Hallelujah! After MUCH ado, I have finally figured out what the heck is going on here.
At first, every change I made per the instructions from @hnla and @r-a-y had failed. I was sure it must be something in my set up, so I did a LOT of detective work and testing, and finally discovered multiple sources of problems.
Although it’s unlikely this will be relevant to many others, I am posting it just in case it might help someone. I always like reading other people’s solutions — it often gives me fresh ideas, even if it’s not an exact fit. So here goes….
1) I was copying my page.php from my child theme to use as /groups/index-directory.php, and it was breaking the groups directory page. Well…it’s in the child theme because it’s been modified from the parent theme, and whatever mods I made were not playing nice with the BP template hierarchy system. When I copied page.php from the parent theme, it worked just fine. (Maybe that’s why they are theme devs and I am a lowly hacker…)
Now having solved the problem of which file makes the best template for a new groups directory, I had to figure out how to actually affect the area of the page that I want to affect: the section where the tabs and the group search live. Those are not in the page.php file, they are coming from somewhere else.
I hunted down some bits of code that were in the section I wanted to modify, and searched all the theme and plugin files on my system for that snippet, and discovered the next problem…..
2) The only place that the code exists is in BP Groups Hierarchy plugin, and BP itself. I had BP Groups Hierarchy (old version, with Ray’s compiled updates) enabled, along with an older version of BuddyPress (due to incompatibility issues between new BP and old BP Groups Hierarchy). Within this environment, the BP Groups Hierarchy plugin was actually taking over the display of the groups/index.php so none of my changes were showing up.
3) The next thing I realized is that I have a customized community.php file (a.k.a. buddypress.php) which is where my buddypress loop actually lives. Or, more specifically, that file is pulling content-page.php. So I had to use that file (which had already started out as a copy of the parent theme’s page.php) to create a working and fully compatible template.
In a nutshell, my new groups/index-directory.php goes something like this:
The first part comes from COMMUNITY.PHP, which is a customized version of the PARENT THEME’S PAGE.PHP
Then the PAGE TITLE CODE is copied from the child theme’s CONTENT-PAGE.PHP
Next I replace THE LOOP from COMMUNITY.PHP with the ENTIRE CONTENTS of the original/default GROUPS/INDEX.PHP. We’ll call this the “new loop”.
After the “new loop” section of the code, then my CUSTOM COMMUNITY.PHP FILE takes over again, filling out the rest of the file with the sidebar and footer.
Note: Somewhere in here, I had to add a ?> to close the PHP. Can’t remember exactly where, but something I copied did not have a closing PHP tag. So if you get a blank screen, that would be a good place to look. 🙂
I’ve posted my entire custom index-directory.php in a gist in case anyone wants to see it. It is commented in 4 places where I transitioned from one fragment to another. You can search on “GROUPS INDEX TEMPLATE” to find the comments in the gist. My parent theme is Zerif Pro, and I have a customized community.php/buddypress.php file. so you CANNOT JUST COPY this code. It just serves as an example of how I cobbled the code together to get a working template. Hope it is helpful.
Grateful thanks to Ray and Hugo for all the assistance and advice!
