Theme Compatibility – Customizing

BuddyPress 1.7 has built-in theme support. All required elements such as front-end editing are included. This means that all functionality will work, even when a theme has no specific BuddyPress templates or code included with it.

To customize BuddyPress:
The directory wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-templates/bp-legacy/ contains the directories buddypress, css and js, and the file buddypress-functions.php.

• buddypress contains template files; copy any you want to modify into a directory named buddypress in your theme’s root. eg. /wp-content/themes/mytheme/buddypress/
• css contains style sheets; copy any you want to modify into a directory named css in your theme’s root. eg. /wp-content/themes/mytheme/css/

Edit the new files for complete control over BuddyPress display in your theme.

Don’t need theme compatibility?

If you are using a theme that was built for an earlier version of BuddyPress, then your theme already supports BuddyPress and you won’t need BP’s theme compatibility. Your theme can tell BuddyPress not to load the theme compat layer by putting the following line in functions.php:

add_theme_support( 'buddypress' );

For more details, see this post on the BP development blog.