Thematic child themes can be used with Buddymatic by changing the template (in style.css) from thematic to buddymatic. The child theme may require additional styling for the BuddyPress components. The framework uses buddypress.css in the child theme for BuddyPress specific css. Included in the download is a sample child theme and Coffee with Friends by Daisy Olsen.

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Post tags: buddypress, framework, theme, wordpress, wordpressmu, wpmu

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Or if you’re interested in a paid theme, check out the StudioPress Genesis Theme Framework, along with the GenesisConnect plugin for BuddyPress. It helps bridge BuddyPress with almost any genesis child theme. )

You may have heard of a social networking plugin for WordPress MU called BuddyPress. In this post, I’m going to write about the way BP handles themes, what you’ll need to do your own, and where to find more.

In WordPressMU, there’s usually only two things to worry about with themes. One is which themes you have available to users, and the theme you’re using on the home page, which is the main blog.

BuddyPress has its own home theme you can use on the main blog, but you do not have to use it. A lot of the boxes of BP details are widgets and can be implemented in any widgetized area of any theme. Here’s where things divert a little though.

In BP, once you get past the initial member & groups pages, they use what’s called a member theme. This is a special BP-only theme that lives outside the usual theme folder.

In addition, members can have blogs – which as we know use their own theme. BP doesn’t have a blog theme integrated, but it’s pretty easy to create one. (By default, if you just install WPMU, then install BP, member blogs get created with Kubrick as the default.)

Creating the BuddyPress blog theme for members:
Make a copy of the home theme and move it somewhere.
Rename the folder to something obvious, like bp-blog-theme.
Edit style.css and change the theme name to be Blogs instead of Home.
Delete home.php.

Move the new theme back into wp-content/themes/. Activate it under Site Admin -> Themes. Go to a member blog (you have a test blog, right?), under Appearance and activate the new BLOG theme.

All that’s left is the forum areas. Since you’ve probably integrated bbPress, most if not all of it is pulled in my BP, but you may want to skin bbPress to match the site as well.

*whew* Need a recap? I do.
Home page / main blog – uses a regular theme or home theme
Member pages (profiles, groups, etc..) – uses BP member theme
Member blogs – uses WP theme
Forum areas – uses bbPress theme

That’s a lot of work! I hear you people in the back muttering and crying. There’s a BuddyPress theme skeleton that is pretty bare that you can start with to make your own. It really helps. Official documentation on creating your own is scanty, but since it’s in wiki format, anyone can join and edit.

Shoehorning an exiting theme around the BP framework though? That’s a bit of an extra challenge.

Thankfully, there are some tireless and awesome individuals who have started to put out free BuddyPress themes for your use and manglement.

Milo has created two packages so far, with all the components in separate downloads so you can get what you need.
Solitude WPMU BuddyPress themein a really nice blue and white, and Spyker WPMU BuddyPress theme in a dark grey-black with red accents.

Edit: here’s an archive page for WPMU and BuddyPress themes. There’s six of them there now.

BuddyDress purports to “dress up” your BuddyPress install. They’ve released three sets of themes so far:
DarkPress in black and blues with a leafy graphic.
Shouty, their latest in a vivid twitter-like blue with a few orange highlights.
And FaceBuddy so you too can have a Facebook clone.

There’s also the BuddyPress theme contest with a few lightly-changed selections. The whole community would really love to see a larger choice, and I have no idea why the other themes mentioned above haven’t entered the contest. Now THAT would be a competition!

Anyone willing to put forth the effort will quickly become a big name in this arena. Inexplicably, none of these themes are in the official BuddyPress theme directory.

Anything to add about skinning a BuddyPress site?

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Post tags: buddypress, member theme, Themes, wordpress mu, wordpressmu, wpmu

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Let’s look at a recent screenshot of WordPress.com’s home page and see the elements included. I’ll follow-up with an explanation of where the find the various plugins and tools to achieve the same functionality (where possible).
(...)
Read the rest of Anatomy of a home page: WordPress.com (748 words)

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There are two uses for themes in a WPMU environment. One is on the main blog, or home page. The other use is for the users. That is, members who sign up for a blog.

WordPressMU themes for users
In a WPMU install, the most important thing to remember is that users can’t edit themes. See how themes are used on WordPress.com? That’s what I’m talking about. So if your theme has a hard-coded area in the sidebar that says something like:

Author info:
Just edit sidebar.php and put in a little information about yourself.

WPMU site admins are going to have to take that out. Check your theme over for any hardcoded areas that need changing, or any areas you expect the theme user to edit manually.

Themes are also shared between users. This is another reason you don’t want hardcoded areas. If I manually edit the theme for one user, all other users with access to that theme see the same files. Which leads me to my next helpful tip.

Widgetize that theme already!

Yeah, yeah, I know… on my own personal blogs, and this one, I like to edit the sidebars myself and tweak things as need. Sometimes it’s plain easier to edit the files than it is to mess with clicking and dragging widgets. But on a WPMU setup, that’s one of the few ways users have to customize their look.

If there’s a header graphic, consider adding the custom header API to your functions file so users can personalize the theme further.

And finally, if you can and if the theme calls for it, consider an options page for extra frills. It’s just a nice touch and users will be able to add or change all kinds of goodies in the backend.

I also feel that as the single-user version of WordPress reaches a larger and more non-technical user base, easier theme management from the backend will probably turn out to be the eventual norm.

WordPressMU themes for the home page

Ahhh, here’s the good stuff. First off, in my experience, every WPMU Site Admin wants something different on their home page. I’m not suggesting theme designers make a WPMU home version with WPMU-specific code in it. I’m just doing an overview so designers understand what Site Admins generally are looking for.

