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imath 10:30 pm on September 14, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : September 7, 2022

BP Attachments / Activity block editor update

  • @im4th has started working on templating to display single media on the front-end.
  • He also made it possible to share media using the Activity Block Editor when the BP Attachements plugin is active. This means block developers could soon enjoy a new playground to express themselves.
  • The BP Attachments Admin UI now includes an “Edit Item” view. See the screenshot below.

11.0.0 updates

  • @im4th shared he was hesitant about #8052. Now the blog post title is directly included into the corresponding activity type’s content, we don’t need to use a blog meta to retrieve it inside the activity action string anymore.
  • @dcavins suggested to request a feedback from @rayisme who worked on this part and should be the best of us to know whether it’s safe or not to make this move in 11.0.0.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • First beta: October 19, 2022.
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor

@im4th started discussing about the drop on the active installations stat we observed on the BuddyPress WP.org plugin’s page as it went down from 200k to 100k 😱. Thanks to @johnjamesjacoby we were able to get more precise numbers about this decrease and it turns out we’re around 190/195k active installs. But the trend since year 2017 is concerning as it’s 📉 not to mention the fact there are less and less contributors to the project 😭. We’ve discussed about the possible reasons for these bad results:

  • lack of cool front-end things added to the plugin recently,
  • hesitancy to install a big plugin like BuddyPress for a single feature,
  • lack of privacy tools, of a media component,
  • growth of the use of things like Teams and Slack,
  • BuddyBoss’s commercial aggressivity (eg: Google Adwords) or their slick-looking theme attractivity,
  • etc..

As the BP Attachments add-on should be available around the 11.0.0 release date, the first action we took was to open a ticket about including a basic private community feature into our next major release.

After some more discussions with @espellcaste we came to the conclusion we need more data from users. A new survey was suggested as well as asking the WordPress Marketing Team for help. We finally thought about posting into our support forum this simple question “what is the most important feature that BuddyPress is missing?“. We decided to test this last idea as soon as we have a text to explain why we are questionning ourselves about it. If you believe you have answers to share with us, don’t hesitate to comment this post 🙏.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on September 21 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#11-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 11:15 am on June 22, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : June 8, 2022 & June 22 BP Dev-Chat agenda

Features for BuddyPress next major release (11.0.0)

The BP Attachments React based UI
  • @im4th shared a GitHub link to an issue summarizing what is/will be inside the BP Attachments feature informing the delete action was still missing. Since this chat, he included this action to the React based UI. As you can see in the above screenshot, one of the goal is to be able to create folders to organize user generated media.
  • @im4th & @johnjamesjacoby agreed it was ok to bump WordPress required version to 5.7 in BuddyPress 11.0.0, see #8709.
  • As we lost ourselves into endless conversations about using PHPCS, @im4th said he would like to see a first patch added to #7228. He thinks this patch should include a GitHub action so that GitHub PR submitted to our repository could be checked against the PHPCS rules we choose to observe.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen today on June 22 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda :

  • A new strategy for a Block based activity post form.
  • BP Attachments & Media in 11.0.0
  • Let’s work on things we can use for BuddyPress.org: a new bundled BP Theme (as a replacement to BP Default?)
  • Let’s work on removing our dependency to jQuery.
  • BP Rewrites 1.3.0: bbPress forward compatibility!

Let’s try to be a lot of BuddyPress contributors to join this chat 🙏🤝

#11-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 9:27 am on February 5, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : February 2, 2022.

Unfortunately, not many of us could join the meeting. Points about 10.0 first feedbacks, 10.1.0 release schedule and the documentation effort were not really discussed.

10.1.0

@im4th shared his concern about the regression we introduced about the custom xProfile field options sort order, it’s now fixed. See #8623.

