I would not recommend this Greg.. While it might look fine on your screen, don’t forget that many users are still using a screen resolution of 1024×768. So you have to deduct more then 200 pixels on the main content area, and you’ll see that your site will look pretty weird and crammed.
I think it’s better to create a horizontal featured slider above the main activity stream for example. This is certainly possible, and I hope to provide a tutorial for it pretty soon.. I’ve got it working on a local site, but need to finetune it a bit. It uses jQuery Tools, so that hopefully answers your question in the other thread as well 
Bowe, understood…
At the same time, I don’t see why the activity stream need to take up more than half of the overall width…I’d like to feature more articles from the community and make my site look a little more like e magazine (ala huffpo or daily beast).
Has anyone experimented with a reducing the width of the activity stream and had it still look good?
@bowe, how does what your slider compare with this one? http://wpmu.org/smooth-slider-wpmu-and-buddypress-plugin-contest-entry/
Thanks!
The activity stream certainly doesn’t need to have all that width in fact it works perfectly well at a considerably reduced size and in fact centered in a fluid column with flanking sidebars is a perfectly able layout.
Even with the biggest screen out there, people can only handle columns that are a certain width. Generally you only want to have between 10-15 words per line. Any wider and it’s hard to read. One of my gripes with bp-default is how wide the main content area is. Check out something called the “golden ratio”.
Oh, and make sure your site woks on a 1024×768 display. ~1000px is as wide as I’d go.
As a general rule of thumb 80 characters in width is the most that should be displayed in a given line , the human brain has difficulty scanning lines that run on longer than that.
Cool…so it sounds like a second sidebar is something worth at least trying.
It’s no problem of any kind you can do what ever you wish within reason, how you layout the data is your concern really, I’ve approached it from both adding another simple locate_template() to mirror the existing primary sidebar call creating a new file to hold whatever required and by creating a new custom Page along with a new file with a three column layout with two flanking columns containing new widget aware sidebars and the fluid centre column containing the activity loop, that page is simply set as the static index page and posts page set to a new blank Page.
@hnla
I need to edit my theme from a 2 column to a 3 column (2 side bars left and right w/ the activity stream in the center). How did you accomplish this? I’m new to WP & BP theme editing so pointing me in the direction would be great.
