BuddyPress.org

I’ve been working on converting my wife’s fan site for a band from a single wordpress magazine style theme over to buddypress to try to give more community interaction. I’ve been following and reading buddypress news for the last 6 months at least and we still haven’t launched because it seems like every time we get moving, some great features get added that make us need to wait for that. But i digress…

I have a few features that I’m trying to accomplish for the site and i want to find out if i’m the only one that has looked for these, or if i’m just not finding how to do them anywhere.

1. We imported our userlist from the old site over to the new wpmu/bp installation so that their users are already there and they can login immediately. in the event that some of them used their real names or email addresses as their usernames and don’t really want that listed in the member directory, is there any way to allow users to “hide” and not be listed in the member directory? We imported almost 1300 users and it would be nice to let the majority of them use their existing credentials but for the few that never wanted their username to be publicly listed, I’d hate to cause problems. I’ve loaded Jeff’s privacy plugin but that still doesn’t allow hiding from the member directory.

2. we’ve modified the cosmic buddy theme, which is a widgetized theme, for use for the member blogs following the tutorial by pulling out the home.php with the rest. This seems to work well but I wanted to know if anyone knows of a way to “force” a particular widget to show up automatically on all created blogs? We’re using the group blog plugin but since we’re not using the bp default theme, we can’t use the theme it came with. The blog template seems to work well except that their is a sidebar in the theme and if someone creates a new group blog, until we find out that the blog is there, it’s going to show that it needs widgets added. We’d also like to “force” some widgets like recent comments and some ad blocks in there. Is there a way to do this or is it better to just hack the member theme some more and pull out the sidebar and hard code what we need in there?

3. by these questions, it should be obvious that we’re pretty new to php and learning things. We’ve found that there are some bp themes that have great member profile pages that include things like their albums, their wire, and other info on that page. The cosmic buddy theme really only lists the wire on the page with the rest relying on navigating through the menu. Does anyone know of any tutorials to customize the profile page to pull in things from the other pages/plugins? For instance, we have the bb-picture album plugin from Manoj Kumar. If we want the gallery to show on the profile page, would that be hacking the profile page and just pulling in the code we need from the other pages?

4. If I’m trying to make this a really user friendly site, does anyone know of any other front ends for wp other than posthaste? I really love the p2 theme that was mentioned in the other thread but we really need more of a magazine style theme so that won’t quite work and we are really trying to keep the theme consistent across all blogs rather than using something like p2 theme for the member blogs while using another for the home blog. I’ve already loaded posthaste and got it working but I haven’t found anything that includes the ability to insert images like the new front end on the p2 theme. would it be easier (and/or legal/ethical) to pull out the front end from someone else’s theme and import that into the current theme or would it be easier to find someone to assist with adding the insert image feature to the posthaste plugin on my site?

5.Also, I know that this isn’t the right place to ask for questions on someone else’s theme, but is anyone using that theme that would know how to pull out the nav bar on my sub blogs? By converting the buddypress theme to a blog theme, it still leaves the nav bar alone so if my site is at blog.com and i have a group blog at sub.blog.com, the nav bar still shows the home, blog, members, forums, etc but all of those are all wrong because they point to sub.blog.com/members, etc. Is it possible/easy to create a global nav bar so that on all the sub blogs, the members/groups links all point back to the main blog or is it easier to just pull it out?

Thanks for any and all answers you can give me on these features.