10.1.0 schedule

  • 10.1.0 stable: TBD 🎯

Documentation improvements

@im4th simply shared this message: “if you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress documentation, don’t hesitate to ping me. We’d like to improve the BP codex and we’ll need help“

Open floor

@rekmla shared feedbacks about the 10.0.0 Site Membership request feature.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on February 16 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. The agenda will be the same as it was for this chat 😉

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 7:57 pm on January 9, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : January 5, 2022.

Some complementary explanations about the 9.2.0 release

@im4th started the meeting saying some words about this minor version which was released on January 3rd. The download spike (~39K downloads) was reached on January 4th. He apologized about the fact he took the decision quite in a rush without discussing about it during a dev-chat. He explained he wanted to have the BP Search Block released in the WordPress.org directory the soonest so that he could focus on the BP Rewrites feature as a plugin for the coming 15 days. 9.2.0 is including a change needed by the BP Search Block (activity search redirection support).

About BP Rewrites, @johnjamesjacoby wants to dive deeper into the plugin. @im4th said it was ok to delay its release after BuddyPress 10.0.0, if needed, as it’s a BP plugin. He also shared his opinion about a BP Core potential merge.

I believe it needs to stay an add-on for at least 2 major BuddyPress releases, there are too many plugins we need to make sure they still behave right before thinking about merging it into BP Core.

imath

Finishing the 10.0.0 Hello BuddyPress screen

If you’ve started testing the RC1 release (if not, do it now!), you already saw it has been finished (See #8605). During the chat, we’ve decided about the 10.0.0 features we want to highlight into this screen:

We also decided to release RC1 as soon as we could (it happened 2 days later) as we already postponed twice our schedule.

Last 10.0.0 schedule

  • 10.0.0-RC: January 7, 2022 🏁 ✅
  • 10.0.0 stable: January 17, 2022 🎯

Open floor

@dcavins has been using the 10.0.0-beta2 release on some decent traffic sites and it seems to be working well 💪 😎

@vapvarun brought up to our attention this support forum topic. Our discussion about it lead to an important decision for our next major release : if ! is_buddypress() no more BP Template Pack CSS/JS. @imath also wishes we use a more modular approach for our JavaScript assets as well as less/no dependency to jQuery.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on January 19 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. We should be able to check the first feedbacks about 10.0.0 😉

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 2:58 pm on December 11, 2021
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : December 8, 2021.

10.0.0 Progress

#8582 Add site membership requests

@dcavins fixed the multisite issues about the feature, @im4th confirmed the fixes made the feature works as expected on the WordPress multisite config. @dcavins decided to add complementary explanations about how the feature deals with multisite registration options. He committed the code yesterday and BuddyPress 10.0.0 is now offering a Site Membership Request feature 🙌. Congratulations to @dcavins 💪.

#8451 Extending no content activities with images and call of actions

@vapvarun brought some nice improvements about how we load activity types template part and also added some new layouts for “no-content” activities. @im4th still had to finish the Avatar Recycle UI so that users can reuse a previously uploaded avatar or permanently delete a previously uploaded avatar.

#8148 Extend WordPress Plugins screen to allow Admins to easily install features as a plugin

@johnjamesjacoby added the BP Beta Tester plugin to the BuddyPress WP.org user favorites so that we have a first BuddyPress Add-on into the new WP Admin “Add New” plugin screen. The ticket is now closed and we’ll soon be able to publish new add-ons like the BP Rewrites plugin to the WordPress.org Plugin directory. Here’s a preview of this new screen:

Other tickets needing attention

  • @vapvarun will have a look to #7540 to try to have it fixed before the 10.0.0 stable release.

10.0.0 schedule

We’re adding the very final touches to the first 10.0.0 beta release… get ready for it!

  • 10.0.0-beta1: in a few of hours 👈
  • 10.0.0 stable: January 5, 2022 🎯

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen next week on December 15 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 9:49 pm on November 18, 2021
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : November 17, 2021.

