The most exciting news in the BuddyPress world this week is the release of a new child theme for the BP-Default theme. Status is theme that puts the activity stream in the spotlight. It was designed and developed by several talented members of the BuddyPress community with a focus on twitter-like activity streams.

The Status theme has some powerful and unique features that go beyond your average BuddyPress theme:

• Per-user profile customization: Under Profile, there is a new navigation element called Design, where users can set custom backgrounds and link colours for their profiles.
• Friends list: A list of your friends shows in the sidebar
• Member stats: On member profiles, you can see how many status updates, forum topics, forum replies, blog posts, and blog comments the user has created.
• Fully responsive: Status looks good on screens of all sizes
• Navigation menu in the admin bar: A custom menu area has been added to the WordPress/BuddyPress admin bar.
• Show/hide comments in the activity stream: You can open or close any nested comments in the activity stream for a cleaner, less cluttered view.
• A login template to mean content doesn’t show on the front unless logged in

The personal profile design option is one feature that makes this responsive BuddyPress theme more Twitter-like than most BuddyPress themes. Users can set the background color, image, tiling, position and scrolling. They can also match their link colors to the background.

During the process of developing this theme, the team found that there were limitations in the way JavaScript is employed in the BuddyPress Default theme. Because they were working closely with BuddyPress core developers, the team was able to rework the bp-defaults JS to be less dependent on the specific markup in the default templates. This is a huge gain for BuddyPress theme developers and offers much more flexibility than before. You can find out more details about the specific tickets this addresses in the Status theme release post.

Since Status requires the activity stream, it will not even show up on your installed themes page unless BuddyPress is already active.

You can download it today from its home at Github: status.zip. Many thanks to the team members who contributed their time and energy to this project: @hnla, @vebailovity, @mercime, @DJPaul, @karmatosed. Want to contribute to the theme? Get involved with the project on github.