In MU, the main blog is also the landing page of the entire site. Many admins get a theme with an included home.php file or whip up their own. In this way, the main blog is sort of shuffled off to the background, while the home.php page can showcase some sitewide features.

There are many wpmu-specific plugins and code out there to pull sitewide data onto the home page, and like I said above, everyone usually wants something slightly different. In terms of design, I find that grid or magazine layouts lend themselves well to being adapted to a home theme.

And one more tip.

The last thing I’ll mention is theme hooks. Make sure your theme has to proper and standard hooks in it, namely wp_head and wp_footer. On a WPMU site, these are widely used in plugins to insert code automatically in themes for (in some cases) thousands of users.

So there’s a general overview. I hope this gives you a little bit of insight into how themes are used in a WordPressMU-driven site. If I left anything out, you have a tip of your own, or even a question, feel free to leave a comment.

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You may want to try this first on a test site of WPMU.

First, check and see if your theme has a functions.php file included. If it doesn’t, make a blank file called functions.php. If it already has code in it, which it will if the theme is widget enabled, then you can paste this code in right before the last ?> tag.

//make changeable header
define('HEADER_TEXTCOLOR', '');
define('HEADER_IMAGE', 'setta.jpg'); // %s is theme dir uri and image filename
define('HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH', 985);  // make sure these values match the theme header
define('HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT', 200);
define( 'NO_HEADER_TEXT', true );

function atypxmas_admin_header_style() {   // change atypxmas to your theme name
?>

// this part adds the header in the admin area
#headimg {
height: <?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_HEIGHT; ?>px;
width: <?php echo HEADER_IMAGE_WIDTH; ?>px;
}

#headimg h1, #headimg #desc {
display: none;}
}

function header_style() {
?>

#header{
background: url(<?php header_image() ?>) no-repeat;}
}

add_custom_image_header(‘header_style’, ‘atypxmas_admin_header_style’);  // change atypxmas to your theme name you used above.

And that’s it! Everything else is handled internally by WordPress. Please read the code and change the values accordingly for your specific theme, including the filename.

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My normal work flow is to upload a zipped theme to the themes directory and unpack it on the server. It’s just faster for me, and works fine and dandy. Every so often, twice now, I’d find a theme that just would not show up in the Site Admin->Themes menu no matter what I tried. Even the same theme on different installs. It would work locally for me or in single WordPress installs, and other people said the same themes worked on their WPMU installs.

It was like it wasn’t working just for me, to spite me. Usually something like this is User Error, but I even got people (*cough* Ron *cough*) to check my work.

Today I *finally* figured it out – it was a permissions issue! For some reason all the themes’ files were set to 444. When I set them to 644, it suddenly showed up in the themes list.

Weird. I haven’t looked at the code yet, but I will and if there’s a check in there I’ll file a ticket.   Because that was driving me nuts.

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Post tags: themes mystery missing permissions solved

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I was really pleased to see this post from Theme Lab explain the process of widgetizing a theme in heaps of detail, including making widget areas in places other than the sidebar. My mind is churning at the possiblities.
To be fair, there’s been only a handful of themes I can think of that were difficult if not impossible to widgetize because of sidebar structure (one had TABLES, seriously). Most of the time, it’s a snap. If it’s not, I drop the theme or recode the sidebar.

While we’re on the subject of themes, has anyone got Probama working on a WPMU install? I’ve tried it on two servers and neither place would recognize that it even existed.

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So here’s the deal – want a membership? Subscribe to my feed for this blog and leave me a comment. That’s it. I’ve got 50 accounts to give away and we’ll go until I run out.

I wrote about the $5 theme club back here.

UPDATE: this went belly-up months ago and is now closed, so I’m closing the comments.

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This follows WordPress’s template structure explained here. If you would like a relatively static home or landing page, this built in function is a handy way to get thing looking the way you want. Since you can literally put whatever you like it in, it can also be a nice workaround if you previously had some information on the main index page you’d like to integrate.

(As a side note, I feel it is a misnomer to call it a static page, when you’re running php on a dynamic page and can still pull in the loop of posts if you want.)

You can always whip up your own theme, if you are able, but then you probably won’t need the following advice if you can. Pick a nice well-designed and flexible theme, then get ready to dig around in it. Strip out everything you don’t want, but unless you change the theme a serious amount, please leave the designer’s credit in there. It’s just a nice thing to do.

There have been a lot of new themes cropping up in a magazine-style format, and I find they lend themselves well to the main blog on an MU install. See Mimbo, The Morning After, and for paid, Revolution – just to name a few. More are cropping up weekly.

The most comon question I see in the forums is people asking how to pull the most recent posts from the site onto the front page.

Easy. I use this plugin, mostly because I asked my handy hubby to do the hard work of writing the SQLs. All I did then was called the function right on the index.php page of my chosen theme.

Other people have used the sitewide feed plugin, then parsed it to display on the main page. (This also involves pasting code.) An example of how to parse a feed is on the dashboard page. Read how it’s done and follow along in that file. (wp-admin/index.php and index-extra.php)

Another handy plugin for the main page is the List All plugin. You can create a full list of all blogs (excluding ones marked private), and even use it again to show only the last x created blogs.

See a working example on my main page at homeschooljournal. It uses the most recent posts plugin in the “Lastest Posts” section, pulls a feedburner feed with code provided by them to show the latest comments sitewide, and uses the list-all plugin to show the last 5 blogs created on the right sidebar.

Don’t forget to disable the theme in the backend so your users will not be able use it on their blog.

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I’ve exchanged a few emails about the specifics of MU, so he’s keeping that in mind for us site admins. You *can* put these themes up for your users to choose from. They’ll be quite happy, I think.

It’s been a busy week in terms of new things to tell you.

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