BuddyPress.org

@jivany

I agree it is annoying having to manually move the theme files. Have you actually put them in bp-sn-parent/ and it worked? I have never tried that! I have designed it so the folder goes in your “default” or customized default theme.

There are two issues with your proposal for automatic moving.

1. If the links dir goes into bp-sn-parent, what happens when buddypress gets updated?

2. If it goes into your main theme, how will I know that I am not overwriting any customizations you have made?

I think the long term solution is to keep the links theme files in the plugin directory, and auto-detect if any custom files were put in your theme folder, but I am not sure if and how that would work.

If anyone has done this successfully with buddypress, please give me a shout!

@marius

Thanks for taking the time to explain your method. I originally thought of doing something similar, but I was a little worried about breaking the flow of how WP “hunts” for templates. In BP (and buddypress links) there are lots of calls to locate_template(), and I haven’t yet taken the time to learn exactly how this works too see if what you suggest causes any problems.

I also have a bunch of calls to bp_core_load_template() that I want to get rid of.

It is encouraging that you have an established plugin that works using a custom locate technique, so I think I might do the same in the next iteration.

STYLESHEETPATH is a sweet constant, I only wish there was one for get_stylesheet_directory_uri()

@DJ

Thanks for the tip. I will keep that in mind when I tackle it

@Everyone

I didn’t receive many bug reports for this RC, probably because nobody will notice they can upgrade until the stable tag changes. Nobody has reported any catastrophic failures, so I went ahead and tagged version 0.2

Thank you very much to everyone that took the time to test this out and give feedback!

@Suzanne

Thanks for the kind words!

Managing themes in BP is a chore, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is just so much HTML required to display it. I tend to agree with you though. Simply extending the existing default theme is the quickest way to get up and running, so you end up with most websites just changing the colors, and not much of the layout. A separate framework for developing themes would be awesome, but you are still at the mercy of the direction of the project.

When 1.2 comes I will have to re-theme this plugin, so I will take all of the help I can get at that point! Any input as to how to re-make the templates so they are more generic would be great.

@Bpisimone

I am assuming it won’t work because 1.2 has a new theme. I have not even looked at theming for 1.2 yet, because from what I hear, it is still under heavy development. Once it has stabilized I will create a new theme with templates that work with the new 1.2 theme.

@PH

Can you post a screenshot of the site? It looks fine in FF. There have been some reports of Safari bugs, but nobody has been kind enough to submit a fix/patch yet.

File server permissions are kind of beyond the scope of support for this particular plugin. The files are set up to be created in the standard WPMU directory, the same as the core BP components. In your case the directory /httpdocs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/link-avatars needs to be writable by the web server. You would probably have better luck opening up a support ticket with your hosting company.

@Modem

Thanks for taking the time to test and post feedback.

I have not worked on BP 1.2 support yet. They are saying that it will probably be late January before 1.2 is officially released, so I don’t want to try to support it yet when a lot could change between now and then.

I am getting a lot of requests to support 1.2 “now” but all I can say is that 1.2 is bleeding edge right now, and I don’t plan to ever support bleeding edge versions of BP. Once it is closer to release I will start working on support.