We will soon publish a maintenance release (6.2.0) to prepare BuddyPress to some changes that will introduce WordPress next major release (5.5.0). WordPress 5.5.0 is slated for August 11, and we’d love you to help us use the coming days to make sure your favorite community engine is ready to fully enjoy this new version of WordPress.
BuddyPress 6.2.0 will make sure our BP Email feature is using the 6.0 version of PHPMailer when WordPress 5.5.0 is installed on your site and will carry on using its version 5.2 when your WordPress version is lower (4.8 to 5.4 for the supported versions of our 6.0 branch). For more information about it, please have a look to this ticket.
If you’re a plugin or a theme developer and are extending our BP Email feature, we strongly advise you to test your code with the latest pre-release of WordPress 5.5.0 (eg: 5.5.0-beta3) and BuddyPress 6.2.0-beta1.
WordPress 5.5.0 will also remove the jQuery Migrate library, as BuddyPress uses a lot jQuery, we’ve been checking the impact of this removal. We haven’t found any issue so far, but if you do, please warn us about it commenting this ticket.
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but, until then, you can check out this report on Trac for the full list of fixes.
You can test the 6.2.0-beta1 pre-release in 2 ways :
Immediately available is BuddyPress 6.1.0. This maintenance release fixes 6 bugs related to the 6.0.0 release, and is a recommended upgrade for all BuddyPress installations.
We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of BuddyPress 6.0.0 code-named “iovine’s“. You can get it clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, it’s always a good idea to back-up your WordPress database and files ahead of time.
You can review all of the changes in this 6.0.0 release in the release notes. Below are a few of the key features we know you are going to love!
BP Blocks
BuddyPress 6.0.0 comes with two awesome new blocks for your WordPress Editor: Members and Groups. Made available from the BuddyPress blocks category of your WordPress Block menu, these lovely blocks let you insert a rich content block featuring a specific Member or Group from your community site inside any WordPress Post or Page.
If you’re an Advanced BuddyPresser and wish to fine-tune the BuddyPress blocks for your community site, learn more in this section of our development note about these new blocks.
The BP REST API is now complete!
In 5.0.0, we introduced the first REST API endpoints and provided reference documentation for them. In 6.0.0, we are adding the 6 remaining endpoints you were waiting for: Blogs, Blog avatar, Friends, Group Cover Image, Member Cover Image, and User Signups. You can now build full-featured applications using the BuddyPress REST API!
BP Nouveau has been improved
Does your theme support wide layouts? Awesome! The BP Nouveau template-pack now supports wide (and really, really wide) content areas! This is the first of the many improvements we are bringing to our default set of styling components. It never looked so beautiful in your theme.
Under the hood
6.0.0 includes more than 80 changes to improve your BuddyPress experience as users, as contributors to our code and as contributors to our translations. The biggest change moves local avatar management to the Members component. Read more about it in this development note.
Knowing how you use BuddyPress and getting your point of view about future BuddyPress development is very important to us. Please, take some time to help us decide what’s best for the BuddyPress project.
If you come to Paris (France), you’ll probably want to visit the Louvre Museum. The greatest Pizza restaurant around is Nicola Iovine’s place. You’ll fall in love with how he cares to respect culinary traditions, share authentic flavors, select great quality products imported from Italy and use the real neapolitan pizza dough.
Receiving your feedback and suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share your feedback about this version of BuddyPress in the comments area of this post. And of course, if you’ve found a bug: please tell us about it into our Support forums.
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 6.0.0 Beta1 release.
Polyglots contributors, there’s some extra work.
This release candidate should introduce around 50 new strings to translate (the ones that were not included previously due to the issue), so thanks in advance for your comprehension and for your help .
This is an important milestone as we progress toward the BuddyPress 6.0.0 final release date. “Release Candidate” means that we think the new version is ready for release, but with more than 200,000 active installs, hundreds of BuddyPress plugins and Thousands of WordPress themes, it’s possible something was missed.
BuddPress 6.0.0 is slated for release on Thursday, May 14, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 6.0.0 yet, now is the time!
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 6.0.0 Beta1 release.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against BuddyPress 6.0.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to this specific support topic so we can figure those out before the final release. We strongly advise you to have a look at the 6.0.0 development notes to figure out what to focus on during your testing.
Polyglots, we need you!
Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate BuddyPress into many languages! This release also marks the string freeze point of the 6.0.0 release schedule. For your information, we are now using WP CLI to generate the buddypress.pot file and you’ll see we’ve paid attention to add translators comments to all the strings needing some.
BuddyPress 5.2.0 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release. All BuddyPress installations are strongly encouraged to upgrade as soon as possible.
The 5.2.0 release addresses four security issue:
A vulnerability was fixed that could allow group moderators improper control over group membership via a REST API endpoint.
A vulnerability was fixed that could allow a CSRF attack related to xProfile field deletion links in the Dashboard.
A vulnerability was fixed that could allow users to delete group activity items belonging to groups to which they don’t have administrative access.
A vulnerability was fixed that could allow site Editors or Authors improper edit access over items belonging to BuddyPress’s Email post type.
These vulnerabilities were reported privately to the BuddyPress team by Kien Hoang, in accordance with WordPress’s security policies. Our thanks to the reporter for practicing coordinated disclosure.
Version 5.2.0 also fixes five bugs, including compatibility updates for WordPress 5.4.
We’ve introduced a repair tool in case something went wrong during the 5.0.0 BP Groups invitations upgrade. Read more about it here.
We’ve gathered all BP Blocks settings into one panel to save you some clicks :). See this ticket for an updated screenshot of the BP Blocks settings sidebars.
We’ve fixed a formatting issue about the total number of members displayed into the Members directory when the BP Nouveau Template pack (the default one) is active. Here’s a link to the commit.
We’ve updated our use of a specific privacy function that has been deprecated in WordPress 5.4.0. Read more about it here.
We’d love you to give us a hand to get there. Testing this new beta release is the very first way you can get involved into BuddyPress. You can test the 6.0.0-beta2 pre-release in 4 ways :
6.0.0 is almost ready, but please do not run this Beta 2 pre-release in a production environment just yet. Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.
We’ve just updated the plugin to help you test BuddyPress beta & RC releases. From now on, when testing BuddyPress pre-releases, you’ll find a new section into the plugin’s administration screen called “What to expect from next release?” as shown below.
By clicking on the “our Development Blog” link you will be headed to the development notes of the BuddyPress next release. It’s a good way to know about the important changes the BuddyPress final release will bring.
It’s the right time to play with this plugin! BuddyPress 6.0.0-beta1 has been released a few days ago. Once again thanks in advance for testing it: it’s an important stage of the development process for us.
Finally props to @iamthewebb for contributing to this new version of BP Beta Tester.
