BuddyPress.org

Hi there!

I’ll be using BuddyPress to launch an online weather community site coming up. I have a few getting started questions I need to ask the BuddyPress community. The site will offer signup/registration, member profiles, direct messaging, a blog, and discussion groups for starters. Here’s the other questions I had:

1. Can we custom brand/theme the signup/login page for our BuddyPress site? I’d like to do something a little more than a generic WordPress signup/login page.

2. What’s the best way we could handle photo/video galleries on BuddyPress? Should we have a full-fledged photo gallery or just have people include photos in their blog posts/weather reports? For videos, I’ll likely have people publish to YouTube or Vimeo and embed in videos. Should we have a video galleries page people can embed in videos or just have those added to blog posts as well?

3. Is there a way to offer live chat in BuddyPress or a live chat WordPress plugin we could look into?

4. Since people from around the world will be sending in weather reports to the blog, I’d like to be able to display their location (not their current location using GPS but statically display what location they enter into their WordPress/BuddyPress profile) next to their name and blog title. This would help us to at-a-glance know where all weather reports are coming from. Is there a way to pull this off in WordPress/BuddyPress?

Thanks!