Integrating Buddypress (or social features) with Colorlabs template

Hi!

Im a bit of a WP newbie but I am sick of Joomla so transferring my site over to something more straight forward for my users.

Basically I am running a news/publishing site which has a public side, and a private side…

The public side is the attractive site, where the content is produced and any user can view and potentially comment on the articles.

There is also a private side for my authors to network with each other, earn points for the more posts and comments they make, integrate split advertising, activity streams, etc.

What I would like to do is implement this with wordpress, potentially using buddypress for the social features.

I am having a lot of problems with finding an attractive buddypress theme, so I am now using some themes for wordpress from Colorlabs.. I would still like to integrate buddypress though..

I have tried integrating into the existing template, but I dont think the framework will allow it as it keeps throwing up errors..

The solution I had thought of was using a Multisite install, with two separate sites (public + private).. This is possible with the one user, but it seems that it is still difficult to get the content posted on the private site, published correctly on the public site (particularly photos are not coming across with plugins such as broadcast, etc)..

The other idea I had was to somehow have the two sites sharing the same tables in a database for comments, images, posts, etc… but I haven’t managed to find any links on the internet to successful implementations such as this..

I know there are all sorts of issues with duplicating content across two sites, but the key here is that the private site will not be indexed…

The final idea I have had was to allow my users to only be subscribers in the private side, and force them to publish on the public side (through the multisite, with an appropriate admin menu at the top) but to then have these posts broadcasted back to the social network (with the permalinks posting to public side, but the author links pointing to the social profiles in buddypress for the private side/logged in users). I won’t have the appropriate photos in the network, but this is not essential. I just want users in the network/private side to be able to see what others are posting, follow the links, add them as friends, and also critically, earn points for the content they post on the front end…

Any suggestions as to how I can implement this, or any one else who has similar ambitions?

Thanks!