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Best and most useful responsive theme for WP 4.1+BP 2.1.1

  • @ronia

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    https://buddypress.org/extend/themes/ – I am again looking at this page and this is still empty. WP repo has BP themes but none are sufficient with WP 4.1 + BP 2.1.1 – none plays nicely with horizontal menus or give good integrated appearance to an end-user who is a blogger as well as a BP user. I have been looking at premium themes, each with its own incomplete media solution – buddyboss.com and rtcamp.com Inspirebook theme – the latter appears slower on the demo but has interesting display of the activity stream in the form of cards or boxes like G+ and allows to put profile cover photo (which buddyboss do not have)

    I will like to know the community’s experience with these premium themes ( as there is no core responsive eye-candy BP theme) or if there is any equivalent or better free theme in the WP repo or github (that will have support for future versions)
    – which is faster
    – which gives better integration with WP blogging [ none of the premium demos have “add blog post” interface – the point is that when one end-user goes to add a blog post he should not be thrown out of the BP theme]
    – best responsiveness and mobile friendliness, in general and w.r.t photo uploads ( rtcamp media costs around $250 with plugin and plugin’s plugins, buddyboss probably around $50, none comes with default photo tagging = marking directly on photo )

    In general pros and cons of these premium themes or an useful comparative study is what I or most users are looking for.

    Speed – demo is faster for buddyboss
    Eye-candy – buddyboss more, while rtcamp offers a fresh twist to display of activity stream
    Privacy and Follow – dunno
    Media – each has its own incomplete solution, dunno how the free or paid other plugins work into these themes
    Features – buddyboss has no profile cover photo, activity display is conventional stream
    Shortcomings – none allows to post a blog or event from site activity or own activity/profile page, none allows to favorite/like/star a blog post or any post from the post page to the stream or vice versa. None of their media solutions integrates into the WP media, so users always remains confused about a central repo of their uploaded picture files!

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)

  • @style960

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @ronia I can only speak from my own experience of using BuddyBoss and I can’t speak highly enough with regards the quality of their products and the support they offer (which is truly exceptional).

    My advice would be to sit tight for short while – the BuddyBoss team are beta testing a new theme which I know addresses some of the issues you’ve raised above, specifically the profile cover photo. These are available on Profile and Group pages, and be can turned on/off in the Customizer.

    I can’t speak for the Media side of it as I don’t use photos on my site. But BuddyMedia 2.0 has just been released on the BuddyBoss site which includes the option to tag friends.

    In terms of mobile responsiveness BuddyBoss blows everything else out of the water. Open their site on your mobile, or sign up and try the demo. RTCamp doesn’t come close.

    Like I say, they have a new theme coming, I have it setup for testing myself. I’d wait for that.

    @ronia

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    I have it setup for testing myself.

    Can you please share a link?

    @style960

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @ronia Out of respect for the developers I’d rather not do that the theme isn’t complete. If you can get an email address to me I can put you in touch with them.

    @disha76

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Hi style960, do you know how to contact the Buddyboss people for pre-sales queries? They seem to have no open forum for this and probably has closed the Q-A page in FAQ.

    I submitted some queries via their contact form – and got no reply from them – its 4 days. But the Rtcamp guys seem to be prompt at least in this respect- they reply very fast.

    I will be interested in such a theme if they can solve the “Like” problem of WP-BP. I visited the Buddyboss demo but it does not show how standard Blog post or Gallery blog posts of a standard WP 4.1 would look – blog post submission pages are missing too.

    Do the Buddyboss people frequent this forum ? If they do and answered such queries it would be a good sign indeed.

    @djsteveb

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @ronia – I am having some luck with most of the issues you describe using the “gridilicous” pro theme – and rtmedia plugin… am eager to test out the beta mediapress plugin ( http://buddydev.com/buddypress/presenting-mediapress-media-plugin-will-ever-need-buddypress/ )to see if it works with this theme and others to have better enhancements compared to the standard rtmedia thing.

