Buddypress integration.

Hello,

     I'm attemping to use buddypress on theme catalyst for wordpress. In the past to achieve this we had to manually install the buddypress pack into the template.

Through reading sascha's comments on the blog, and searching other discussion posts, i noted you claim that your integration is out of the box on warp 6 for buddypress.

I performed a out of the box install for catalyst and then buddypress. Nothing else done.

None of the buddypress components / 'pages' are showing up (ie, activity, members, etc). I'm not ruling out that I did something slightly wrong but I know from my experience working on bigtown's buddypress integration you guys were still in beta and having troubles with it.

Any word on your guys testing buddypress on new themes and if it is supported out of the box (like I have read claims on your web site), or can you give me any instructions on the manual process.

Cheers

Jeremy

EDIT***

I ended up just trying out using the warp template pack like i used to (copy the BP files into the install manually), which seems to begin to work. I'm kinda confused that sascha had posted a comment on one of the blog articles saying 6+ warp had support for BP 'out of the box', yet the only process that seems to work is a manual tweak. It was a one line comment perhaps I just misread it and we are still supposed to use the template pack on 6+ warp templates.

Just some general advice would be nice. I read some detailed articles by a yootheme employee, but to be perfectly honest, it did not seem to address at all the situation if i just install a stock yootheme 6+ template, install buddypress, what do i have to do to get it to work. There is just some conflicting information.

It seems to me that we basically have to copy bare programming into the template in question and do the layout ourselves. This would be fine except that even when i copy your old stock BP bare template, stuff is broken and missing in catalyst on a completely stock unmodified install. Basically you get a half working BP.

In the interim I'm considering just using the yootheme widgetkit on a template already optimised for buddypress as this is sapping quite a lot of time. I still have faith !! Thanks for reading.

Warp Theme
Bug Report
Catalyst

Edited

david.carroll answered

Hi Jeremy,

I'm one of the volunteer support moderators here and was searching on some old BuddyPress questions I've responded to in the past when I came across your question from Jan 26 / updated Jan 30. I'm not sure how I missed your post. My apologies for not replying sooner.

I can appreciate your comments about BuddyPress Support. I believe at one time the support was aided with a custom plugin created by YOOtheme to work directly with BuddyPress. However, this plugin appears to have been deprecated for some reason. I'm not sure if BuddyPress released a version that rendered that plugin useless or if the plugin was just abandoned.

Either way, I worked closely with the YOOtheme Development team to make some additional theme updates to enable greater support for the way BuddyPress integrates with themes in general.

Previous issues aside, the point you are making is you expected BuddyPress to just work with YOOtheme upon activation. This is a legitimate expectation. When most people learn additional plugins like BuddyPress Template Pack are required to be installed and sometimes copying files from the plugin folder to the theme folder are required, most will direct their frustrations at the theme developer who claimed to support BuddyPress. I completely understand this from an end user's perspective.

Alternatively, one thing to consider is how uncommon it is for most plugins to require so much of a theme simply to be activated. From a developer's perspective having built custom plugins and worked with many themes, my frustrations are more directed at the BuddyPress plugin. Ultimately, the issues with setting up BuddyPress on themes from many different vendors is avoidable. For example, BuddyPress could be extended to facilitate and automate the necessary modifications to work with any theme, as is the case with the BP Template Pack plugin. However, I'd suggest BuddyPress to take a different approach than the BP Template Pack by not applying modifications to the theme files. Rather, modifications should be limited to the BuddyPress plugin files, perhaps for a custom template automatically created to adopt the design of the active theme.

The additional BuddyPress functionality should be managed via Widgets, Short Codes, as well as, custom API code that could be applied to the theme functions.php file. What I'm describing here is the common method found with most plugins and conforms to the WordPress plugin framework.

While I think YOOtheme may want to consider clarifying what is meant by BuddyPress Compatibility, such clarifications would not be required if BuddyPress improved their setup requirements.

Final Thoughts: Currently, there is a design issue when activating BuddyPress with BP Template Pack to work with YOOtheme. Basically, default template files are copied from BuddyPress folder to the theme folder. With that includes a column for generating a sidebar with a link to all pages, posts, and categories. This sidebar should just be removed from the BuddyPress default template. Not only does it not serve any real purpose, most themes implement a sidebar already. Since this sidebar is included, people are required to manually remove this sidebar as described in my posted solution: Links and formatting issues with Budypress pages. The simple exclusion of a single line in code would resolve a great deal of the complaints I've reviewed.

Sorry for the long reply. I thought I'd share my thoughts to your honest and well thought out feedback.
Best Regards,

David Carroll

Edited

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Buddypress integration.

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