Stop bundling BP-Default theme?

[DJPaul]

We've been bundling the BP-Default theme in the build/release process for what feels like years.
It only shows available on old sites; newer sites it is hidden.

Back at the start of January 2018, I enquired about what usage stats there are available. There were very few useful stats available, but:

• "We don’t have any stats for the number of themes who use bp-default as a parent template."
• "The number of people who use the bp-default theme directly is next-to-none. The BP plugin has ~230k active installs. bp-default is registered as installed on 10k sites and in use on 2k".

I propose we remove BP-Default from 4.0.

[boonebgorges]

I run a number of active but older sites that use bp-default child themes. Removing bp-default will mean a non-zero amount work for me as the maintainer of those sites. I'm sure I'm not alone.

There are two sets of compatibility considerations. One is the fact that the active (or parent) theme will suddenly be missing. There are things we can do to mitigate this: automatically install the theme from GitHub/the repo; prompt the admin to install the separate theme; discourage BP upgrade until the problem has been rectified; etc.

A harder problem is that certain theme and plugin customizations may make reference to bp-default paths, so that (eg) enqueuing a style from wp-content/plugins/buddypress/bp-themes/bp-default... will no longer work. (This won't be an issue for those using get_template_directory_uri() etc).

Personally, as in the case of bbPress 1.x, I don't see the advantage of removing the files. Removing it will break some sites, while keeping it in doesn't cause any harm to anyone. If we were introducing new themes and template packs every year, you might argue that it no longer makes sense to package them all, but we are on our fourth in the history of BP (bp-sn-parent, bp-default, bp-legacy, bp-nouveau, and only the latter three are included) so the overhead seems minimal for the time being. That said, I recognize that one real piece of "harm" is that it annoys people like @DJPaul to have it in there, so I won't lobby hard to keep it.

[DJPaul]

That's a good enough reason to keep it around. It's a shame we were blocked years ago from having BP-Default included in the WP.org Themes repo, as that was the original plan, and would have solved this naturally by now.

Thanks for your feedback Boone