BuddyPress used to come with it’s own theme, it’s still there though not really supported.
The theme dictates the look and feel of your site so recommendation is difficult, also there’s a choice to be made between premium and free themes.
For the free themes just take a look over on the WordPress Themes Directory
Thanks Venutius. The part I find confusing is that all those themes have nice fancy images and layouts, but none of them appear to be anything like an online community layout. If I choose one of the themes from WordPress Themes Directory, is it safe to assume I can easily modify it (without knowing any code) to the look and feel of an online community?
For some of my sites I use non BuddyPress themes because they give me the layout options that are required for the site.
What I would do is try some themes, check out what the BuddyPress pages look like. Most themes allow you to set a static front page, which you can edit freely with a page builder, allowing you to add widgets into the main content areas which a lot of social sites use to create a composite picture of the sites various activity streams.
Unfortunately it’s the pay for plugins where you actually get themes designed for social networks from the off, some of these have nice BuddyPress specific page layouts, with the free themes you will get the default page layout for the BP pages.
I dont mind paying a bit, so let me know if there are any specific pay options you recommend, and if the idea is to use those as a theme, or use them instead of BuddyPress.
The trouble with the pay for themes is that you need to pay for them to try them out fully so it’s difficult to recommend them as I’ve not played with most of them.
Here’s a few links, Kleo from BuddyBoss works well, there also Community Buider from BuddyDev that just been released:
BuddyBoss
BuddyDev
Theme Forest
I’ll try to make this my last question. I think I’m going to purchase and use the BoddyBoss theme. Now that I have already added WordPress to my Bluehost account, I also have to add the BuddyBoss theme and BuddyPress to my Bluehost account as well, is that correct? And does it matter which order I add them in?
I’d install BP First but there’s no difference really
Just because you mention paid themes, here a small free BP ready theme list available on WP’s theme repo:
Level
Profile
Republic
Alchem