10.0.0 Progress

The first thing we’ve discussed about was the scheduled date for the first beta release of BuddyPress 10.0.0. @im4th shared his concern about the fact he would not be able to test/review the latest improvements brought to the site request membership feature #8582 by @dcavins as well as the “no-content” activities patch @vapvarun was about to add to the ticket (#8451) before November 20 (beta1 initial scheduled date). He requested to use 2 more weeks before releasing beta1. Although @vapvarun was in favor of only adding 1 week, @im4th argued he was prefering to delay by 2 weeks once instead of by 1 week twice. @dcavins also thinks a 2 weeks delay is good and should help us to fix some other tickets.

New 10.0.0 schedule

  • 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ december 3, 2021 👈
  • 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄
  • #8451 Extending no content activities with images and call to actions: @vapvarun announced he was about to submit a first patch about the feature.
  • #8582 Add site membership requests: we think we should use a new action link instead of links into a new WP List Table column to open the modal. @im4th will try to build an inline-edit feature using the BP REST API and we’ll be able to replace the modal link with the inline-edit one if it’s ready before first beta. @dcavins will also try to avoid adding an upgrade routine to edit the existing $wpdb->base_prefix . 'signups' table rows and use instead a new meta to differentiate site membership requests from signups. The last touch about the feature will be to update the list of BP Emails so that it includes the ones needed by the feature.
  • #8594 Legacy Widgets: next step before deprecation: @vapvarun shared his concern about it considering the number of downloads of the Classic Widget editor plugin. After checking the ticket’s patch and the plugin’s code, @im4th reassured @vapvarun telling him the legacy widgets would still be available for people using this plugin. He’ll do some more tests to be 100% sure about it.

Open floor

@im4th thinks we shouldn’t include more BP Blocks into BP Core and that we should start using standalone blocks and publish them into the WordPress.org Blocks directory (which is actually using the plugins directory). @dcavins thinks it’s an interesting idea. @vapvarun is not convinced (yet 😁) about it especially when considering these blocks are increasing the number of active plugins on sites. He thinks a Blocks collection plugin would be better. If you have an opinion about it, we’d be happy to read it as a comment of this post 😉.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on December 1st at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. In the meantime we’d be happy to get your help about these tickets: please contribute to BuddyPress 🙏

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 11:56 am on November 12, 2021
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : November 3, 2021.

10.0.0 Progress

#8451 Extending no content activities with images and call to actions

Preview of a no content activity
Preview of a richer “no content” activity about a group who has just changed its Group profile photo.

@vapvarun will soon share a patch about it on the ticket’s page. He decided to take the base64 encoded road to store previous profile photo/cover image inside an Activity meta.

@im4th & @dcavins suggested to include a way to avoid such activity types to be generated too often when a user changes these images multiple times in a short amount of time.

Writing the above lines, I believe the last activity should overwrite the previous ones. A 1 hour delay was suggested during the dev-chat.

#8582 Add site membership requests

@dcavins updated the patch attached to the ticket to remove all references to data stored inside the Users table. He also added a way to preview all signup/membership request information using a modal window.

A modal window to preview signup/membership request information

The modal window choice was debated with @im4th & @johnjamesjacoby. First concern is a11y: we need to check keyboard navigation to make sure everything’s fine with it. Second concern is the clumsiness of it into the WP Administration (old JS libraries, Ajax, etc..). @dcavins thought about an alternative way to reach the same result (be able to preview information) using a dynamic row like what’s included into the « inline edit » feature of the WP List Table class. @im4th believes it’s a nice idea and could be even more interesting if information could be edited from there. We might need to customize the feature for our need which can be too long for the remaining time we have until first 10.0.0 beta. @dcavins will give the modal window another thoughts before deciding whether to keep it or not.

Please help us progress about the site membership requests feature testing the last patch attached to this ticket: #8582.

#8588 use the “site-health” look & feel for BP Admin tabs

Preview of the 10.0.0 BP Settings Admin screens
Next BP Admin Settings/Tools screens look & feel!

