We’re very excited to announce our first “feature as a plugin” hosted on the official WordPress.org Plugin directory is now available for download. Today marks another important date into our project’s history: BuddyPress is progressively moving towards using the WordPress Rewrite API to create, manage, parse and customize every URL generated by the plugin.
We’ve met twice during this first month of documentation contributions. ICYMI our documentation site is named the Codex.
First, we’ve shared our feelings about the current status of it :
Half of our guides are outdated.
New screenshots and descriptions are much needed.
Improving Codex organization is highly required: User documentation doesn’t reply to the same needs than Developer one.
SEO should be considered to make it easier for users to find the replies they are looking for (and to make sure BuddyPress Codex’ site is up in search results).
Plugins used to power the Codex site are not as great as they used to be now we write content using Blocks.
Then we took these decisions:
The codex will target Users and Site Admins.
A link will be added to direct Developers to the developer.buddypress.org site and the corresponding content will be moved there.
Organize the Codex using sections :
1 to help people to get started with BuddyPress,
1 to help people troubleshoot BuddyPress,
1 for each BuddyPress component.
Use & adapt the WordPress HelpHub plugin and theme for BuddyPress Codex needs. This way we can capitalize on the great work the WP Documentation team did.
Put up a staging site we can work on to update the documentation content and organization.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.2.0. This maintenance release fixes five bugs. For details on the changes, please read the 10.2.0 release notes.
We haven’t updated the BuddyPress Codex for a while and it really needs a big refresh! The BuddyPress development team decided at the end of their last week meeting to spend the next 4 to 6 months on this very important task: make our documentation up to date, better organized, more accurate and more useful to all BuddyPress user “levels”.
This task is huge and we really need your help to make it a success
That’s why we kindly invite you all to join this effort and why not become members of a new BuddyPress Docs team!
We’ll meet every other Wednesday for an hour to talk about docs during a new “documentation contributor hour”. Our kick off meeting is scheduled next week (March 2) at 20:00 UTC. It will happen into the #BuddyPress channel of the WordPress.org slack.
If you haven’t registered a WordPress.org account, you’ll need to do so: create your account on WordPress.org
If you haven’t joined the WordPress.org Slack (the tool WordPress contributors are using to communicate with), you’ll need to do it, once you did the 1st step, from this place: https://make.wordpress.org/chat/.
If you have questions, don’t hesitate to comment this post 👌
“La Pino’z” is our first major release of 2022, and it’s version 10 of BuddyPress! It all started for us in 2009, 2 years before Sanam Kapoor opened his very first pizzeria in his hometown of Chandigarh, India. Known for its delicious and rich traditional Italian pizza, “La Pino’z” soon became one of the most famous foods shared in the Indian community. From that very moment to 350 plus restaurants over India today and soon elsewhere in the world, Sanam and his team have unquestionably come a very long and successful way. La Pino’z is also the only pizza chain in India equipped with giant pizza machines producing the 24” inch monster pizza 😜
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 10.0.0 release in the release notes. Please note that BuddyPress 10.0.0 requires WordPress 5.4.
That being said, let’s talk about the new delicious features we believe you are going to enjoy a lot!
Site membership requests
Take control of your site’s membership! With site membership requests, administrators can significantly reduce the number of spam users trolling their sites.
When requests are enabled, visitors may submit a membership request, which must be manually approved by a site administrator. Read more about this feature.
More engaging logging activities
These simple activities about specific user interactions or events (for example, you and me are now friends) are more visually attractive to improve user engagement in your community.
The most impressive new activity is that which is generated when a user updates her profile photo: it will include the profile photo that spurred the creation of the activity item, even if it has been changed since. Learn more about it by reading this developer note.
As shown in the image above, the BuddyPress administration screens are now using the layout WordPress uses for its tabbed administration screens such as the Site-Health or Privacy screens.
Knowing the WordPress pages BuddyPress uses for its front-end directory screens is simpler with special status information displayed beside all BuddyPress pages.
A new area to discover our current and future BuddyPress Add-ons
BuddyPress Add-ons are experimental plugins, beta features packaged as plugins, that will be made available into the official WordPress.org plugins directory so that it’s easier for you to test them and give the development team your feedback.
The more we are to get involved into the future of our open source project, the brighter it will be and the faster we’ll be able to include great new features!
BuddyPress Add-ons are also stable complementary BP Components or BP Blocks, which we have decided to keep independent from the core of BuddyPress, leaving you the choice whether to use the feature or not. The BP Search Block is the first example of this second category of add-ons. Give it a try; you can easily install it from your BuddyPress Add-ons administration screen.
