Puneet Ghanshani

Chief Architect at Microsoft

3 minute read

This post is very specific to installing non-Buddypress compliant themes on Buddypress enabled Wordpress website.  So for those who don’t know what is Buddypress – Buddypress is a plugin that enables creating public/private social sites with features such as Blogging, Tweets, Forums, Groups, Activity Streams, Discussions and many more.  More features can be enabled by installed 100s of Buddypress plugins.  You can read more here

 

Problem with Buddypress –

Buddypress creates new or uses existing pages for its features. But it does not display any page content and instead replaces the page content by its standard pages.  This means that if you have a page called ‘Groups’ and it is blank but if it is configured with Buddypress you can still view the Groups page. 

Now if you install any non-Buddypress-ready theme with Buddpress enabled, you will see the actual Groups page (that can be blank, or may contain something) but not the Buddypress Groups page.

Think of it.  You have less than 50 Buddypress-compatible themes in market (as of 3 Jan 2012) and over 10000s non-compliant theme.

The solution – Buddypress Template Pack

You can install a plugin named ‘Buddypress Template Pack’ to convert any Buddypress non-compliant theme to a compliant theme.  However, this template pack does not convert each theme into Buddypress theme.  It finds out links and redirects them to use Buddypress behavior.

That’s as simple as said.  Download it from here

But many users face issues while activating this plugin

  • Error 404 – Page Not Found
  • Error 500 – Internal Server Error

and you could be just another one getting this error.  This error is primarily because the currently activated theme is creating hindrance in changing the settings.  These errors have an easy fix :

  • Deactivate the plugin.  If you are unable to, then go to \wp-content\plugin and append the folder name by TEMP
  • Enable a theme that is non-compliant to Buddypress.  You can use a default theme for the time.
  • Activate the plugin.  If you have renamed the plugin folder, you should revert that change.
  • Enable a Buddypress theme
  • Run through the wizard of plugin to do the settings.

That should help you get going!

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