Not sure if this is the right place, but it’s a complaint for sure, and as this site is a nightmare to navigate here will have to do. I’ll stick my foot where my mouth is and rant, but will happily listen if someone can explain the kind of nonsense I’m coming across while theming BuddyPress.
I’ve spent long, long days for weeks on end setting up BP and modifying a simple theme to suit what we want. Some problems, it seems to me, should never have been ‘designed’ into it. For example, in the Activity stream there are links to View and Delete the post. Fair enough. My theme causes View to wreck the layout and display everything off-centre, with no sidebar. I’ve spent hours trying to rectify it, then had to take a break to help someone out with an old clanker of a PC that stopped working. When I came back I clicked on View, to continue working on getting the View page to display correctly. Then I thought, WHY?! What on earth is the point of a View link, to display something I can already see, on a blank page of its own?
So I’ve done it another way; deleted the code which inserts the View link from the core files. I’ve backed it up for when there’s an upgrade, along with a few other things which make little or no sense. That’s just one example, along with the stupid admin bar which only gets in the way in the WP back end, and confuses users on the BP front end.
Now we’re very grateful for WP and BP, and all the wonderful plugin work done by others. But come on; who designed this thing, and why is it so Heath Robinson, with more unnecessary options and bits than you can shake a stick at? For the next version, wouldn’t it make sense to re-map what’s actually required in a social network site and what’s just a waste of developer time, and our time? Or can someone make better sense of it all (including this site) because we sure can’t!
@lincme
those are a few reasons I have deactivated the activity-stream just now, as it is not logic and user-friendly at all.
Just having Groups and Forums, but that is really not a Social-Network (besides the friending-component).
@erich73; Personally, I love the Activity stream, as long as a lot of the activities are removed (dumb stuff like, “Fred just did something”, “Mary coughed 2 hours and 47 seconds ago”, etc). With Groups and Members shown first, and Activity renamed to something like Conversations, most ordinary users can cope with it. Out of the box it’s scarier than a gang of axe-wielding clowns on acid!
You feel it isn’t possible to create a proper social network with BuddyPress, and while I agree to a point, it’s the best we have so far, it seems. We struggled with Elgg for some weeks, but gave up on it. The team and community are wonderful (as here), but it’s TOO open, has no real user controls of the required kind, and creating a site that looks like a site takes forever in hard slog coding. Pligg came close, but needed far too much work to turn into a BuddyPress-like tool, and most others have fallen by the wayside or cost a packet. For those without funding, BuddyPress certainly seem to be the best of the bunch, but HECK does it need redesigning. (But it won’t be, of course, because that would cause all the plugins to fail… *sigh*)
Oh, and I tried Mingle for WP too. Wonderfully simple, and Categories could be used for Groups, sort of. But… it fails miserably with most WP themes, or at least the ones I tried for alteration within a reasonable time scale, ie., some time before the world ends in 2012. 
for some reason the “view” permalink for activity records theme file does not have a sidebar and the css is set for a smaller width. (can change that with a child theme/css)
@nuprn1; Thanks, but any idea WHY there’s even a stupid view of something you can already see anyway..? I think I’ll leave it at that and have a cup of coffee before my head explodes! 
a permalink – this way it can be referenced later (favorite, bookmark, etc)
@nuprn1; That makes no sense to me whatsoever. A hanging permalink which just sits there, linking to a view which nobody needs, and which wrecks the layout because it wasn’t themed correctly, thus making a site look pathetic to users? Hmm…
@lincme it’s pretty easy to theme, in your child theme, just add:
div id=”content”
div class=”padder”
for default theming after the get_header call in members/single/activity/permalink.php of your child theme.
Don’t forget to close off the extra DIVS though.
The permalink is pretty handy for favouriting/bookmarking as it will soon get lost in the activity stream.
update: damn code still can't be added here, just removed the brackets.
@thekmen; Ok, thanks, I’ll try that. There’s already a Favourite link, so I guess the permalink is just for bookmarking? Too tired to care now!
Edit; Almost, but no sidebar, and the content is squished into the centre. Falling asleep now, so will have another look tomorrow.
@lincme, sorry, forgot, you will need to add
locate_template( array( 'sidebar.php' ), true )
just above get_footer() in that file.
@johnjamesjacoby, @apeatling are there any plans to add proper code back to the forums here, it’s been way too long now…
@thekmen; Thanks, but it doesn’t work. No bother. Most ordinary users haven’t a clue about bookmarking, and ask, “Use the permalink? The WHAT?!” The View link is being perma-deleted!