    A few thoughts to add to your discoveries perhaps.

    (Still have not found anything perfect myself, just piecing together the least bad things at the moment – lol )

    I found that most buddypress responsive themes are based on bootstrap – and since rtmedia loads a lot of bootstrap, and font awesome stuff, things would break when I put them together.. so I have to sift through the few that were not bootstrap based in order to use rtmedia.. bp-social is okay – but not totally (only percentage) responsive… I’ve been kicking around some BP + Tempura Theme and Firmasite as well – but have not done enough testing and modding to say whether they are ready for live sites..

    I got a book on making responsive themes, maybe I will finish it before end of summer and make one. Hopefully the media plugins will mature a bit by then as well.

    @style960

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @disha76 Did the BuddyBoss guys get back to you?

    @dainismichel

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    it would be wonderful, if the WPMUDEV team were to come out with its long awaited theme.

    currently, i own “Terso Theme” and WPLMS.

    you can buy premium wordpress themes that just plain break BuddyPress, so it is necessary to try things out.

    i also run a BuddyPress site with the 2012 theme. i don’t know why, but the activity stream is actually nicely styled and works properly, whereas other themes simply turned the activity stream into an ugly mess.

    one criteria for the theme is that certain key functionality has to work in a way that makes sense to users.

    @disha76

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @style960 not yet. I have checked spam folder also. They have closed comment in the FAQ section and they have no pre-sales forum where one can register and ask question.

    @disha76

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @dainismichel 2012 theme not very eye-candy, it works but some of the problems are

    @buddyboss

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Hey guys, this is Michael from BuddyBoss.


    @style960     Thanks for the kind words 🙂


    @ronia

    Can you please share a link?

    The next theme will be available later this month, so check back at buddyboss.com every so often and you’ll see it advertised there. It is an entirely new concept.

    If you really want to play with it now, send an email to support at buddyboss dot com asking to be a beta tester, and I’ll let you in.


    @disha76

    do you know how to contact the Buddyboss people for pre-sales queries?

    Here I am, ask away 🙂

    They seem to have no open forum

    True, we used to have an open forum, but we had too many spam signups and closed it to customers only.

    I submitted some queries via their contact form – and got no reply from them – its 4 days.

    Sorry to hear. We are usually faster, but may have been slower due to the holiday season. What email did you send from? (you can PM me this if you prefer)

    I visited the Buddyboss demo but it does not show how standard Blog post…

    Here is a sample blog post:
    http://www.buddyboss.com/demo/buddyboss/an-argument-for-simplicity/

    Front-end posting…

    We are going to build a plugin for front-end blog posting. In general we prefer to put big features in plugins rather than themes, so they can work with any theme. Then we style that functionality in our themes so it looks really nice.

    Do the Buddyboss people frequent this forum ? If they do and answered such queries it would be a good sign indeed.

    I check out buddypress.org forums pretty frequently and answer questions 🙂


    @djsteveb

    I found that most buddypress responsive themes are based on bootstrap – and since rtmedia loads a lot of bootstrap, and font awesome stuff, things would break when I put them together..

    Agreed, bootstrap bloats stuff and causes problems. BuddyBoss themes (current and future) are just CSS and media queries. We’re not using bootstrap.

    @disha76

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    I actually would have missed since this thread has become old! But thanks for responding at last.

    1) Can I “Like” from a blog post and it will show in the activity stream? And vice versa?
    2) Can an user see a collection of another users’ Likes? In the demo I saw this missing
    3) How does the theme behaves in WP Multisite set up and/or with a standard 3rd party plugin eg buddypress-activity-privacy.1.3.3?
    4) Media solution by buddyboss is separately priced but seems incomplete:
    – Cannot mark directly on photo, see photo tagging in FB or other php scripts
    – Cannot do multiple ( but max number settable by site admin) photo upload simultaneously
    – Media files not integrated in WP media etc
    5) How does the interface look like when one submits a blog – is he thrown out of the theme?
    6) Less important – Wall comes as a separate premium plugin but does not let you post blog/event/location – nothing except photo. It has also only river display – some premium themes similarly priced offers both river and card display. No profile cover photo also ?