Ready for Twenty Twenty-Two!
WordPress 5.9 will introduce Full Site Editing featuring the new default theme Twenty Twenty-Two.
We’ve adjusted our BP Theme Compatibility API so that you can enjoy this amazing feature, making sure that BuddyPress-generated content integrates optimally within themes supporting it.
➕ The BP Nouveau Template Pack also includes a companion stylesheet to maximize BP pages layout within Twenty Twenty-Two.
Under the hood
10.0.0 comes with more than 70 changes including performance improvements to the BP Notifications, BP Activity and BP Signups APIs; Date Query support for the Members, Groups and Sites loops; new BP Avatar UI Recycle tab, improved inline documentation/translators comments and code formatting. Have a look to the release notes to discover them all!
Many thanks to the 39 contributors who helped us build & translate BuddyPress 10.0.0
“Release Candidate” means that we believe 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 we missed something. BuddyPress 10.0.0 is slated for release on January 17, 2022, but your help is needed to get there 🙏.
You can get the 10.0.0-RC1 pre-release package in 4 ways:
Try the BP Beta Tester plugin. (This is the easiest way!)
We’ve closed over 70 tickets in the process of developing BP 10. Here are some highlights:
🛂 Site Membership Requests
Site Administrators wishing to have more control over who can join their community will be able to enable site membership requests from their BuddyPress Options Administration screen. Once done, BuddyPress sign-ups are transformed into membership requests to be manually reviewed and approved by an administrator to validate new user accounts.
🗞 More engaging logging activities
These simple activities about specific user interactions or events (e.g.: a user became a friend of another user) will be more visually attractive to improve user engagement in your community. The most impressive new activity is that which is generated when a user updates their profile photo: it will include the profile photo that spurred the creation of the activity item, even if it has been updated since 📸!
🎨 WordPress Full Site Editing compatibility
You’re beta testing WordPress 5.9: first thank you, second please take a few more minutes to check the improvements we’ve made to our BP Theme Compatibility API to play nice with themes supporting Full Site Editing such as the next WordPress default theme: Twenty Twenty-Two.
➕ A new place to easily discover our next BuddyPress Add-ons
BuddyPress Add-ons are side projects/projects as features/next BuddyPress blocks maintained by the BuddyPress development team we’ll soon make more widely available by publishing them on the WordPress plugin directory. When BuddyPress 10.0.0 is released, you’ll find a new tab to your “Add Plugins” Administration screen. On it, you’ll see a new add-on for a potentially upcoming feature: BP Rewrites. We think this will bring more contributions to the BuddyPress project as a whole.
Translate BuddyPress into your language. The release candidate also marks the string freeze point of the 10.0.0 release schedule. And we don’t have much time to update all of the BuddyPress translations. So if you speak a language other than English, please help us translate BuddyPress into as many languages as possible!
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can share it with us replying to this support topic or if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
Thanks in advance for your help–we can’t build BuddyPress without you! Happy testing!
Immediately available is BuddyPress 9.2.0. This maintenance release fixes three bugs, anticipates one issue which appeared while beta testing WordPress 5.9 and prepares the release of our first BuddyPress add-on (a community search block). For details on the changes, please read the 9.2.0 release notes.
The BuddyPress developers and contributors wish you the best for this new year! Have fun, stay safe and carry on sharing great words & feelings with WordPress and BuddyPress 📝 🤗
🎶 All BuddyPress wants for Christmas🧑🎄 is you 🎵 … to test this new pre-release!
If you haven’t tested our first 10.0.0 beta release, here’s another opportunity to help us put the final touches on our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress-/ BuddyPress-specific configuration.
Beta testing is very important, and we need you all, whether you’re a novice or an advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author. Please contribute 🙏.
Custom Group Extensions: if you activated one or more plugins adding a new tab to your groups or if you built one or more plugins playing with the Group Extension API. It’s very important you take some time to make sure everything is working as expected in this area.
Contribute to WordPress 5.9 beta tests as well! Let’s all check that BuddyPress pages are getting along well with Twenty Twenty-Two, the next WordPress default theme.
The Private Messages component just got a new feature: messages thread exit. Users can now remove themselves from a conversation.
The final release is slated for early January and we need your help to get there: please test 10.0.0-beta2. If you find a bug, please report it on our Trac or as a reply to this forum topic.
The BuddyPress core team is wishing you all: Merry Christmas 🎄