BP Dev-Chat Agenda October 5, 2022

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on October 5 at 19:30 UTC (today) and of course in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

  • 2 weeks left before 11.0.0-beta1 🚨😱
  • 11.0.0 Trac tickets needing some attention :
    • #8590 this ticket about cache groups now has a patch which should improve BuddyPress performance.
    • #8693 Site Members invitation & configs using the wp_signup table.
    • #8734 Private community feature.
    • #4535 Activity load more button & possible duplicate activity display.
    • #7614 Group members count issues.
  • 10.5.0 minor release to welcome WordPress 6.1 new default theme (see #8746).
  • The next BuddyPress great looking theme

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

👋

#10-5-0, #11-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat

BP Dev-Chat summary : September 21, 2022

We’ve started the meeting talking about the latest discussions that happened since we’ve shared our concern about the active installs statistic negative trend into our September 7 dev-chat’s summary. There is some interesting conversations into this WP Tavern post and into these Slack threads here & here. On this subject, we’ve done what we wrote: we’ve published a post explaining the situation and also called for feedbacks and contributions to reverse this trend! We often say it, but it doesn’t hurt to always repeat it: BuddyPress is free & open source software, everyone is welcome to help the project various fields of improvements (documentation, beta testing, support and of course code!)

Our progress about 11.0.0 (next BuddyPress major release)

  • #8734: a basic “private community” feature, instead of using a new option to switch between a public and a private community, we could use the BuddyPress WP Pages post status.
  • #4184: being able to exclude a list of users from the activity stream is an interesting first step to help us building a “muting/blocking” member activity feature.

Both tickets are in need of a first patch, don’t hesitate to jump in!

BP Attachments / Activity block editor update

  • The BP Attachments’ feature as a plugin is now adding a front-end users Media Library (screenshot on the left) as well as Media blocks (screenshot on the right) to use into the Post/Widgets Block Editor as well as the Activity Block Editor 👇.
  • The Activity Block Editor feature as a plugin now includes a new Activity Admin area (to replace the current one) and users can now edit posted activities.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • First beta: October 19, 2022 🚨 that’s in two weeks!
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor (how to reverse the trend?)

Here are the various topics we’ve been talking about to start replying to what BuddyPress needs the most to reverse its usage trend.

  • A “health community check” or a Diagnostic/Audit tool to improve security and help users fight against spam accounts, rude behaviors… Quoting @johnjamesjacoby: “A rudimentary and obvious set of global anti-spam settings that are used by every active component, too. Throttling requests. Keywords. Profile fields values. PMs. Group data. Status updates. And an admin-area inbox to funnel all of the failed attempts into, with some kind of crappy confidence score, might not be perfect, but an OK thing to as a new component that could be unplugged or replaced if something better comes along, AI etc…
  • A new & gorgeous BuddyPress theme block-based (👈 @im4th‘s preference) or not, @vibethemes shared a lot of interests about it and raised some concerns with BuddyPress’ registration area, current design, the lack of customizability, Block template based theme compatibility and… the bp-core-catch-uri.php file which houses our legacy URL parser. @im4th and all the team share the same concerns about this last one, it’s the reason why the BP Rewrites plugin was published on the WordPress Plugin directory (to get more users testing it with their plugins to avoid potential missed back compatibility issues before merging it into BP Core)… @vibethemes even prepared a very interesting presentation. We talked about various stuffs related to theme design (CSS framework/library, webpack etc..). The BuddyPress Core team is totally in favor of building that new great looking theme and will help @vibethemes, @dunhakdis and any other contributors to make this come true asap.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen tomorrow on October 5 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments, the agenda will be published shortly.

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

BP Dev-Chat Agenda September 21, 2022

Hello BuddyPress contributors 👩🏽‍🤝‍👨🏻

Our next development meeting will happen on September 21 at 19:30 UTC (this coming Wednesday) in #BuddyPress. Below is our agenda:

  • 11.0.0 & BP Attachments global progress.
  • 11.0.0 Trac tickets needing some attention :
    • #4184: @espellcaste did right including this ticket into this development cycle: being able to exclude activity based on their author is an interesting enhancement.
    • #8734: we talked about it 2 weeks ago and we should really consider adding a BP Native way to set a site’s community as restricted to its members.
  • Who’s in to build a new great looking BuddyPress theme? We had very interesting discussions lately into #BuddyPress about working on a BP standalone theme and why not one supporting block templates (in other words a “Full Community Site Editing” theme). We think it’s a great idea, let’s organize to make this happen 🎨

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

👋

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

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

BP Dev-Chat Agenda September 7, 2022

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on September 7 at 19:30 UTC (tomorrow) and of course in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

  • 11.0.0 global progress.
  • 11.0.0 Trac tickets needing some attention :
    • #8052 this ticket was reopened and now have a wider perimeter. It questions the way we’ve delt with activity action formatting for blog post.
  • BP Attachments & BP Activity Block Editor latest progress

