Adding BuddyPress to Your WordPress Theme
I’ve recently had the pleasure of working with BuddyPress on a client’s site. BuddyPress, which technically a plugin, is more of complete extra “section” to WordPress. It basically takes your WordPress blog and injects it with social media steriods. No I’m not kidding.
It’s great to use if you want your site to have a lot of visitor interaction. It allows visitors to sign up with accounts, have their own blogs on your site, create groups, message each other and even includes a public forum. Whew that’s a lot of coolness for one “plugin”!
The cool thing about BuddyPress is that it doesn’t have to be installed on WordPress MU if you don’t want the multiple blog accounts and it works on the theme you currently have with just a few steps! You’re also able to pick and choose which features you want to us in it.
Installing BuddyPress
BuddyPress is installed like any other plugin. Simply navigated to “Add new” in your plugins area and search for it.
Budpress requires little setup but in order for it to work with your theme and not a BuddyPress theme, you’ll need to install a second plugin, called BuddyPress Template Pack. This will give you a set of new files to place in your theme that will allow full functionality of BuddyPress into your current theme.
Customization
If you’re familiar with WordPress, then customizing BuddyPress shouldn’t be too tough for you at all. I was able to quickly find what I was looking for by using my IDE’s search feature to find the right template file. Most of the layout is easy to change via CSS and PHP and the functions are pretty similar to regular WordPress.
You’ll notice that several of the actions in BuddyPress run on a loop that’s a bit more detailed than the regular post loop, however it’s all named pretty well, so you shouldn’t have a problem trying to figure out what does what. Here are some of the regular BuddyPress functions:
// display BuddyPress avatar NOT gravatar <?php bp_activity_avatar( 'width=35&height=35' ) ?> // display permalink of new entry <?php bp_activity_thread_permalink() ?> // template calls <?php locate_template( array( 'groups/single/admin.php' ), true ) ?>
While I was pretty skeptical at the coolness of BuddyPress before this site, I’ve found it to be a nifty little add-on for sites that are social based.
Your Thoughts
What have been your experiences with BuddyPress? What kind of questions do you have for using BuddyPress?
About the author
Amber Weinberg specializes in clean and semantic XHTML, CSS and WordPress development. She has over 10 years of coding experience and is pretty cool to work with. Amber is available for freelance work, so why not hire her for your next project?
I normally use Joomla for all of our CMS needs, but I was recently tasked with a project (last week!) where we wanted to allow past alumni to connect with each other leading up to a 50th anniversary reunion. After playing with the available social components for Joomla (and not being impressed) I started looking into a WordPress/BuddyPress solution – so far I love it!
When I first started reading, I was thinking buddypress was more like the gigya-socialize plugin but I had to give it a try. I’m currently working on a entirely new website for myself and I decided to go with wordpress for a change. I installed and activated the bp-templates but I’m getting an error when trying to activate the actual plugin itself. I think I have to allocate more memory in php.ini to fix the prob. Just to try it out, I signed up on the test drive account.
Maybe I just can’t seem to find where the option is, but is there any way to change your avatar once your account it setup? I used my gravatar one which was too small and I can’t find where to change it. Now I’m all pixelated
Ha, seems like I’m just having problems with avatars in general today.
You can change your gravatar at Gravatar.com. BuddyPress also allows the use of user uploaded avatars (called BuddyPress avatars) that you control via your BuddyPress uploads. If you try to manually resize them with HTML/CSS, they’ll turn out pixelated. You actually have to change the avatar function’s size.
I actually figured out what the problem was a few minutes after I posted the original comment. I opened the activation email in another browser tab and was going back and forth. My 150 x 150 (high res) pic wouldn’t seem to upload and I couldn’t find out how to change any of the settings for my profile even though it said I was logged in. Not sure if it was a browser session issue or what but everything was fine and I could change all my profile options after a quite browser restart.
I also figured out the memory allocation issue so I was able to successfully install BuddyPress on a theme I’m working on now too. Apparently the setting was in the wp-settings.php rather than the php.ini.
I’ve played around with a few BuddyPress installs and overall it’s a nice plugin. I think it still has a ways to go before it’s really full-featured, but since it’s part of the WordPress/Automattic umbrella, I have confidence that it’ll only get better.
As a sidenote, it works great on Apache-based hosts, but I had nothing but problems with it on a client’s IIS0-based environment. I don’t love running WordPress on IIS as it is, so that’s kind of expected I guess.
Yeah WordPress doesn’t really work well on any type of server besides Linux/Apache.
Nice post and great timing! I’m currently starting my first BP project for a client, which is actually a “rush” job so I’m very much hoping it will be easy to pick up for a developer who’s already well-versed in WP.
Oh it is. I had zero experience with it as well, and it really didn’t take any extra time to skin versus just skinning regular WP templates.
Hi
I am putting together a buddypress website and all the links are broken with 404 not found pages. I added 4404 error handler to the domain which injects index.php and some links started to work again. But still some links seems to have broken like the form submissions like “Save chnages on edit profile” and “upload avatars” etc..I did go manually and modify some links with index.php…i guess I am messing up the whole thing w.r.t these links. I am using bpcolumns theme.Any help or quick look will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks
Kumar
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