Back to: How to Build a Similar ELN

A WordPress theme provides the overall look and feel of the website. Out of the thousands of possible themes, we recommend the Community Builder theme because it provides good defaults for making the BuddyPress features easily available. For example, it provides a user icon with a drop down menu in the upper right that is a quick way to find the user profile area. It is also compatible with the other major plugins of GeoDirectory and Lifter LMS.

In this low-cost version of an ELN, we chose to use the pro version of the Community Builder theme because it provides additional features like customization of the footer text and some BuddyPress customizations.

From the Settings >> BuddyPress menu, you can set the features that will be utilized. In this example site, we have enable every feature except the Site Tracking. This then allows the site to have groups, extended profiles, friend connections, private messaging, activity streams, and notifications.

Also, under the Users menu item, when editing a given user then BuddyPress provides an extended area that allows you to upload your own avatar that is displayed in the members area.

For displaying groups and members, you can create separate menu items under the Appearance >> Menus. Using Custom Links, you can create /groups to display the list of groups, and /members to display the list of members.