress Social Network Theme Framework. Changes made to the templates will affect both themes.

If you are seeing something different, you need to carefully look at how you’ve installed your themes.

A few questions:

• Was BP 1.0.3 running on WPMU 2.8.4a, or did you first upgrade to WPMU 2.8.4a before installing trunk? If so, from which version of WPMU did you upgrade?
• Are you using a custom theme? If so, what happens when you switch to the default parent/child theme?
• Do you have any plugins other the BP activated? If so, what happens when you deactivate them all except BP?
• Do you have a bp-custom.php file in use? If so, what happens when you temporarily remove that file?
• What errors are you seeing in your server’s log files?

You’ve got a nice custom theme. What you need to do is copy/merge the contents of the standard BuddyPress theme functions.php into that of the theme you are using.

If this has already been done, check your htaccess/mod_rewrite is enabled.

Unless you look into your web server logs when these White pages are generated, how are we meant to help you resolve the error when you don’t tell us? A White page error in itself could mean a lot of things.

As per https://trac.buddypress.org/changeset/1843/, you need to re-activate the theme. Also you will probably need to go in and remove the themes/bp-sn-framework/ directly manually.