BuddyPress.org

I’m not sure why but when you are in the page admin for a BuddyPress page can you select a different page template? Looking at your source code in browser there is reference to a class “teaser” which is making me assume its showing a page excerpt

I have the same problem and also no freaking clue how to solve this. Previous versions worked perfectly and this update screwed it up basically.

This is probably related:
https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/5301#comment:3

Thesis probably has an unusual method for displaying page content. Atahualpa, another theme, suffers from the same issue.

Since Thesis is a paid theme, I do not have access to see how their templates are set up.

I’m using Attitude theme (which is free) with the same problem. Do you have any recommendation on how to fix this issue? Or a suggestion on how to communicate the issue to the theme developers?

> I’m conflicted on how much we can realistically support themes that deviate so far from the norm.

I see no real conflict to be resolved, it’s impossible for BP to take into account unknown divergences from the core template api WP provides, if theme authors want to create something non-standard then sadly that’s their problem and unfair to expect BP to have to try and deal with this. The best BP can do and is doing pretty well is to tie in as much as possible to the set WP template approach and if all themes did the same – and frankly they probably could regardless of proprietary approach to frameworking – then this would be a non issue.

>that now uncover pretty fatal flaws in several themes

Flaws that existed and have existed in many themes that do their own thing.

Where that leaves things is sadly fairly and squarely in the theme authors court to try and help provide a solution for template issues.

On a sidenote on another thread I noted a response relayed from a theme author to the user on enquiry of how to resolve their theme issue that the theme author couldn’t possibly support every third party plugin issue that happened along! It’s worth perhaps pointing out to any theme authors that might happen past this thread that there are plugins and there are plugins that really are best described as modules that extend WP they transcend the notion of a simple plugin and leverage the WP API to it’s fullest, these plugins, and I’m thinking of BuddyPress and bbPress here are in wide spread use, and really the smart theme author might be advised to actually test their themes with both these ‘plugins’ to gauge the level of support the theme offers and where possible improve it!

Obviously the above isn’t a great deal of help to those of you having these issues, but this forum is going to struggle to help on these sorts of issues being it’s primary purpose has to be directly related to BP issues and third party themes especially premium ones are something we can’t deal with due to lack of knowledge on how they are constructed.

I wrote my own theme and am always trying to do things the right way but initially things were not working correctly with bbPress or BuddyPress. I now realise was my theme using the_excerpt rather than the_content on the special pages.

I’d read the topics in the buddypress codex on theme support but these mainly addressed the issue of altering pages using the template selection rather then explaining what a theme author needs to do to make their theme work properly with bbPress or BuddyPress. Just explaining how it injects its content into pages (by hooking the_content) is not immediately obvious to the newcomer.

In my theme I had been using is_singular() to know when to show content rather then expert and use parameterised preferences for each post type for when is_singluar() was false.

Simply changing this test to (is_singular() || is_page()) suddenly turned my theme from incompatible to reasonably compatible. The “/forums” slug still did not work properly but after searching around I discovered the is_bbPress() function and expanded the test to:

(is_singular() || is_page() || (function_exists(‘is_bbPress’) && is_bbPress()))

There may be other tricks and gotchas I haven’t found yet, but as I say it would be really nice to have a topic directed specifically at theme authors to make sure they know what needs to be in place to make things work.