I think best practice really depends on your target audience and what features they may expect or desire from their profile.
One of that main profile customisation features provided in BuddyPress is the ability to “overload”, a profile template file, replacing it with your own customised version. This is a simple way to add your own features to the profile pages.
However, overloading a page means any updates to it in future by BuddyPress would need to be manually added to your overloaded page, so this method, although simple, is not the only way to add custom features to profile pages.
If you look in the plugins/buddypress/templates directory, and investigate the templates in, for example bp-nouveau, then you can see there are a lot of action hooks you could use to add further content in specific locations in each page.
This second method allows you to keep the BP provided templates unchanged, but still add the content required.
The most configurable profile I ever created was for a social networking community that wanted the user to effectively create their own theme for their profile pages. So I built the following additional plugins for the site:
1. a theme specific plugin that allowed the user to fully customise their profile colour scheme.
2. A custom header plugin that allowed the user to select their own header image.
3. Similarly, a custom background plugin.
4. My profile home and sidebar user widgets plugins to allow the user to add their own content into their profile pages.
5. Menu customisations to bring all these customisation options into a single location, and remove/simplify them in other places.
6. Integration with the overall blogging platform – providing the user with areas where they can showcase their own blogs, and also allow them a variety of options as to who those blogs are shown to.
Those are just a few main examples as to the possibilities, but most of them do require some form of coding.