    True, we used to have an open forum, but we had too many spam signups and closed it to customers only.

    I will request you to make a custom solution for yourself to prevent spam signups. This will be more creditable stuff encouraging us to go for custom solutions to Buddyboss. Thanks again.

    @buddyboss

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @disha76

    1. We don’t have Liking in blog posts, only on activity streams posts.

    2. You can see your own Likes in a tab, but not another user’s Likes. You see if they Liked a specific post, but the tab to see all of their Likes is only available to them for privacy reasons.

    3. Works fine with Multisite. When we release our next theme we’ll be moving all theme demos to a single multisite install, already doing our beta testing there and it works fine. Works with BP Activity Privacy too (this is a popular companion plugin for many people using BB Wall plugin).

    4. True, cannot tag directly on photo
    Cannot do multiple photo upload simultaneously (this is a big feature request, will be built)
    Media files not integrated in WP media etc (sort of, they are actually stored in WP Media, but user does not have access to all of that on front-end)

    5. Blog posting is done in admin like other themes. We do not yet have front-end blog posting. That will come in a future plugin we have planned.

    6. Wall does not have every FB feature, but has a lot. The main purpose of it is to let you post on each other’s activity streams. Out of the box BP doesn’t let you do that. Our next theme has profile cover photos actually (coming soon). And we have a cover photo plugin coming soon as well.

    8. Spam signups. We may make a spam solution at some point in time. This is a tricky one. Every solution you make only works for a bit, then the spammers figure out your tactic and update to counter it. It’s a cat and mouse game. We have some ideas, no timeline on this though.

    @ronia

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    @buddyboss

    but the tab to see all of their Likes is only available to them for privacy reasons.

    In BP-buddyboss river, everyone can see what I have liked – so it is not private. Default BP does allow to see other users’ Favorits in the Favorit tab in Profile page – why does Buddyboss kills this? At least site admin should be able to turn it on or off.

    Wall does not have every FB feature,

    buddypress-activity-plus allows to post link, video etc quite nicely and is thus more user-friendly than the premium Wall plugin, imho. There is also a plugin by Brajesh that allow front-end blog posting via BP

    Buddyboss is never meant to load every plugin but if a chosen few are bundled, it will be really good rather than re-inventing wheels at premium plugins, features of which are already available in the WP-BP repo. If users like us see thay they are well integrated into the Buddyboss look and feel there can be more sales of the Buddyboss theme actually.

    We may make a spam solution at some point in time. This is a tricky one. Every solution you make only works for a bit, then the spammers figure out your tactic and update

    Let wp com users at least post to pre-sales and/or free discussion forum. You can do this via jetpack

    @buddyboss

    Participant

    9 years, 11 months ago

    Default BP does allow to see other users’ Favorits in the Favorit tab in Profile page – why does Buddyboss kills this? At least site admin should be able to turn it on or off.

    I see what you mean. We will consider adding an admin option.

    Buddyboss is never meant to load every plugin but if a chosen few are bundled, it will be really good rather than re-inventing wheels at premium plugins, features of which are already available in the WP-BP repo. If users like us see thay they are well integrated into the Buddyboss look and feel there can be more sales of the Buddyboss theme actually.

    I appreciate all of the feedback, very much. Our plan is to expand on these plugins and make them more feature rich, launch more premium plugins and themes, and also free plugins for the community over the year.

    We launched two free plugins this week which you may be interested in:

    Search all BP components in one unified dropdown:
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-global-search/

    Edit BP activity from the front-end:
    https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress-edit-activity/

Viewing 14 replies - 1 through 14 (of 14 total)
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