@im4th asked for some feedbacks about it. @dcavins thinks it should be committed. @espellcaste thinks this is the kind of change regular BP users will enjoy. @im4th also shared a preview of the new BP Rewrites admin screen using these revamped Admin tabs. This improvement has since been committed, a developer note will soon be published to explain the changes introduced about adding custom tabs in 10.0.0.

Other interesting updates

10.0.0 schedule

  • 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ november 20, 2021,
  • 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on November 17 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. We’ll be 3 days away from first beta release 😅. If you have specific points you want to discuss about during this next meeting, please share them into the comments area of this post.

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 4:45 pm on October 20, 2021
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BP Dev-Chat Summary : October 6, 2021 & BP Dev-Chat Agenda : October 20, 2021.

10.0.0 Progress

  • Many thanks to the contributors who commented our last dev chat summary about whether or not we should raise the BuddyPress required WordPress version to 5.4. During this dev-chat, we’ve taken in account your feedbacks, kept on discussing a bit about the subject, and we’ve decided 10.0.0 will require WordPress 5.4. Yesterday @im4th suggested a first patch about it and we’ll keep you informed when it will be converted into trunk. Don’t hesitate to contribute to it from this ticket #8571. We’ve also decided to include WP 5.4 to the GH action that runs PHPUnit tests after each commit to our development version. So far, we were only testing the latest WordPress stable version and the development one, fearing about exceeding our GH Actions quotas 😱.
  • @vapvarun is progressing on Legacy Widgets for community stats (before doing the Widget Block jump!) and impressed us with rich content activities for « poor » activities like « a member changed their profile photo ». He opened a ticket about it: see #8451. We believe these could be a nice enhancement to the activity streams.
  • @espellcaste is working on patches to improve our inline documentation 💪 : see #8553.
  • @im4th has been working on the BP Attachments feature as a plugin lately and hopes he’ll be able to have a first beta ready before the end of BuddyPress 10.0.0 development cycle.
  • @dcavins made progress about the Site Membership request feature and a first patch is available on this ticket: #8582. Feedbacks are very welcome.
  • We’ve also discussed about refreshing our BP Admin tabbed screens to use the look & feel of the Site-Health & Privacy settings screens. A first patch is waiting for your feedbacks there: #8588.

10.0.0 schedule

  • 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ november 20, 2021,
  • 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

Open floor

@im4th asked the team to keep an eye on TwentyTwentyTwo new WordPress default theme and to the progress of the full site editing feature in WordPress 5.9-alpha/Gutenberg plugin. He reminded us about potential difficulties to have BuddyPress behaving the best way with Themes using this Full Site Editing feature. See #8474.

October 20 Dev-Chat Agenda

It will happen today, in a few hours in #BuddyPress. We’ll share our progress about the 10.0.0 release.

We hope to chat with you soon!

#10-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat, #sim-mary

imath 8:55 pm on September 28, 2021
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BP Dev Chat Summary : september 22, 2021

10.0.0 Progress

  • We started by congratulating @oztaser for the great contribution he brought about SQL performance improvements to the BP Notifications API (See #8426).
  • @dcavins will actively (👈 adding some pressure here 😁) progress about the site membership requests feature. He will also take in charge the issue about the inconsistent behavior of Groups Invites when the friends component is not active inside the Legacy template pack (see #8550)
  • @vapvarun is exploring BuddyPress statistic widgets from a plugin, @im4th challenged him to build Widget Blocks about it in 10.0.0 as well as exploring the mutual friends/mutual groups which are other Widget Block nice candidates (see #8559).
  • Then we had a long discussion about raising the BuddyPress required WordPress version to 5.4 (see #8571). It’s true it’s quite a jump from 4.9 but “Tipton” was released almost 4 years ago, it’s the last WP version before the Block Editor which is probably making it a bit special. WP 5.0 to 5.3 are under 5% of total WordPress installs which makes 5.4 a good candidate for our next required version.

