AdSense friendliness and Options Control Panel

[Icepin]

Hello @michael and @tjchester,

Most of the themes come out of the box with an impressive control panel where you can easily customize the looks of your theme. I’m not talking about WP’s built-in customization tool. I’m talking about a real options control panel where you can easily manage the looks of the theme without relying heavily on bloating the WP install with tons of plugins and tons of custom modifications on the child theme.

Fixed navigation and few other layout options
An option to have the navigation menu fixed or not on scroll (this should’ve been a standard from the beginning for easy navigation) and few other options like puting icons in the menu or having the blog page easily customizable…

AdSense friendly.
The #content is 720 px. A standard ad is 728 x 90.
The header can be also used to place an Ad.
“Sponsored activity update” – Looking exactly like an activity update but controlled from the theme options menu to post the content with a ticker for on or off and of course, being always on top of other activities.

These are just few options that can be easily implemented with few lines of code in the theme’s option control panel. I’ve done a lot of customization on the child theme to achieve this and other things but the problem is that on every major update, something brakes and need to waste ton of hours trying to find and fix the bug.

Take a look at this theme’s menu and options control panel: http://demo.mythemeshop.com/best – NOT to be considered as advertisement, just trying to open a light for BuddyBoss becoming more awesome and complete.

I would even pay for such option control to have on BuddyBoss Theme. It would save me A LOT of time to concentrate managing the community instead of trying to fix and find ways to achieve what I want for BB install.

Kind regards,

[Icepin]

forgot to also mention the sidebar where an square standard Ad is 300px, sidebar is just 270px wide. At least the #content OR the sidebar to be made Ad friendly out of the box.

[Paul]

@icepin @michael @tjchester Divi2 by Elegant Themes and Kleo (Buddypress theme) both come with very good examples of such control panels. Kleo in particular can enable you to transform a site in minutes, while Divi2 has a complete mix of possible layouts. I have both if you’d like a look at them.

[Icepin]

You forgot Sweet Date, which is Klein and Divi combined + a lot more 🙂 I’ve chosen BB over Klein or SD just because it has the “Wall” and “like” functionality, thinking I’ll do the rest of modification manually. But it’s a pain in the ass. If they won’t implement an options panel at least to control the navigation of the website having more options, ad management and few other tweaks to layout… I’ll just switch to competition since it offers so much more.

[Paul]

@icepin I also have Klein, I actually bought that before BB. Kleo is the latest theme from Seventh Queen which supercedes Sweet Date, it’s very impressive. I’m sticking with BB for the time being to offer continuity across all platforms. On desktop BB is severely lacking, but on smaller devices it’s streets ahead – and the majority will visit your site from a mobile or tablet. Try the BB Super Mobile theme on an iPad, it’s fantastic, no other theme like it. The Wall and Like functions can be applied to any theme using the BB Wall plugin.

[Michael Eisenwasser]

Our upcoming themes have much more exciting desktop layouts. We’re doing some unique themes, targeted at specific use cases. Their mobile layouts will mostly resemble BuddyBoss mobile, with some tweaks to match their look. Not going to update the current BuddyBoss theme design much, because many people already use it and have many coded customizations already that we would break with big changes.

@icepin Thanks for all of your suggestions. You have some good ideas. Not just the theme options (I have played with many themes and know some are more feature rich here) but also in regards to advertising options. I know many people are looking to monetize their BP sites and anything that helps with that is appreciated. On Facebook, activity stream ads convert much better than sidebar ads (I know from experience) and so that is a really neat idea.

[angslycke]

@michael Appreciate the information! I am really excited about your upcoming themes since I’m looking for a more exciting desktop layout than BuddyBoss currently has. Am really pleased with the mobile version though.

Is there a time frame for these new themes? Perhaps you could write a blog post with some details and post a screenshot or two to build some momentum and give us users something to look forward to? Please? 🙂

[Michael Eisenwasser]

@angslycke Glad you’re excited about the next themes 🙂 Our future themes have nice mobile layouts as well.

Next theme will come out soon, this month. We’ll notify you.

May do a blog post, we’ll see. If you really want a sneak peak, send an email to support at buddyboss dot com, requesting to be a beta tester and I’ll let you in.

Best,
Michael

[angslycke]

Curious about whether you thought about advertising positions when you created the Boss. theme? From what I can tell it’s possible to place ads in the right widget area, but are there any other places designed for this?

Thanks!

[Alyssa]

@angslycke that isn’t quite what we have in mind for the first thing for the Boss theme but I think you may want to look into Page Builder to do something like this. I think Google is coming around to responsive ads and you may want to check into that to see where might be the best placement for those kinds of ads. I’ll forward this request to the devs.

[Michael Eisenwasser]

The right widget area is the best place, allows for a 300×250 ad (most profitable placement usually). Also you could put a leaderboard ad (728×90) in a footer widget.

We will be making updates sometime later to allow for ads in the activity stream too, via a plugin.

[Sol Huebner]

That would really be a nice plugin 🙂

[Alyssa]

We thought so 🙂

[Anonymous]

I’ll be a first day buyer on the activity stream ads plugin. I hope this is getting closer to completion.

[Anonymous]

@tjchester anything new with the activity stream ads plugin?