BuddyPress.org

@ajamison5579; We’ve had some fun with themes too, and just getting used to what exactly is WP controlled, and what’s BP controlled! (Bit of a nightmare, to be honest, but it all seems to work ok in the end).

To use a standard theme you need the BP Template Pack (at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/). In the end I pulled the guts out of a BP template to give us a very simple Facebook-like look (http://lincme.co.uk) If you have a peek you’ll notice that a lot of BP stuff went under the knife, as it’s way to complicated and busy looking for many people. As some have said elsewhere, this site is too.

As to your final question above; the default BP theme has all the code templates you require (of course) and you can clone it, modify the CSS info so it doesn’t clash, and hack away. Any template files you use override the default ones, so you can pull files out and just modify the bits you want to. And the CSS, of course. Have fun!

Add; To clone the BP theme, create your own folder such as wp-content/themes/my-theme, then copy all the files from wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default into your new my-theme folder. Be sure to modify the header content of the style.css file so WP/BP recognises it as a new theme.