BuddyPress.org

That’s because there is no buddypress theme for your users blogs, they just take the standard wordpress theme, just like when you would make a WPSA install.

Ah right. I’d copy/pasted that from a standard WordPress theme. Thanks for the correction.

http://codex.wordpress.org is probably the best place to start when trying to figure out what functions perform what tasks for what purposes. Also, think about using an IDE like NetBeans so you can reference functions and trace their usage to get an idea of why you would or wouldn’t want to use a specific function, action, or filter.

WordPress has a steep learning curve, and it uses an action oriented code structure rather than an object oriented one. There are objects out there, but you rarely interact with them directly, and in the WordPress world interacting with those objects is typically left to plugin developers to tinker with, and best left out of the template files.

Since you’re just learning, the best advice I can give you is not to edit any “core” file, or rather any file that comes included in WordPress or any plugin that you might use. If something isn’t doing exactly what you want it to, chances are you can adjust it somehow. If you can’t adjust it, make your own plugin and copy/paste the code that isn’t good enough and make your own functions out of them. If someone would have told me that 3 years ago I would have been a much happier person then.

To be honest, there really isn’t one, at least not on paper. I can’t say that WordPress has one either.

It isn’t really about how the pieces fit, as much as it’s about how you adapt them to fit your needs. This is similar to WordPress, where it started as blogging software but people bend it around backwards to work in other ways.

Without sounding too much like a broken record, the about page sums up almost all of the functionalities of BP; none of them are more important than the others. It’s up to a good theme designer and code slinger to bring those components out and emphasize their importance to a community website.

Out of the box, BuddyPress is designed for all elements to be created equal. Groups are no more important than friends are no more important than activity are no more important than forums are no more important than directories are no more important than… You get the idea… It’s up to a good theme designer and a great developer to make the functions of BuddyPress pop-out and turn a WordPress site into a meetup.com or linkedin.com.

All of the elements exist in the core and in external plugins to do it, it just has yet to be done.

Every wordpress theme needs at least a style.css file, bloginfo(‘stylesheet_url’); tells the theme to get it’s style.css file. If you want another one, change the style.css or just add another stylesheet underneath your style.css sheet.

If your totally new to WordPress, try downloading a theme from the wordpress theme directory on wordpress.org and see how it’s made. Maybe then you’ll have a better understanding on how to do things in wordpress, like calling multiple stylesheets.

Here’s an example.

<link href="<?php bloginfo('template_directory'); ?>/css/style2.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />

I am thinking about wordpress.com and how many users they might be running. If it's in the thousands than good.

It is in the multi-millions.

The bp-default theme is a “child theme” of bp-sn-parent theme, and you copy the bp-default theme and rename the theme folder to e.g. mythemename to make a child theme of your own. It’s not easy. If you have strong CSS foundation and Firebug, this process will take a few hours to tweak if you already have a design in mind.

https://codex.buddypress.org/how-to-guides/building-a-buddypress-child-theme/ Plus google “create wordpress child themes” or check out ” free BuddyPress child themes”

Btw, you can download latest BP 1.1.3 already

The problems are all related to this bug:

https://trac.mu.wordpress.org/ticket/1147

If you want something less you could give Mingle a try, it works on WPSA (Stand alone).

BP is not yet support standalone wordpress, when you implement your site with MU, you can simply disable blog registering for individuals and remove the “Create blog” option in usermenu with some tick.

A few quick thoughts and comments…

1. People use Facebook, YouTube etc. for one reason… volume… millions of “eyeballs” and astronomical amounts of content. It helps that they are a joy to use. Usability is paramount for user adoption.

2. Don’t lock yourself in a closet for 5 years trying to build the perfect solution and unleash it all at once. Who knows where the web will be in 5 years. That’s a lifetime in “web years”. Start small and constantly tweak and evolve.

3. You COULD use WordPress, BuddyPress… but at a certain point I would think you’d get into a square peg / round hole scenario. If you’re really trying to do something new and cool, and you have the funding, build it from the ground up… probably in either PHP of Ruby.