First up… facebook

We’ve now got a page over here.  We’d love you to like our page and start joining in the discussion there.

BuddyPress Colours gets on the theme directory

This week BuddyPress Colours was accepted into the WordPress theme directory and we’re over the moon about it.  You can now get it right here.  In just a few days we’ve been amazed by the 650 downloads.  If you don’t know what BuddyPress Colours is… it is a theme pack that consists of child themes where the colours are split from the layout elements making it really easy to create your own colour scheme.

We’d like to thank anyone whose downloaded it and look forward to welcoming new members both to the blog and as BuddyDress members through the theme.

Catch up on the tutorial videos

Missed out on a video from BuddyDress?  You can catch up with all the videos right here.

BuddyDress twitters

Don’t forget as we close up this Friday Find that you can find us all week over at twitter right here.

Create the page template

For demo purposes we’re going to use the structure of page.php from the BuddyPress 1.2 Default theme and this theme for the demo itself.

At the top of the theme declare the template name by adding php comments and then by adding the name like this:

/*
Template Name: About
*/


Either add the custom code, formatting or whatever you want for the template in the rest of the code. For this demo we’re going to add the line “This is now using the about template”.

Save the page.

It’s often a good idea to save your pages using a naming convention we’re going to call this page templateabout.php but other good ones are by prefixing template_ or template-. By adding a prefix it makes it easy to identify which are your custom template files in a theme.

Assign the page template to the page

First you need to pick the page in this case the about page.

Then we want to go to the far right and find the section that says Attributes and then Templates under that there is a drop down and lets find the about one.

Remember to update your page to save it or if it’s a new page you’d be publishing it.

View the page template

Now go to the front and on the about page you will now see your template being used. There you go, that’s how you use page templates and it’s a world of possibilities. Many themes have built in templates common ones are full width, blog/news, sidebars to the left or right and 3 column layouts – however many have special templates also. You can read more about page at the WordPress Codex.

Going deeper into page templates next week

Next week we will build on this tutorial by showing you how to assign a blog or news template and a static home page along with more information on home page templates when we dive into the settings and templates.

We hope you are enjoying our tutorial series here at BuddyDress. If there are any tutorials you’d like to see just contact us.

Make BuddyPress speak your language with translation

Translating your site is not as large a task as you’d think with BuddyPress. Many themes including our own use mo and po files which you can edit to your own language. More information and discussion can be found in the ‘Localization Forum at Buddypress.org’.

Hover effect your users

Over at Sylozero there is a great tutorial on adding ‘A cool hover effect for your BuddyPress members avatars’.

DIY BuddyPress

BuddyPress is great out of the box but should you wish to delve deeper over at buddypress.org there are some great ‘How to Guides’. There is something for everyone there and you should never forget about this great resource along with the buddypress forums which are an endless resource of good information.

From WPMU.org this week:

Sarah kept up the daily dose goodness this week over at WPMU.org. Here are a few great tips for BuddyPress this week:

‘How to add the global facebook like button to buddypress profiles and activity stream items’
‘Optimize buddypress for search engines with the newly updated seo plugin’

Freedom from NING without worry

WPMU DEV released this week the Ning to BuddyPress user importer.  It’s a great solution that whilst yes it is a premium solution you can be sure of the support and code being safe which adds to a smooth move onto BuddyPress.

There we go another Friday Find we hope you have a great weekend. We’re always interested in suggestions for posts, friday finds and any comments. You can either comment on this post or contact us via our form.