B.Participant
Thanks everyone, I was going to say after the first two post that I was going to jump into Child Theming something I’ve wanted to do for a while. The second two post sound more like using the theme pack and making a standard theme may be a better option. Ah, I’m back where I started! I think I’m leaning towards child theme for two reasons 1) it’s something I’ve wanted to learn and 2) It has all the BP ajax, CSS, etc.
Thanks for your input thus far and I encourage you to keep it coming.
You don;t need to create a child theme if you’ve downloaded one to use. And you need to keep the parent them there too.
Which theme did you want to use? TwentyTen? If you have the twentyten child theme I did, then activate that one. Leave the rest where they are.
I only start with a child theme off the default BP theme, *if* the markup of the non bp-areas (blog pages, etc) is close to what I want in the end.
I disagree. Using the BP Template Pack and building as a child theme of BP-Default have their respective advantages and disadvantages.
An advantage of using the Template Pack which I feel you’re overlooking is that it allows theme designers to quickly get the required template/css/js files into their custom theme. This is a lot quicker for a non-BP-expert than figuring out which files are required. The designer then has two options; add, possibly duplicate, your CSS to style the BuddyPress templates to match the rest of the site, or use the Template Pack files as a skeleton, which the designer can then use to rebuild those templates to their own HTML/CSS specifications (perhaps to use a theme framework).
Don’t use template pack. That’s a quick fix to get WP users without theming skills using BP. For the long run you are better using a child theme as a start. Upgrades are easy this way too.
Hi, we always create a child theme derived from the BuddyPress default theme (we are on our 5th commercial BP project at the moment).
We customise heavily, change an awful lot of the CSS, and tear our hair out at the masses of unnecessary divs and classes. But, on the other hand it does give us a huge head start – BuddyPress needs a lot of template files and loops that aren’t in standard WordPress themes.
If you are happy with the default structures and functionality, you can get a long way quickly with this approach. Styling the layouts to your needs.
If you want to add new functionality, seriously enhance the loops, and so on – you are in for a bigger challenge – it’s not as easy as WordPress theming, you quickly end up in hooks, filters and plugins (which you can usually avoid in standard WP theming), and a fairly restricted API (which is due to get better, and better documented). The joys of building on the sands of a still relatively early stage project.
Good luck – I’m sure you’ll create a great site.
Roger
p.s. setting up a child theme is straightforward – a few lines in your style.css. We typically mimic the folder structure of the default theme, copy over just the files we are specialising (most of them!), and work from there. Only strange thing is functions.php – a functions.php in your child theme doesn’t override the one in the parent theme, both are used.
p.p.s. I can’t comment on the theme pack plugin… I haven’t used it
Instead of re-enabling the admin bar every time, why don’t you just use this xprofile_setup_adminbar_menu() somewhere in your theme?
Make sure you wrap [ul] around the function though.
Either that, or enable the BuddyBar for admins only.
Actually thekmen is right.
get_stylesheet_directory_uri() should return the URL to your child theme.
Also, re: TEMPLATEPATH – I’d use STYLESHEETPATH instead.
That’s only for CSS 
I suppose, you could point to that and then go outside of it… maybe, possibly… but that’s still kind of a hack way of going about it, haha. Ah well, like I said… no biggie.
To remove the dropdown menu, copy over /activity/index.php to your child theme and remove the following list item:
http://pastebin.com/ZLBBYU9u
@hnla I’m afraid to say I have changed the 4 php files and the js in my theme and still no luck
I liked this follow up post about the GPL from the WP lead developer: http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/why-wordpress-themes-are-derivative-of-wordpress/ I learned a lot about the license as well.
The main problem is you can’t do find and replace all. It breaks the file. You have to hit next over and over and search manually. Very time consuming when you want to just change one word.
A reason I’m wanting an easier fix is for theming. Say you are developing a theme for sports teams. You would want the user of that theme to change groups to teams. They are not going to edit a po file. ‘Groups’ in my opinion is too generic anymore for social networks. The network is the ‘group’. Unless you are trying to do a facebook type site then ‘groups’ will work but for niche sites it’s too generic.
Thanks Mercime,
I downloaded the zip files and extracted them via cpanel from hostgator. Same problem, I even installed BP MU with wp 3.0 on another domain and account to test it and same outcome. It is not picking up the Twnety Ten Theme but everything else works. I am using my reseller account, I don’t know if that would be an issue. Also I noticed my “.htacccess” file (i think i pronounced it right) was burried in BB Press. (that’s where I added step 3 in copying the rewrite files). I don’t know if that has anything to do with it? Also it was set up with fantastico for wordpress 2.9.2 then I changed it to 3.0.
@nit3watch That’s an interesting idea about .po/.mo templates. Maybe in the future, if BP starts shipping with more than one default theme, it could also ship with more than one such default template, just to give people a sense of how you might make BP act differently.
The slug idea might be workable (though awfully messy) for English, but it simply couldn’t work more generally.
And to hide the dropdown filter box here is what i added in my child theme’s style.css:
#activity-filter-select { display: none; }
Yes those are the changes and you need them made to any of the files that ordinarily live in /bp-default/ but in this instance will reside in your theme folder.
Hello,
Thnx Roger. I did make some research and found this post:
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/creating-extending/forum/topic/how-to-add-per_page35-without-messing-up-load-more-link/
Since I also have this code in my activity-loop.php:
php if ( bp_has_activities( bp_ajax_querystring( ‘activity’ ) ) ) :
Thanks to @Boone :
https://buddypress.org/community/groups/creating-extending/forum/topic/how-to-add-per_page35-without-messing-up-load-more-link/#post-45733
I did this in my child theme’s function.php file:
function my_custom_query_filter( $query_string ) {
$query_string .= ‘&action=activity_update’;
return $query_string;
}
add_filter( ‘bp_dtheme_ajax_querystring’, ‘my_custom_query_filter’ );
It seems to work! I now just need to get rid of the dropdown filter boxes!
Thanks @hnla point taken 
So to clarify I need to make the changes here:
https://trac.buddypress.org/changeset/3111/branches
but with the theme edits made in my custom theme rather than the default theme?
Hi,
I advise doing this in your own child theme:
You’ll have to modify the /activity/index.php file. In there you can change your activity stream loop to just return status updates, and you can also remove the dropdown filter.
This page gives some guidance on modifying the activity stream loop, including the filter you’ll need just for status updates:
https://codex.buddypress.org/developer-docs/custom-buddypress-loops/the-activity-stream-loop/
Cheers,
Roger
Obviously these themes are at fault in as much as there were changes to the approach that zebra striping took the majority of the changes were in core files which you should have in 1.2.5.2 but also there were changes made to theme files which is always likely to be an issue where non default themes are used as you will need to be aware of changes or wait for the theme author to update.
The table that lives in the forum directory is missing a class you need to go through all tables and add ‘zebra’ to the table class
Very minor point when posting to forums it’s better not to call on a member directly, the community has a lot of very knowledgeable people helping out a particular member may not be available or may be busy, so don’t impose or limit yourself
nicely done! nicely done! would you release a copy of your theme or some variation of it… pretty please… well done !
@afritech, No problemo WPTouch improves teh look over the other plugin, but still not 100% solution: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wptouch/
how about get_stylesheet_directory_uri()?
Thanks Yeah, I’ll hard-code it instead. I was hoping something along the lines of bloginfo(‘childtheme_url’) … like an actual template tag but it’s really no biggie. Kind of like a math problem… lots of different methods to arrive at the same solution.