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

👋

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

BP Dev-Chat Summary : August 17, 2022

11.0.0 updates

  • #7228: using PHP Code Standards linter, @espellcaste plans to commit the code he worked on from this PR soon.
  • He also requested feedbacks about this BP REST API issue, @im4th brought his!
  • @im4th reminded the team about latest improvements about our PHPUnit tests suite.
  • #8722: @im4th started working on the Activity templates and JavaScript for the BP reNouveau template pack. He’ll need to find a « no-jQuery » way to deal with live date and time updates as well as activity heartbeat refresh. He also decided this new template pack will have a dependency to the BP Attachments plugin to deal with profile and cover image features.
  • The BP Attachments plugin now includes blocks for the Post Block Editor as well as the coming Activity Block Editor.
  • #8693: site membership issue on Multisite configs. @dcavins is confident it will be pretty straightforward to fix.
  • @dcavins will deal with #8713 to bring type meta to types registered using code.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

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

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on September 7 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

BuddyPress 10.4.0 Maintenance release

Please upgrade to 10.4.0!

More information about introduced changes here 👇

#10-4-0, #maintenance, #release

August 3 dev-chat Summary & August 17 dev-chat Agenda

10.4.0 Maintenance release

  • @im4th & @dcavins had another look to the fix applied in #8715 and agreed it was the right move to avoid having the page to send group invites viewable by non-members of the group (even if it’s not usable to actually invite people to join the group).
  • This fix is the main reason why @im4th thinks we need to package a maintenance release.
  • Decision was made to release 10.4.0 before next dev-chat (as dev-chat is tomorrow, it’s more likely to happen before the end of the week, sorry for this delay 😞).

11.0.0 tickets needing attention

  • #8643 .webp image support for user profile images & user cover images. @dcavins gave his feedback about it & thanks to it @im4th improved the patch and committed it. In 11.0.0, you’ll be able to use a .webp image to set your profile photo or cover image 🙌 ✅.
  • #7614 Group members count routine needed improvements. @dcavins will give a deeper look to it. @im4th suggested to put in place a specific repair tool to eventually perform a recount for out of sync group members counts. This suggestion led to a longer discussion later during the chat see this part of the summary.
  • Some other tickets were discussed during the chat:
    • #8604 @dcavins & @im4th agreed generating a richer content for mini activities when they are displayed into single items is a bit “too much”. We’ve decided to bring back mini displays for these activities in these areas. In other words, Richer content will only be generated when viewing these mini activities into the Activity Site Wide directory. See this commit for more information about it.
    • #4535 @dcavins volunteered to work on adapting @im4th first patch so that it also fixes the issue about activity duplicates when loading the load more button for the BP Legacy template pack.

Open floor

  • Let’s introduce a mechanism to safely upgrade a big range of data in batch. This was the subject of the long discussion we had first, calling @boonebgorges to the rescue 🦸🏼‍♂️. To go straight to the point, he suggested us to use the same mechanism he included into WordPress Core when he needed to upgrade taxonomies to achieve shared-term-splitting, because “you have to make sure that upgrades of this sort degrade gracefully. You have to leave logic in place for what happens when a site hasn’t run through its upgrade routine“. He shared with us links to the key parts of the WordPress code so that we can get some inspiration from his work 😍.
  • BuddyPress PHP Code Standards: @espellcaste suggested to create a custom BuddyPress PHPCS ruleset that any BP project can use. @im4th agreed it was a good idea and this GH repository has been created to house this ruleset. @espellcaste‘s plan is to progressively improve BP Core’s code so that it comply with this ruleset. It’s a lot of work and if some of you want to give him a hand, you’re very welcome.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen tomorrow on August 17 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda :

Thanks in advance to the contributors who will join this chat 🙏🤝

#10-4-0, #11-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat, #summary

PHP tests suite improvements

Following WordPress’s effort about improving PHPUnit compatibility, we’ve just improved our PHP tests suite so that it now uses latest PHPUnit version (9.5.21). We’ve also updated our GitHub action so that it now includes PHP 8.1 tests to our PHP testing matrix. This action will now also run each time a Pull Request is submitted to our GitHub repository.

Next time you’ll check out our development version, don’t forget to run the composer install command and if you want to use latest PHPUnit version without installing it globally, you can run composer run test to launch BuddyPress PHPUnit tests.

For more information about it, please read this ticket #8649. Many thanks to @espellcaste & @rafiahmedd for their contributions to this great improvements 😍.

#11-0-0, #phpunit

BP Dev-Chat Agenda August 3, 2022

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on August 3rd at 19:30 UTC (tomorrow) and of course in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

  • 10.4.0 Maintenance release schedule, see tickets list here.
  • 11.0.0 Trac tickets needing some attention :
    • #8643 .webp image support for user profile images & user cover images.
    • #7614 Group members count routine needed improvements.
  • BP Attachments latest progress

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

👋

#10-4-0, #11-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat