Welcome BuddyPress to TF

Recently we discovered that not only are BuddyPress themes selling like crazy, they’re also one of the top searched items on ThemeForest. Naturally we decided to give BuddyPress its own category. Categories improve browsing and, in turn, sales so I’m guessing we’ll see a spike here soon.

If huge sales isn’t enough of a motivating factor to get you making BP themes, here are a couple other advantages.

1. BuddyPress items will be price $10 higher than an equivalent WP theme
2. You are allowed to have a BuddyPress version of your existing theme
3. Over the next couple weeks we’ll be giving this category some extra promotion
4. Thousands of people search for this file type on TF every month

I look forward to see what you guys can come up with. I’m always amazed at the incredible work you do. Good luck with sales!

You are allowed to have a BuddyPress version of your existing theme

So say I have my Adventure theme and give it BuddyPress compatibility? Does that mean I can upload it as a new listing.

Thanks!

ThemeProvince said

You are allowed to have a BuddyPress version of your existing theme

So say I have my Adventure theme and give it BuddyPress compatibility? Does that mean I can upload it as a new listing.

Thanks!

If it’s a BuddyPress theme, you’re definitely going to want to make it a community site. That said, you’re more than welcome to use the same overall design.

I do not like the idea of categories for plugins. I think it’s a move in the wrong direction. How about a bbPress category too? And there is the point, you can’t be in more than one category. BuddyPress is an OPTIONAL feature of my themes. Why would you categorize something by just one of its many options? As more and more advanced plugins are developed you will eventually end up with a conflict over which category to place your theme in if it supports multiple major plugins.

Maybe that’s why I started getting asked this question today “Does your theme work without BuddyPress?”.

This is the wrong way to accomplish a BuddyPress category in my opinion. If you want to show a category for BP in the menu, create a checkbox on the item options for “BuddyPress ready?” and you can auto generate the “category”.

This makes it impossible to categorize our BP themes by design or style. We already have tags and they accomplish this letting the themes show up with a simple search for “BuddyPress”, and isn’t that what tags are for, to specify things like plugin support. Please reconsider this decision or look at a different implementation. I feel this is a backwards step.

I must agree with Parallelus. His themes do support buddypress but can do more than that, so you are ripping it from the general usage described from other categories from wordpress. You are telling that the theme is good only for buddypress in short.

Is it possible to make BP themes as a stand-alone or an add-on to an already available theme? Sometimes customers might want just the core WP theme without the additional theme for BP. This will save some headaches especially if we do not want to mess with a lot of options.

sy4mil said
Is it possible to make BP themes as a stand-alone or an add-on to an already available theme? Sometimes customers might want just the core WP theme without the additional theme for BP. This will save some headaches especially if we do not want to mess with a lot of options.

My themes are built to detect the BuddyPress plugin and only show the additional options if you have it installed and active. The benefit of this is you don’t have any performance loss as a result of the BP template files and the administrative features are not bloated with unnecessary options. So there is no need to have 2 themes.

Thank you for the explanation Parallelus. I can imagine that you might have answered similar questions like this many times before, so apologies for that.

However I do have another curiosity – If you can offer your theme at a slightly cheaper price for the WP version and slightly more for the WP+BP theme, considering that the cheaper one would appeal to the customers who only wanted the WP version – would you consider doing it that way?

sy4mil said
Thank you for the explanation Parallelus. I can imagine that you might have answered similar questions like this many times before, so apologies for that. However I do have another curiosity – If you can offer your theme at a slightly cheaper price for the WP version and slightly more for the WP+BP theme, considering that the cheaper one would appeal to the customers who only wanted the WP version – would you consider doing it that way?

Probably not. I see some issues with this. For example, there’s no way to upgrade to a higher priced version which isn’t helpful for customers. Also it splits the sales making it harder to get on the top sellers list which can help with exposure and increasing sales.

Now can you add a WPML category, a BBPress category, and categories for pretty much any plugin that needs to be “supported”?