I’m not sure what you mean. It’s possible for users to choose traditional WordPress themes for their blogs, while using BuddyPress themes for the BuddyPress-related stuff. I struggled with this too, but if you read the instructions for the individual theme downloads, it makes more sense. The instructions for the package download don’t exactly make it clear.
So, I’ve got a BuddyPress home theme with its own name, a BuddyPress member theme (which is required), and then a traditional WP theme I’ve set to “default” (by changing its directory name to “default”), which is the default things for user blogs. And I will also have a selection of traditional themes that users can switch their blogs to.
Good luck!
Mark
Thanks Andy for the link. I do find it a bit confusing how the current themes are working.
If I understand it correctly, all the “My Account” pages are defined in the user theme, while they should be, in mine opinion at least, be in the home theme. The reason why I think this, is because it are all pages which aren’t linked to the users blog. Most people probably want to give these pages the same look and feel as the home page.
For the user themes, I would expect to only find things which are related to the users blog.
Personally I would like to give my members a selection of themes where they can choose from for their blog, so they can individualize it a bit. As far as I have been able to figure out, that isn’t possible yet.
When you would have the possibility for members to select a theme for their blog, it would only make more sense to have all those pages like the “My Account” pages in the home theme.
But that’s just my 2 cents. I would love to read your opinion about it.
I now see where you’re coming from. The BuddyPress Forum settings state:
“To enable forums for each group in a BuddyPress installation, you must first download, install, and setup bbPress and integrate it with WordPress MU.
Once you have bbPress set up correctly, enter the options below so that BuddyPress can connect.”
Well, I’ve turned the integration off but can still post. I need to look at this some more.
There isn’t any configuration option to do what you want. You’ll have to customize wpmu or use a plugin if such a thing exists. Try searching the wpmu forums https://mu.wordpress.org/forums/ or over at
[SNIP] cancel all that.
As I was getting the url for wpmudev.org and their plugins area the front page has this:
http://wpmudev.org/project/default-user-role
This seems to set the default user role for new blog owners. Go figure.
!
Can you use normal wordpress themes as user themes in buddypress or are the themes different?
What would be needed to change a wordpress theme into a buddypress theme?
I don’t believe their is such a thing as “buddypress forums”, I believe buddypress requires bbpress for it’s forum capabilities.
WordPress MU will scale without question beyond the needs of any individual providing enough server backend power.
BBpress as a stand alone should be able to scale large enough for most people. Due to a the different nature of forum database structure, it isn’t as easy to breakup among many servers as a the mu blogs are. An active forum can easily have 100k’s of posts, and I’m not aware of a way to archive older posts into backup tables. BBpress uses 1 table for all posts, it would be possible (there might even already be a plugin to do this) to move each forum to a seperate table, and therefor possibly a separate server.
My concern would be for the XML-RPC mechanism used to talk to the forums. This was designed, with good caching, but on a very large buddypress install with 100’s of active groups and 10000’s of members I wonder how much overhead the xml-rpc adds compared to a straight database lookup. It does allow for the bbpress to be moved to a secondary server, which is good, and is safe as it stores a bbpress creditials and not database creditals if the admin account happened to get compromised. The nice part is, the it was written with the bbpress_live class, which could be replaced with any other class. So someone could, if so desired actually rewrite the class to talk to a vbulletin forum or other solution. It could even do direct database lookups and inserts if desired. I’m sure we will see this in the near future, as some large vbulletin sites may want to add the social abilities of buddypress, and maintain their forums, as buddypress groups.
I have only used BBpress inside of Buddypress, so I haven’t yet had to deal with scaling issues, as I beleive mine has about 45 posts total.
Any Thoughts?
Brad
http://gorgeousgamers.com/beta/
I am running wordpress mu on a godaddy hosting, everything is fine! installed succesfull (before I used wordpress so I am new to mu).
The problem is I follow the instalation steps of installing the bp, but corect me if im wrong, I need to see the plugin in my Plugins option from the admin, right?
Well I cant see a damn thing there!
Another weird thing is that mu says to use wp-content/plugins and the bp says to use wp-content/mu-plugins.
I am so confused, anyway I tried to both method but I have nothing in my admin menu/plugins.
Can someone please explain to me to how to attach the bp to mu step by step?
I am downloading the core and then ? where should I put it so I can see it in the admin site menu ?
Please help, i’ve lost my whole night trying to fix it!
Regards,
Alex
The home theme is just a WordPress theme, (with a couple of new template files if you want to use the directories).
Member themes are used for all pages that are not blog related.
Try this. It hasn’t been updated in a while by the looks of things but I have it installed in /mu-plugins and it works well.
