The sitewide activity, members, and groups are all widgets which would simply needed to be added to your sidebar. Other than that its as simple as installing BuddyPress and your main site will be maintained while the profiles will assume the new theme.
If you’d like to see a more custom example, check out MMAFrenzy.com where I integrated the profiles into my own design but for basic functionality and maintaining your own theme its just a basic install.
Hope that helps, feel free to ask any questions so I can hopefully clear them up for you.
Haven’t run into this but are you using the latest trunk, what version of WPMU are you using, did you make any changes to the theme? Again, I haven’t encountered this but the more details you can provide the easier it’ll be to find a solution.
Thanks for the tip!
Yesterday I reinstalled for what I had hoped was to be the last time (at least for a little while) worpressmu and buddypress using the subdirectory rather than subdomain option for new blogs. My plan was to simply create a news blog, since that works (as noted by chriscarter) — it isn’t as elegant because you can’t use the buddypress home theme (unless you want whole new buddypress blog with its own useres, etc.). Nevertheless, it works.
I just checked with bluehost, and they told me that I cannot use the subdomain option on bluehost. Maybe that simply means I need to modify the database DNS wildcard, but for the moment I am sticking with subdirectories for blogs and a new news blog — and hoping I can find a way to fiddle with the appropriate php code in buddypress wpmu.
Please feel free to check out the site, just realize its very alpha and could be much beta ; ) — http://whiteblackthepenguin.net/
@wardeh, I’m sorry, confirm? I’m running the latest from svn (r547 till I update this eve). I’m thinkin’ that the people in this thread are having probs ’cause of wpmu configs that bp just don’t like. I’m not a wpmu or linux guru and I try to stick to what works well for others. I’d rather spend my time making themes do what I want them to do and building a site. Got enough problems in that area. 
Sorry, not getting where buddyPress is installed and how you have wpmu configured. There are some options for installing wpmu first of all. It can be installed in the document root or in a subdir. Originally wpmu had to be installed in the doc root for bp to work. I heard a rumor that bp now works with wpmu installed in a subdir of the apache root. True? I don’t know. That’s the first option.
Second option is you can run wpmu with subdomains or subdirectories. You can have your URIs look like whatablog.mysite.org or mysite.org/whatablog.
@CriticalTodd it looks like you installed bp in a subdir off the doc root called ../bp is that correct? bp is installed in the wpmu /wp-content/mu-plugins dir. I’m kinda confused.
Here’s my setup that works:
1) wpmu is installed using subdomains not subdirectories in the apache document root
/var/www/mydedicatedvirtualsite.org/httpdocs/(allsortsofwpmudirsandfiles)
mysite.org launches wpmu
2) buddyPress is installed in the /wp-content/mu-plugins directory
/var/www/mydedicatedvirualsite.org/httpdocs/wp-content/mu-plugins/(lotsofbuddypress)
3) buddyPress themes get put in /wp-content/themes
/var/www/mydedicatedvirualsite.org/httpdocs/wp-content/themes/buddypress-home
/var/www/mydedicatedvirualsite.org/httpdocs/wp-content/themes/buddypress-member
However you have wpmu configured when it comes to subdomains or subdirs for creating member blogs, bp goes in ../wp-content/mu-plugins and ../wp-content/themes
How do you have your site configured?
There isn’t any need to change the permalink structure of your blog. BP hijacks lots of URIs so that no .htaccess regex magic is needed to run BP. Normally the URI mysite.org/ gets index.php and your recent blog posts. That’s what most themes do. BP home theme ain’t a normal theme. 
BP home theme serves as the home/root of a community of blogs in wpmu. I’m still gonna want to post to the home blog for homey, groupy type stuff. Maybe I wanna make those things sticky for awhile. Whatever.
BP does some magic URI hijacking to avoid .htaccess mods. Correct me if I’m wrong Andy but if I remember correctly, browsing the code, I saw BP doing some registering of URIs such as ‘/news’ that gets caught by some code in bp-catchuri.php. BP looks at the URI first and if it’s something it wants to pay attention to then it snags it. Otherwise it just passes it on to wpmu.
