What I’d look for in a default theme is not necessarily the styling but the functionality. It should provide all possible features of BuddyPress and be documented reasonably well to make customisation easy. Hardly anyone will use a theme out-of-the box anyway. If anything you wouldn’t want to overload it with too many styles and graphics 
.
The theme looks nice and goes with the look and feel of the BP profile theme.
By the way, what will the criteria for the active/popular groups and members tabs be?
Excellent! Thanks a bunch Andy!
@brianbrey – Yes, I’m working on it right now. It’s important for this to be in the first version of BuddyPress.
Wow. I’m super impressed and excited for the future of buddypress. Do you think a version 2 will be part of the dec release?
Keep up the great work Andy!
– Brian
@MrWiblog – Not sure exactly how the “Hot Posts” will work yet. It was more just an idea. A rating system would be good if there is one out there that would work?
@milo317 – Everything is dynamic, although content will likely be cached to reduce server load.
@wildebees – I think a site wide activity feed shouldn’t be too tough. Every members activity is cached in the DB, so merging those together to produce a site-wide feed should be ok to do.
@Member – Site wide categories and tags would be a big plus. Not sure if that will make it by December though.
@orangeguru/dazednconfused – Some people love padding, others hate it. Thankfully you can edit the CSS, so it should be fairly simple to tighten up the theme.
@exchequer598 – I think someone was working on a BuddyPress video component, but I’m not entirely sure.
@trent @andrea_r – Thanks!
Woot! There’s my nose!
Looks good Andy.
For video support, MU strips out any script, like those in embed codes, so you need to add some generic video plugin to allow them.
Looks amazing Andy! I am really looking forward to what trying it out!
Yay! I got featured on the screenshot .
Great work Andy. I remember someone asking for video support. Maybe you can download some free FLV player and brand it ‘BuddyPress Player’ or something and use it for video content throughout the website!
I like all the aggregation. I find the layout a little bit to spaced out. My suggestion is tighten it up a tad.
For orangeguru:
Nice, but did you have published this website ?
What kind of configuration do you used ? WordPress MU + Buddypress + what widget ?
Add
My suggestions:
First look – nice and clean.
But I would say it’s too spacious and “nice” for daily use.
Last year I did a similar page for a client – who wanted several columns for widgets (Blogs, Login, Chat, Community, Forum, etc).
http://orangeguru.biz/clients/bizzlounge/index.html
If the layout / type is too big you hardly see anything what’s going on on a normal sized monitor (1280×800 or x1024) without scrolling. On the other hand you’ll never fit everything on a small or big screen anyway. So the layout has to be compact on one side – but also prioritize the widgets / elements.
I suggest deflating your design a bit, resizing some sections. It doesn’t need to be as tight (in my opionion too tight) as my design mentioned above – but it would help.
D.
I like this, very impressed that it seems that their will be a sitewide activity feed (as opposed to a per user feed) Am I right Andy?
What I don’t see is categories and tags. I know WordPress MU does not support sitewide categories, and I know theres a plugin to make Tags sitewide.
Any plans for these features in Buddypress?
Loving it! I think it does what its supposed to do (Aggregate), and a component/ widget arrangement sounds pretty good.
I like it. Aggregating this information makes an immediate statement about the site and its users. As it is, it’s easy on the eye and the page isn’t overloaded.
I guess it’s all dynamic, so’s the bbpress feed too?
Also are the member widget tabs dynamic or hard coded?
Looks great Andy! One thing I noticed: the “What’s hot” link for blog posts – is there going to be some kind fo rating system (or is there one already I’ve missed)?
Actually, looking at this and the similarities with the default profile template I see quite a few opportunities to create site-wide style templates which may be edited by users. Think: changing the background and text colour for your blog, but keep the actual layout etc.
Thanks for the replies, Andy.
Really looking forward to seeing the home page theme this week. Sounds like you’re including everything that’s needed. The only thing missing is some measure of what’s popular within the community. I know you can use plugins for WPMU to do voting/rating of posts, but it would be nice if there was an equivalent way to track those votes/ratings to show on a person’s BP profile page (eg. My favorites), as well as on the home page (eg. Higest rated posts). Any chance of this being inherent to BP?
It would be great to have the signup process modified to allow the first blog to be registered straight away. Is that something you’ll be able to get to by the release date?
In the upcoming home theme yes.
So here’s why blogs are separate from home bases:
BuddyPress is designed to support existing blog networks, as well as brand new installations. On an existing installation, users already have their blogs set up and established. Forcing a new blog on them just to use BuddyPress features would make no sense and most of them would be left empty and unused.
It could be possible to give users an option whether or not to set up a personal blog with their new home base. The trouble is, that would mean some home bases have blogs, others not. That could end up being even more confusing for users.
Also, another big problem is adding additional authors to the blog. This would mean other site members would be posting within a users home base which would mean an additional layer of security would be needed so they couldn’t access the main user’s messages, profile etc.
Overall, separating blogs from home bases saves a whole lot of headaches, and allows BuddyPress to easily support new and existing installs. Perhaps we can work out a way to automatically set up a redirection from “user.domain.com/blogs/blogname/” to “blogname.domain.com” for each new blog. Going any further than a simple redirect would be fundamentally change the way WordPress MU works – and that’s not something we want to do.
I’d also like to create a BuddyPress blog theme, that will tie in with the overall look and feel, and add the user navigation menu. This should reduce the contrast between home bases and blogs even further.
Hope this explains the choice a bit more.
Cheers,
Andy
Thanks for the questions. Some things I’d like to see on the home page:
– Latest posts, comments, tags and new blogs.
– Recently active, new, and biggest groups
– Recently active and new members
– Member, group and blog directories
– Site wide activity stream
– Recent group forum posts
– Latest photo updates, most viewed photos
Just some initial ideas. Most of this should be possible already with what is already there. I’m going to tackle the home theme next week.
As for your second question. I’d like to see the signup process modified to allow the first blog to be registered straight away. This may be down the line a little bit though.
Blogs will stay on their own subdomain/subdirectory simply because this is the way WordPress MU works – and changing that would break existing installations.
Site RSS feeds will be available at some point.
Andy
I’m putting the final touches on the codex theme today, which should be live at some point this afternoon. Once that is activated the docs tab will be consistent with the others.
The demo tab should be a simple one to solve – I just need to add the site header to the home theme.