Hi ! I saw that there was a WordPress Facebook connect plugin.
But it creates a profil page wich is conflictual with Buddypress’s ones, and more over it is not usable with Buddy press. But wuth little work it coul de used (and usefull !) with buddypress :
the invite friends and connecting with facebook login are really great for a community.
Is there a way to implement Facebook connect with Buddypress ?
Will an official plugin will be released, or is someone planning to make a facebook connect plugin for buddy press ? If I knew how to code I would make it myself … 
Thanks for your answers 
yes,
http://testbp.org/news
that is the standard theme applied to the initial blog.
Be warned, you may have problems with some features. It is not recommended to be used on normal wordpress.
is there a BuddyPress WordPress theme?
I want a theme for my blog that will look similar to the social network.
I figured out the problem…I had to deactivate the all in one seo pack plugin. I am running wordpress MU 2.7 and the latest trunk of buddy press. Apparently something was conflicting with that plugin. Now everything shows fine! thank you for your help!
Sometimes when my test members login it goes to the traditional wordpress backend instead of the Buddypress members theme…how do I stop it from doing that? I want it to only go to the Buddypress members page/theme and not the traditional wordpress backend page. Can any one help? Thanks so much!
bbPress does this by default for mods and admins, so it should be that hard to duplicate. Not sure about plugin though. Have you looked through https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/ ?
My 2 cents… Buddypress is built upon WordPress and WordPress MU. If I didn’t like the architecture of WordPress and had concerns with it’s performance to begin with, I probably wouldn’t spend to much time on Buddypress. On the flip side, if I was creating a social compliment to WordPress, I would keep the architecture similar as to take advantage of upgrades, the huge community and extending the system through plugins.
In creating systems in the past, I haven’t designed this way, but I completely understand why Buddypress has made this choice. And I’ll use it. 
There are many places that you can discuss this that I mentioned above including the wpmu, hackers, wordpress & other lists if you want to further discuss this.
WPMU forums as well as in the WPMU Advanced Forums as well as on the WPMUDEV Premium Forums
WordPress MU is configured well, just had to put these lines :
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php
In the htaccess of the server, so that I don’t have any 500 errors in admin
I guess Buddypress is not pointing to the right thing when it wants to create the tables, but there are no errors displayed
If someone can be kind enough to send me the basic sql table that are put in our database right after the good install of buddypress, maybe I could go on testing other stuff…
Thanks burtadsit for the quick answer ^^
Hi, I’ve tried to install WordPress MU & Buddypress on a 1and1 server I got,
All is going well, but when I tried to create a group I discovered that the tables of BuddyPress were not created at all in my database
Anybody know a way to fix that ? Do I have to manually create those tables ? If yes what’s the beginning of the table name ? (like wp_bp_groups)
Looking at is_404() and it’s brethren. These things are part of the wp_query lib that:
* The query API attempts to get which part of WordPress to the user is on. It
* also provides functionality to getting URL query information.
When trapping an url and gen’ing a page based on that virt url we aren’t in wp any more. I see in bp_core_do_catch_uri() that first a check is made to see if this is a blog page. That doesn’t work. The workaround for not gen’ing 404s for directories is to create a wp page that is ignored. We get the title for the page and the directory itself and no 404.
Looking at bp_is_blog_page() I see that all it does is detect if this is a member page, news or a bp component page. Return true else false.
So bp_is_blog_page() returns true for virt urls.
Thanks! I am not as advanced as SVN yet. I tend to beta my install and try to keep it up and running, it is a rodeo, but with my pay-grade of bagel it is all I can afford. So if I download the working version and ftp it to my server it should update the database when I get into the back-end for the first time? So I don’t have to run the update.php like in wordpress? That is good. Now, on a live install I know it is not a good idea to do this, but I am hoping the updates will stabilize my install. I am having conflicts with bp and wpmu and every other day something with apache or the conflict is taking my site down. http://www.theodoremedia.com So with no real formal training but self taught persistence, we are getting grizzly with this great product. Loving it, just have not tamed the bull yet.
thanks for help! I can’t wait until wpmu 2.7 is here, any dates yet for a release?
Chad
I have been having problems with my MU installation. I finally found a step-by-step ebook that explains the changes that have to be made to DNS and more. Here’s a link:
Installing WordPressMu – The E-Book
Very clear and easy to understand. Hope it helps.
Kelly
So It finish by working very well . In fact there is a problem where your WordPress MU/Buddypress is in a sub folder of your httpdoc. I think googlemap plugin don’t find the path for some javascript. When I put the cms on a direct folder all is working fine. Thanks bergsten for this amazing module .