‘/news’ is one of them there things. I have the root blog running just stock out of the wpmu box and it works as I intend it to and BP seems happy also. It’s confusing I know. Maybe Andy can gen a list of all hijacked URI patterns to clarify things?
Jeez. I hope *I’m* understanding this correctly.
To accomplish that, yu have to change the style sheet from the “buddypress” theme CSS (style.css), of course if you are using it for the home theme.
And remember that when you access to a member option, the theme used is the “buddypress-member” look 4 the style.css on the folder and make the changes too, i did so to have a correspondence between site colors.
I play with the tarski theme and the way Ben does it is to use the wp filter mechanism. He builds up the stylesheets and javascript libs that are used and then calls apply_filters to trigger them. This allows for backend admin selection of any custom css files. (Anything in a specific dir gets backend admin selection). If I want to create a custom style sheet I create it and plunk it into the ../styles dir.
His entire header.php really doesn’t have any html in it at all. Just a function call. It’s a pain to try and track down one little thing in his theme but it makes it flexible.
You people are talking about the ‘News’ on the bp home page? That just shows the root blog’s posts. It’s the same as running any theme. Normal themes just show the most recent posts. X number of them. The ‘News’ link does the same.
Yes, you need to post to the root blog if you want anything to show up there. No permalink changes should be needed.
Ah, good point on the overwrite… don’t want THAT happening! The php stuff sounds good. I guess the difference is during the development stage that all the plugins tend to be running but thats not always going to be the case once it’s a stable platform.
Lovin’ your work by the way dude, keep it up
Also – the reason there is no custom-styles.css file present right now is because that file would be overwritten every time a new version is checked out of SVN. A custom-styles-sample.css could be included though, but that wouldn’t make any difference to the logs.
Nice ideas. I think it should change to something similar to this.
What I had in mind was to use a PHP file with a text/css header that would dynamically include the styles for each component, as long as they were present. That way you don’t need to load any of the groups CSS if you don’t have groups installed. In the same file, the custom-styles.css file can be imported at the bottom (with a PHP check to see if the file exists – stopping the log errors).
Any thoughts?
Wow, sorry, that seemed shorter in my head
Mumble mumble…I’ve simply wrote a post from the beckend of my blog width bphome theme…(that in my case isn’t the main blog, but I don’t think this is a big difference in writing post…)
Am I a special case?
Well, if wpmu is working then in your root blog, activate and select the bp home theme. Fill the theme with widgets as usual and play. Not sure what your question is.
Good call, Andy. All the files within the folders were set at chmod 600, too. Any idea why this happened? I’ve never run into this problem before now. Anyway, I’m pretty sure everything is looking and operating as it should. Would you mind taking a quick look? One last thing. I need to know where to send your cup of coffee as my thanks. PayPal?
I think I got it moving all files into the mu-plugins except for the theme folders…seems to be doing something, just not sure what to expect yet
How is everything looking now? I went through and changed everything to 755, as it was all set to 600. There’s still 1 dead link on an image but I think everything else is as it should be?
Looks like you are close. You need to do the same on the images directories and the javascript dirs too.
Mine are set at 644 and are working ok. I’m runnin wpmu 2.6.2, as I saw no point in introducing another headache until 2.7 is out.
It’s the admin bar that’s trashed. It’s being served out of ../mu-plugins/bp-core/
What ya got for permissions under there. The images and css dirs?
Huh. Ok, yes, that’s exactly where the css file is. However, style.css is set to 600. In fact, all files within /buddypress-home/ are chmod 600 while the two directories within /buddypress-home/ are 755. Again, the theme directory itself is 755. That’s not right, is it? What should all the files be?
Andy, those folders are 755. Always have been. I’ve tried re-uploading the theme, too, but to no avail.
The home.php requirement should be fixed in r521+
