Back to: How to Build Your Free ELN

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

From the WordPress admin area, you can select the Settings >> BuddyPress menu item and set the features that will be utilized in BuddyPress. In this example site, we have enabled every feature except Site Tracking. These settings allow the site to have groups, extended profiles, friend connections, private messaging, activity streams, and notifications.

Also from the WordPress admin area 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 WordPress admin area using Appearance >> Menus. Using Custom Links for the menu items, you can use the path of ‘/groups’ to display the list of groups, and the path of ‘/members’ to display the list of members.