I am building a WPMU + Buddypress business directory. Can anyone recommend a free theme that can be used to convert user blogs to look more like a company profile page? Sections in the dashboard where the information (like company name, address, contact, products) can be filled in easily and show up in the appropriate spots would be great.
Eventually, I would like to link employee profiles to these pages and vice versa but that might be a question for the buddypress forums.
Thanks!
Do you have a plugin that gathers all this information? Usually something like that will have code you can place in any theme to display those fields.
Hey Andrea,
I have not come across such a plugin. Would you recommend using a plugin for gathering the custom information or create a theme options page in the dashboard?
Ive seen some tutorials to create the theme options page, and it does not look like it will be too difficult to create one for my simple needs. Also this way the options will automatically be available for the users that use this theme (other regular themes are also available in my WPMU install).
From the design aspect, I guess I will have to create a new theme from scratch with zones where the information should be displayed. Im still looking for a simple business that might have some of these aspects to start from as I have never created a theme before.
A theme options page deals with changing aspects of the them itself.
what you want is a profile plugin. you shouldn't have to create a brand-new theme.
Since you're using Buddypress, you do know you can add more profile fields, right?
Why not display the business info there, and not in the blog parts?
Thanks for the suggestion Andrea. My goal is to use buddypress as a community of startup founders and the company profile theme as a way for them to create an information page about their company. Once I have those set up, I want to connect the page to the founders' profiles groups, forums and other blogs in buddypress as well as pull in news & other information about the company from around the web.
This is something like what I have in mind for the company profile - http://www.crunchbase.com/company/craigslist -(but more basic and connected to the buddypress community)
Ofcourse, one good way to do it would be to have the company blog be created and pull in basic information from the founders buddypress profile page automatically when they register to the buddypress community.
The reasons why I would like to not use the buddypress profiles directly for all the company information is because there might be more than 1 person connected to the company profile (i.e. blog admins) and also I might want to restrict viewing privileges of the buddypress profiles to members of the community only while keeping the company profile page public.
Sorry if I am not being clear here. Would love to get your suggestions on this project. :)
