Introducing the popping pricing table

Our solution is a simple one. One button, you click it and the entire pricing table shows with the 2 options. You then know right there what options you will have on the next screen. No complex maths to work out how many times something goes into something, just 2 options – all themes or just one.

There was also some confusion over our varying price options so we’ve repeated our pricing table for all right in the popping pricing table. We aim to be clear from the start about what you get and what we charge and this change we hope shows just one way we want to listen to our users and those yet to become users.

If you have anything else to comment on you can always use this posts comment form, the site contact form or twitter @buddydress us – we’d love to hear from you at any time.

The idea was simple, we wanted a complete brand for BuddyDress that you could instantly know was your home as a member. To us this version will be a work in progress lead by the members. We are considering a number of future developments including community features but the starting point is this redesign.

Themes are our focus

We’ve gone back to our roots with this design reminding ourself that the most important thing to us our the themes. This can be seen by the featured sections on the front page. The actual themes as a result of this focus are possibly the biggest overhaul section. You can see the theme over view page right here. If you then click through you can see we’ve not left a pixel alone on the theme full view page.

Pricing options are important

With this new version comes a pricing change at BuddyDress. You can now not only buy every theme at BuddyDress you now have the great option to buy just one theme and get support for that one theme. We’ve heard what users want and sometimes they simply don’t want an all access option they want to just grab one theme. Now you can with BuddyDress. You can see more about our pricing structure here. It’s important we note here that our existing users will have no change to prices or terms.

Blogging still is important to us

Don’t let our focus on themes suggest our blog isn’t still of just as much importance to us. We made sure that got a large dose of redesign also. It was important our blog was easy to read but had a strong identity of it’s own in the design. We also wanted to make more of our Twitter as to us our Twitter interactions are important.

Don’t forget the forums

As support is important to us we could not forget the forums in this redesign so we’ve made sure they got a fresh theme as part of this version.

As you start looking around the site (which we hope you will) you will find we’ve not left any rock untouched in this design. We really hope you like this design and there is a lot more to come from us we can promise you this is just the start of our plans for this version of BuddyDress. We’d like to take a moment to thank all our existing customers for being so great in supporting us – you make BuddyDress what it is and thank you.

Studio: Your next theme?

We’re about to release Studio to you all this next week and you can check out the demo here

We’ll tell you more about Studio next week but we hope you enjoy the demo for now.

Link time…

Lets get on with some quick links after all that’s what Friday Find is about:

Daily Tip: Where to Find a Qualified BuddyPress Developer

Daily Tip: How to Improve BuddyPress Pagination

8 WordPress Plugins that enable Posting and Editing from the Front End

Hope you have a great weekend and see you next week with a theme release.

Adding sitewide search to BuddyPress Daily

Want to add Brajesh’s ‘Sitewide Global search’ and remove the sidebar search with BuddyPress Daily?  No problem:

1. Edit sidebar.php and any other sidebars you want to remove the search from – you will find sidebars for buddypress have bp- before them under library/sidebars/.

Remove the following code:

<div class="light-container">
	<form action="<?php echo bp_search_form_action() ?>"
method="post" id="search-form">
	<input type="text" id="search-terms"
name="search-terms" value="" size="18"/>
	<?php echo bp_search_form_type_select() ?>
	<input type="submit" name="search-submit"
id="search-submit" value="<?php _e( 'Search', 'buddypress' ) ?>"/>
	<?php wp_nonce_field( 'bp_search_form' ) ?>
	</form>
</div>

2. The search bar location you want to add the unified search to is located in library/components/searchform.php

Add linkedin to the social links in BuddyPress Scholar

A great tip to add more social links comes in the form of this one from James.

If you’d like to hardcode the link into your theme, this could be done by opening bp-scholar>sidebars>sidebar-home.php
Place the following on lines 64-66:

<div id="url-linkedin">
	<a href="http://YOURLINK.com" title="Linked In">Follow us on Linked In</a>
</div>

Replace YOURLINK.com with the url for your profile with linked in.

Finally, open up your style.css and add the following lines to the bottom:

#url-linkedin {
	padding: 5px 0 5px 30px;
	background: url("_inc/images/NEWIMAGE.png") no-repeat scroll 0 9px transparent;
}

The other social media images are 16×16 and located in the _inc>images folder. You should be able to find a similar image for Linked in and place it in the same directory and then replace NEWIMAGE with the actual image name.

Currently we have a lot planned here are just some of the new things:

1.  New clothes – BuddyDress is having a complete new look we’re hopeful you will love as much as we do.  We’re keeping it under wraps for now but we’re sure you will love the new look we’ve got cooking up.

2.  Better documentation and FAQ – we’re going to be increasing the documentation for you adding to manuals and videos.

We’ve got other plans but these are our some of the big changes.

