WordPress BuddyPress Community Theme

BuddyPress Community stands on the design of sites like Ning and takes it to another level with BuddyPress. With sharp, clean lines and a vast array of preset styles BuddyPress Community delivers a simple design that works well with high impact.

There are multiple widget options and a ton of configurations you can set to truly create your own unique site combination. Light weight, flexible and simple but effective is what BuddyPress Community delivers. Unlike many themes this one is not image heavy it is a true work horse taking the pressure off your site and making features of all the wonderful social networking that BuddyPress brings.

BuddyPress Community

Here is a list of the features of BuddyPress Community:

Custom admin bar colours
Customiseable welcome message
Home and blog page templates
Home pages article block
Built in widgets: most commented and recent comments
Privacy options: Allow only logged in users to view members profiles
along with members directory and switch to stop normal users creating
groups or joining ones unless created by admin or editors
15 colourful theme styles
Create your own theme styles using the easy styling system
Parent and child themes allowing for easy updates
Theme options that mean no code editing to configure any feature on this theme

BuddyPress Community also comes not only with the default colour scheme but 15 more styles all as lightweight and colourful as the default one. If one of those preset styles doesn’t fit then you can easily create your own just by using our easy colour picker.

BuddyPress Community styles

The home page in BuddyPress Community acts like a proper portal summing up all that is going on in your community. You can even add widgets to it to really customise it to show any information you want. There is a section for showing your latest posts on the block along with the ability to upload your own custom header image to really make your site look how you want.

Unlike many other BuddyPress themes at WPMU DEV we make sure our themes give your site a total consistent look. We even theme the default BuddyPress pages. Take a look at the activity stream styling in BuddyPress Community:

BuddyPress Community Activity

A WPMU DEV theme also ensures your blog posts look great with a range of text styles for your posts. Take a look at a sample blog post with the BuddyPress Community theme.

BuddyPress Community post

Not only do you get a great theme but at WPMU DEV you also get great support in our community support, documentation, videos and live chat. Twice a week you can even talk directly to our theme designers so you can talk about anything relating to any of our themes. WPMU DEV really is the place to go to get a great theme and feel safe in the knowledge no matter what you want to do with your site you’ve got the support to do it.

As with all the WPMU DEV themes BuddyPress Community is not only a BuddyPress theme it works with WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress. All WPMU DEV themes also have child and parent themes, we don’t make you use one core parent or have to buy a framework like other companies, we let you create your own child themes with everyone of our themes. A WPMU DEV theme really is the only complete solution you need to theme your site.

Discover our other BuddyPress themes:

Installing a theme from WPMU DEV

Download the theme file
Unzip the file into a folder on your hard drive
Upload the folder to /wp-content/themes/ folder on your site

If you’re using multi-site you’ll need to visit Network Admin -> Themes and Activate it there.

4. Make sure your install path is correct for example:
/www/var/site/wp-content/themes/thethemename

not

/www/var/site/wp-content/themes/themes/thethemename

5. You’ll see several files and folders depending on the theme package. Most themes contain a folder for the parent and child theme
within the folder called themes.

6. Launch FileZilla or your FTP client – read more about using FTP and FTP clients here.

7. Enter your domain name, your username and password.

NOTE: the same username and password that you use to log into your cPanel.

8. Click Quickconnect

9. Upload both the parent theme folder and child theme folder to wp-content/themes/

For example, with BuddyPress Daily theme you need to upload bp-daily and bp-daily-child to wp-content/themes/ (bp-daily folder is the parent theme folder)
With Gallery you need to upload gallery and gallery-child to wp-content/themes/ (gallery folder is the parent theme folder)
We provide child themes with themes to enable you to customize your own files without having those changes overwritten when we update a theme.
To find out more about parent and children themes please visit our guide to parent and child themes.

Uploading parent and child themes to your theme folder on your site

10. Dragging the theme folders from your computer into theme folder in your WordPress directory uploads these new themes to your WordPress install however they aren’t enabled on a WordPress Multisite install.

11. As Super Admin user on WordPress Multisite you have the choice to enable:

a) The theme network wide so that all users can use the theme
b) Enable access to the theme on a per site basis
c) Use Supporter plugin via supporter-themes.php to make it available as a premium theme for supporter sites only

Enabling The Theme network wide

Here’s how to enable Sleek Photo network wide so that all your users can use the theme:

1. On your Network Admin dashboard click on the Themes menu
2. Select Network Enable underneath the theme name to enable its access network wide.

To enable more than one theme at once:

Enabling themes on a per site basis

Any theme that has not been activated for the entire network can be activated on a site as follows:

1. Locate the site you want to enable specific themes on by searching for the specific site by clicking on Sites > All Sites

2. Once you have located the site click on Edit (hovering your mouse over the domain name brings up the action menu)

3. Click the Themes tab

Only themes that haven’t been enabled network wide appear on the site theme list

You can also enable more than one theme at the same time:

Using Supporter Plugin for Premium Themes

The supporter plugin allows you to select premium themes for supporter sites only.

The idea is you make the best and nicest themes available on supporter sites so users will want to sign up to access the themes.

To install:

1. Install the Supporter plugin as per the installation instructions.
2. Upload supporter-themes.php to wp-content/mu-plugins

How it works is:

1. A Premium Themes page is added to Settings > Supporter in the Network Admin dashboard, where you can select the themes that you want to enable for Supporter sites only.

Only themes that haven’t been enabled network wide on Network Admin >Themes will be listed on this page

2. A Premium Themes sub-menu item is added to the dashboard of all sites under both Supporter and Appearance – but only users using supporter site can activate a Premium theme.

3. Whereas users on non-supporter sites can see all the Premium themes but can’t activate them – instead they see a message saying ’This feature is limited to supporters only’