If you can wait about two weeks, you’ll be able to use BuddyPress on your regular WordPress site!
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To create forums, you need to create a group with discussion forum enabled.
@r-a-y
Two weeks? That’s excellent!
I was a bit worried, because I looked up an old thread about regular WordPress availability and it was from a while ago. Then, apparently, development was going to take longer than they thought – or something like that.
Two weeks. Is that certain?
No.
In fact, I’d say there will be a reasonably-solid beta out within a 2 week time frame, then some time for testing yet to be determined, then a final release.
Oh, and to answer your question, yes, there’s a base theme. You can create a child theme to get started straight away.
What I suggest you do is on a test site is install the current trunk version of BP 1.2 (https://trac.buddypress.org/changeset/2400/trunk?old_path=%2F&format=zip or if you know how to use SVN, https://svn.buddypress.org/trunk/). The new theme, as seen on http://testbp.org/ is called bp-default and you will find it in /buddypress/bp-themes/ however you do NOT need to move this to wp-content/themes/.
You can just build your new child theme as usual and put it in wp-content/themes/ and Bob’s your uncle 
@DJPaul
Thanks, I’ll give it a go. =]
If I may ask, what’s the difference between the BuddyPress I have and this “trunk version”?
Not so much your theme, but compare the 1.1 default BuddyPress theme http://dangerous-minds.org to the 1.2 theme http://testbp.org/. 1.2 also has the following big features:
Standard WordPress support (not just MU)
Activity stream threaded commenting.
Ability to mark an activity stream item as a favorite.
Activity stream item permalinks.
Advanced activity stream filters.
New default theme with improved usability and customization options
There have been some template tag changes (incl. the template tag loops), I would advise you get a copy of the 1.1 default and 1.2 default theme, look at the changes and apply them to your site. There’s no documentation written yet.
And if you’re looking to pick apart what we did to convert exisiting wp theme, you can try a few here:
freebpthemes.com
Well, I’ve crafted my theme and have got it running on my WordPress site.
http://scrawlfx.com
Although on some pages I get this error:
‘Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/scrawlf/public_html/wp-content/themes/scrawl-bp/functions.php:254) in /home/scrawlf/public_html/wp-admin/theme-editor.php on line 75’
Please help me out. =]
Also, posting status updates and new topics in the forums don’t work, as well.
Sorry to bump this but the site’s kind of on a fritz. If anybody can help me out please.
Okay I replaced my functions.php and I’m not getting the errors anymore. However, it doesn’t let me update statuses, create groups, forum topics or anything like that.