So, what would you like to see happen in the next version of BuddyDress?

So, how do you enter?

We want you to create a colour combination from our popular BuddyPress Colours theme.  You can make whatever colour combination you want and we’re even going to feature the top entries on this blog and in the BuddyPress colours pack.

Get more information

We’ve got some great videos that will help you in this.

First up here’s our tutorial on BuddyPress Colours:

Next up, here’s how to use firebug to find styles.

You can also get BuddyPress colours right here from wordpress.org.

What do you win?

As we’ve said you get a full FREE membership to BuddyDress for the year.
That means you not only get access to all our current themes but ANY themes we update throughout the year all for FREE!  How is that for a prize?
You also get access to the support forums and any other features we create over the year.
Trust us when we say we’ve got a lot planned for BuddyDress coming up that you really will want to be a member for.

Here are the rules:

1.  We’re looking for a new theme with a new colour combination based only on the BuddyPress colours structure – give it a theme name and package it up for us.
2.  Submit the entry by sending to contact@buddydress.com.
3.  You may use images and colour changes.
4.  All entries must be received by 23rd August 2010 and the winner will be announced by the 1st September 2010.
5.  The judges decision is final and the winner will be notified via email.
6.  You do not have to be a member of BuddyDress to enter.  If you are a member your account will be credited for the 12 months.
7.  The 12 months start on the 1st September 2010 and end 31st August 2011.
8. All work must be original and your own.

What you waiting for? Enter right now

Simply send an email to contact@buddydress.com with your attached theme in a zip and your name and a link to your site if you wish. We will then review all themes and notify the winner. We look forward to seeing the entries.

We hope you enjoy it and you can download Product right here.

We are going to start our tutorials again next week after the updating themes break. We should also have some news about things this week for you so keep posted and subscribed to us.

Today sees the release of the 2nd release client for WordPress 3.0 and whilst we’re not releasing our theme updates for it until the full release if you do have a test install we’d recommend you downloading and starting to explore as this usually is the one before the final release – get it here (that’s a whole load of releases) .

Sarah over at wpmu.org has a great tutorial exploring a plugin: Easily Style and Manage BuddyPress Groups with Bp Group Control and Bp Group CSS.

This week also saw some great eye candy from wpmu.org in the form of BuddyPress Showcase 12 New Stellar Customizations.

Over at WPMU DEV there also is an amazingly configurable Membership Plugin. The most powerful, easy to use and flexible membership plugin for WordPress, WPMU and BuddyPress sites available. Offer downloads, posts, pages, forums and more to paid members. This plugin is in beta at the moment and simply has to be tried to be believed.

A milestone for BuddyDress

We’d like this week before the Friday Find ends, to give a big thanks to all our members as we also reached the amazing milestone of 100 members! We think that’s just wonderful and really pleased every single one of you decided to join BuddyDress. We’re always interested in hearing your thoughts and comments just respond to any of our posts, comment in the forums or drop us a line using our contact form.

Buddypress blogtastic

Over at wpmu.org Sarah posted a list this week entitled 15 Excellent BuddyPress Blogs You Should be Reading – thank you for the mention Sarah. We’d suggest it’s well worth checking out as there are some great gems over there. For this week’s Friday Find I thought it was worth taking a look at a few of the blogs listed and doing a roundup of their latest topics.

Jeff Sayre has an interesting post entitled ‘The Growing Panoply of Speciality BuddyPress Developer and Administration tools’

Boone Gorges has a great article on ‘Setting up a WordPress/BuddyPress development environment on OS X’

Francesco Laffi delivers an nice tutorial entitled ‘Add confirm email field in BuddyPress signup page’

These are just some links but any of those blogs listed are well worth following some update more than others but worthy of a place in any BuddyPressers list of reading.

In wpmu.org this week

Wpmu.org as always was busy this week so here’s a nice selection of links from over there relating to BuddyPress:

‘Maximize WordPress and BuddyPress Performance With W3 Total Cache’

‘Daily Tip: Limit Groups Per User With New BuddyPress Plugin’

‘Keep them Clicking: How TO Increase Your Site’s User Interaction With Cubepoints For Buddypress’

Releases a gogo

This week’s also been fairly busy with WPMU DEV chucking out a fair few plugins:

Random Theme on Signup
Rebranded Meta Widget
There was also a major update to BuddyPress Group Calendar

We’ve also been busy here at BuddyDress with the release of our free Bp Colours: Colour Pack for the BuddyPress Default theme.

As always if you’ve got anything you think we may like to include in a Friday Find just drop us a line.

As you can see we haven’t exactly changed much – er – anything yet around here, but needless to say we have plenty of plans to do so… starting with fixing up FaceBuddy, DarkPress and Shouty!

So, stay tuned for more news, info and great BuddyPress themes!