buddypress

BuddyPress My Friend

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BuddyPress, blogsitestudio.comIn my November 12 post, Making Friends with BuddyPress, I bemoaned the difficulty of adapting BuddyPress to the Next theme, one that is not on the BP’s preferred list of compatible themes.

I used BuddyPress Template Pack and moved folders around on the server before being faced with the task of tweaking the layout to make BP appear correctly on the page. I got pretty far, copying and pasting the header and footer tags, but not far enough to make the sidebar go where it needs to sit.

After much frustration with BuddyPress, I did what any WordPress designer does when the coding gets tough.

I hired a developer.

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Making Friends with BuddyPress

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This week I finally had the opportunity to use BuddyPress – a forum program who’s very name implies we’ll be fast friends – but the friendship has been higher maintenance than I expected.

According to Wikipedia, BuddyPress is open-source social networking software package owned by Automattic that can be installed on WordPress to transform it into a social network platform. Perfect, I thought, for a client who organizes educational fairs.

BuddyPress includes its own theme, which looks like your average bulletin board from the late 1990s. Functional, but not pretty. Having never used BuddyPress, I was surprised when it activated and replaced my premium theme and had no idea I would have to shake off that built-in theme. Turns out, what I needed was, you guessed it, another plugin.

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