Our Canvas BuddyPress child theme has, to our surprise, been one of our most downloaded themes recently, yet we are guilty of not giving it the attention it deserves. It’s been ignored partially because of our capacity in-house, or lack thereof, and partly because of our lack of knowledge/skills with the plugin. We therefore thought that it would be a good idea to partner with top-notch BuddyPress specialists to take care of ongoing support, upgrades and fixes.
Enter Paul Weingartz and Jon Van Rooyen of Guntribe, two Cape Town based developers with a wealth of knowledge on BuddyPress. Over the past couple months they’ve been adding new template pages, including a widgetized homepage and new settings pages, fixing styling bugs and making the child theme is 100% compatible with 1.5.x. With 2.0 development already underway.
The Canvas BuddyPress widgetized homepage.
Club members and Canvas users who’ve had access to this child theme in the past will continue to do so, whilst going forward the child theme will now be a commercial product and not be made available to new Canvas users. They’ll need to purchase the $20 child theme. This is to ensure it’s maintenance and upgrades by our collaborative partner.
Take the new Canvas BuddyPress child theme for a spin on our demo or view the theme listing here.
Let us know what you think of Canvas BuddyPress and what you want included in it going forward, we listening.
21 Responses to “Canvas BuddyPress gets a revamp”
Hurrrahh! Fantastic news
Does this theme actually do anything new that buddypress itself does not do out of the box? i.e. new functionality…
A BuddyPress compatible WooThemes Theme is enough in itself if you’ve ever tried to use BuddyPress with a non-compatible theme.
Woot for Woo!
Not necessarily new functionality, but a theme that is styled/works with BuddyPress.
questions: – never used buddypress as a child or as itself:
1) is it possible to import a phpBB forum to buddypress? With users?
2) if I have a child theme for my Canvas-theme, can I add the buddypress into this too?
I would like to use buddypress in my very custom CANVAS theme.
Or is the child theme for buddypress annother party?
Sorry for my maybe silly question.
#1 is definitely outside of WooThemes’ support coverage. I think your best bet for phpBB to BuddyPress would be to use bbPress 2.0, a new WordPress plugin you might be familiar with. BuddyPress 1.5 can be integrated with bbPress 2 out of the box.
There’s a migration plugin in development called bbConverter for which phpBB 3 is on the roadmap. If you’re using phpBB 2 then you should probably use phpBB’s own migration script to update it to version 3 before using bbConverter.
The big downside at the moment is that, to my knowledge, Canvas BuddyPress does not yet support bbPress 2, so you might have to modify the theme a bit in order to make your forum look right.
thanks Erlend. Very important info for me.
I will try to import the phpBB on a testpage.
Thanks for the helpful answer Erlend, as noted you may need to make your own style tweaks for bbPress. Not something we’ve tested or worked on integrating.
A much welcomed revamp. I’m still not very happy with the child-theme structure, but this is a great start indeed.
Once again, WooThemes has listened to its community and acted in the best interest of its userbase. This is what we stick around for
@shawn you bring a good point. I think for the next generation of BuddyPress themes, they need to bring something new to the platform in order to compete. But for starters, I’d be be super happy with full bbPress 2.0 compatibility.
I’d love to create a theme to sell on your site based on a social genre using this base.
Great work as usual!
You can always submit stuff you have to us here.
– http://www.woothemes.com/submit-your-design/
Think I will! Will be an honor to have a theme accepted by the Woo guys!
I submitted my first concept last week, hope you guys like!
For any reason I cant see this theme under my downloads tab, and I used to see it the last week, any ideas?
Same thing here… Will the theme be available to Canvas owners soon?
Hi I am also looking for a download link, I have been using it before.
I have it under my downloads, but the last update says 2011-02-06. Has the download not been updated?
The download is right, even though it says .1 and 2/6 as last updated. I looked at the change log in the files and it’s the updated version.
Looking forward to this – great to see buddypress getting better and also woo supporting it – cheers
Great news. Do you have a rough timeline for the 2.0 compatibility?
Had a moment to spare for some testing now, but the theme doesn’t appear to be available for download yet. If it’s not ready for prime time yet, I’d be happy to do some beta testing for you.
Most of all I’m curious if WooThemes will introduce some sort of tutorial to safely editing child themes, seeing as you’ve started to opt for reduced theme options in favor of a leaner, more accessible codebase. Maybe look into how the Infinity guys are pulling off “Grandchild themes” ?