The BuddyPress community is coming up with many excellent tutorials lately, but with so much constant buzz it’s possible to miss some of this high quality content. That’s why we’ve gathered 15 of the best hacks and snippets for customizing your BuddyPress site. Grab a cup of coffee and start bookmarking your favorites!
Use Dropbox as a CDN to host your BuddyPress or WordPress Theme
It’s time for another round of BuddyPress eye candy! Now that WordPress 3.0 is here more users are becoming acquainted with the myriad of possibilities that the WordPress platform affords, not only for multisite blogging functionality, but also social networking in a box with the help of BuddyPress. As the BuddyPress user base expands, we are seeing more and more unique customizations of the basic platform. Grab a cup of coffee and sit back and be inspired. Explore BuddyPress at its best!
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The BuddyPress codex is growing and changing. The list of conditional template tags is one of the most handy references available in the documentation. It lists out all of the conditional template tags available for BuddyPress 1.2+, approximately 50 total.
An example:
1 |
bp_is_active( $component ) - checks if a BP $component is active
|
Google Buzz offers you one more way to allow users to share links to your website. In just two days after launching, Buzz had nine million posts and comments with approximately 200 posts per minute from mobile sites. While those numbers have gone down since its debut, it demonstrates how much influence Google services have in the landscape of social media.
Looking for a list of BuddyPress template tags? The BuddyPress codex has one that is a work in progress but a very good resource nonetheless:
http://codex.buddypress.org/developer-discussions/buddypress-template-tags/
So far it’s divided into a few categories: General Tags, Avatar Tags, Signup Tags, Custom Loop Template Class, and is_ Functions.
Time for another roundup of free BuddyPress themes. The good news is that most of these have been updated for the latest versions of WordPress and BuddyPress, so they’re ready for use in your projects right now. BuddyPress theme development is still a small portion of the WordPress community, so updated themes can be scarce from time to time. We’ve been keeping up to date with what’s available so you don’t have to spend hours searching. Check out the list below and hopefully you’ll find a theme to use as a starting point for your own BuddyPress theme customization.
Wondering what people are doing with BuddyPress lately? It’s time for another round of BuddyPress design inspiration. I’ve collected some great new examples to inspire you for your own projects. We have several in this round from non-English speaking countries where BuddyPress is becoming more popular, as it is rapidly being translated for more languages. Enjoy, comment, and explore BuddyPress beyond the default theme.
AmplifyAmplify is a platform for engaging in conversations online with people who you’re already connected to on other networks. “In between tweeting & blogging, there’s a world to talk about.”
Here are some quick CSS tips for customizing avatars in your BuddyPress theme. You can file this under the “cute things you can do with BuddyPress” category. I was inspired by a post in our forums where a user requested a way to distinguish admin / moderator avatars from general users. You don’t need to hack the core or write a plugin for it. Highlighting avatars is simple to do with a little CSS. You will add this to your child theme’s CSS file.
How to Highlight Admin Avatars:
I’d like to introduce you to a fun new plugin for BuddyPress that will spark up another dimension of user activity on your social network. The BuddyPress Like plugin has arrived on the scene. This plugin will add a “Like” button, similar to what you’ve seen on Facebook, for logged in users to like activity items in the stream. It will also display how many people have liked a certain item and update the user’s activity stream to show who liked that item. A “view likes” button will appear next to an item that has been liked and clicking on it will display the users who have liked it. One great thing about this Like button is that you won’t receive tons of notifications of people having commented on something that you liked. No chance of notification overload.
***UPDATE***
This post is a little outdated now and the new process is outlined at the plugin page in the WordPress repository: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/bp-template-pack/
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BuddyPress 1.2 official release is finally here with native support for WordPress. The BuddyPress site is also sporting a new look highlighting all of the plugin’s features.
We’re going to see floods of new users from the WordPress single user community because of the latest release. You may be asking the question – how can I keep my current theme and incorporate BuddyPress functionality? This tutorial will help you do that.
