BuddyPress.org

This might be a good place to start if you looked at it already?

BuddyPress Theme Development

Hi @vickievik,

the right question here would be how to make my theme compatible with buddypress.

The thing to understand is that BP use dynamic content for its page and that these page are NOT ordinaty WP pages.
For each content, BP fires a so called template-part.
Lets take as example a profile page

The slug is /members/ which exist as “page” on wp’s page list. This wp page has no content and also no model or template. It’s just a “slug” in the wp ecosystem.

When you’re on a profile you have the page(aka /members/) but also many template parts, depending what you’re doing on that profile. Aside the common parts header – content – footer, you’ll find also personnal activity, frineds, groups, mentions, notifications, messages and not the worst, profile settings. All this on the same “page”.

Most theme mistakes are at this point. People try to design the page, instead to work the template parts.

When you design a theme, you usually design something for a page, independantly from any plugin. This structure is used by any Twenty Theme and you can follow them as model, because these themes are bullet proof and systematically used by all wp devs when building (in our case) BuddyPress

BP can be used with almost any existing theme, so far this theme is respecting WP’s coding standarts.

If you have brocken elements, and specially thoose using JS, it could be due to missing ID or class or even more simple, some missing instructions/conditionnals in your theme.

BP’s template parts are designed to fit with a majority of themes. The best to do, at least while creating your first theme, is to use BP “as is” and build your theme around thoose existing parts and not to remove/modifying BP arts to fit your creation.