I’m considering a redesign for my busy members site.

I currently have around 250 members, most of whom are very active in the community, and I’m looking to increase numbers to around 500 over the next six months.

I currently have the Buddy theme installed by Ghostpool. It has been great for the first year of the site, I just have some concerns about how well it will scale up as member numbers increase.

At the moment I have my site set up with a single Buddypress group for general chat and then members use the BBpress forums for more involved conversations. All activity appears on a feed in the centre of the homepage so members can quickly catch up with what’s been going on.

This has been working well so far, but I’m not sure how it will scale up. For example, with my current theme, replies to posts in the chat group are nested and start to look untidy after a few replies (the font size also decreases making them difficult to read). Another issue is that replies appear twice on the activity feed – once under the original post and again individually. As the site gets busier this could get really confusing.

Another issue is that members can reply to (buddypress) group comments via the homepage activity feed but to reply to (bbpress) forum posts they see in the activity feed they have to click the title to go through to the forum to reply. This often causes confusion.

It is good to have the forum activity appearing on the homepage though, I think this helps keeps conversations going much more than if members only saw the forum topic headers on arriving at the site.

The community is central to the site, but members also need to access post/page content, so I need to consider how content is presented too.

It’d be really useful to know what themes people are using for busy community-focused sites, especially larger sites.

Any recommendations?

(I know I can search the theme directory, by the way, I’d just really like some recommendations from site owners using the themes)

[@henrywright Moderator 9 years, 3 months ago]

Hi @julia_b

http://www.bpinspire.com/ might be useful to you. It showcases lots of popular BuddyPress websites and themes.

[@julia_b Participant 9 years, 3 months ago]

Thanks @henrywright. I’m just looking a those now, but to be honest I’m not feeling hugely inspired by them. They mostly look more like content sites with community elements added on. I’m more looking for something where the community is at the heart, so members feel compelled to interact right from the moment they enter the site.

I do appreciate the link though, very interesting to see… And makes me feel like my site is already pretty cool! 🙂

[@henrywright Moderator 9 years, 3 months ago]

There’s currently also 29 themes in the WordPress Theme Dir tagged “BuddyPress”. See here. I’m not sure if any of these will be different to the themes you’ve seen already at BP Inspire, but it’s worth taking a look 🙂

[@wecreatehype Participant 9 years, 2 months ago]

Hey Julia, I use the Boss theme by Buddy Boss for my community. Just launched recently and it seems to be great.

[@henrywright Moderator 9 years, 2 months ago]

Hey @wecreatehype

Feel free to show off your community in the Your BuddyPress forum. It’ll be great to see a live version of Boss “in the wild”.

[@julia_b Participant 9 years, 2 months ago]

Thanks @wecreatehype are you able to share a link so I can take a look please?

[@wecreatehype Participant 9 years, 2 months ago]

Hi @julia_b sure… Its http://www.skateboardhoard.com let me know if you have any questions about it!

One thing that I have found is that with so many features it can be confusing for the users. I have only been live for about a month now and have made several UI adjustments and will continue to do so.

[@ckchaudhary Participant 9 years, 2 months ago]

I’d vote for boss theme too. It looks awesome and is specifically built for buddypress network sites.
http://www.buddyboss.com/product/boss-theme/. You might want to check its live demo.

[@julia_b Participant 9 years, 2 months ago]

Thanks @wecreatehype, nice site! Best of luck with it.

Thanks @ckchaudhary.