If a WordPress version became obsolete over a year ago, it’s a candidate for removal.
If a WordPress version’s use slips below 5% of all WP installations, it’s a strong candidate for removal.

The BP Codex

Please, share your opinion about the BP 10.0.0 required WordPress version using the comments area 🙏

10.0.0 schedule

  • 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ november 20, 2021,
  • 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

BP Rewrites feature as a plugin

It’s now possible to enjoy BP Directories as the site’s homepage using the BP Rewrites URL parser.

@sbrajesh shared his first thoughts after testing the plugin. He was a bit surprised not to find the BP Directories into the WordPress pages. In BP Rewrites, BP Directories are using a Custom Post Type without using the corresponding WordPress generated UI. Instead there’s a new URL settings page to customize almost every possible slugs. The last improvement to add about slugs is to support customizable slugs for the Member’s secondary navigation. It’s true the UI used for this settings page should be improved (a lot!).

@im4th informed about the plan for this plugin : it’s not to merge it into BP Core during 10.0.0 (or even 11.0.0) but to release it as a plugin so that a lot more people can easily test it. There’s a ticket about easing hosted on WP.org features as a plugin installation from one of the BuddyPress Admin screens to also simplify this part for users (see #8148). Switching from our Legacy URL Parser to the WP Rewrite API will need a lot more testing to make sure BP plugins and themes are behaving almost like there was no switch!

@im4th strongly encourages all BP Plugin/theme developers to give a test to this feature as a plugin to contribute to the next way BuddyPress will parse URLs.

Open floor

@im4th @dcavins & @vapvarun are going to participate to a Q&A hosted by Birgit Pauli-Haack from the Gutenberg Times on October 28 at 16:00 UTC. If you want to know more about our experience migrating the BP Legacy widgets to Block Widgets during the BuddyPress 9.0.0 “express” release, please join us! More info available there inside the Upcoming Live Q&As section.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on October 6 at 19:30 UTC and of course in #BuddyPress. If you have ideas or questions, feel free (and we are strongly encouraging you) to comment this summary to share them!

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

imath 8:16 am on September 4, 2021
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BP Dev Chat Summary : september 1st, 2021

10.0.0 Progress

  • Shortly before the dev chat started @dcavins shared his progress about the Site Membership Requests feature: he did preparative work needed for the feature by improving the BP Signup Class and fixed 2 tickets (#8540, #7938).
  • Thanks to a discussion between @vapvarun & @im4th about 2 BP plugins @vapvarun will soon make available on the WP plugins directory (about global BP Search and using the big G reCaptcha service to secure some parts of BuddyPress), @im4th will explore the possibility to add 2 new BP Blocks: 1 to perform global search, the other to display a member’s community statistics.
  • To help @sbrajesh organize the BP Relationships API, @johnjamesjacoby created the corresponding repository on BuddyPress’s GH.
  • @espellcaste asked for a dev review about his approach on adding pagination to message threads (#8508) and thanked @im4th for the one he provided about #7614.
  • @espellcaste also introduced some very interesting functions to get a Group object, making it possible to use template functions outside of the Groups loop. You should have a look to this commit.

10.0.0 first schedule

  • 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ november 20, 2021,
  • 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

BP Rewrites feature as a plugin

Although @im4th only said he was making good progress about the feature during the dev chat, let’s warmly thank the first contributors who joined the adventure of using the WP Rewrite API to replace our legacy URL parser: @shanebp @boonebgorges & @rayisme 🥰.

@im4th strongly encourages all BP Plugin/theme developers to give a test to this feature as a plugin to contribute to the next way BuddyPress will parse URLs.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on September 15 at 19:30 UTC and of course in #BuddyPress. If you have ideas or questions, feel free (and we are strongly encouraging you) to comment this summary to share them!

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary