Tag Archives: summary

imath 4:09 am on January 17, 2023
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BP Dev-Chat summary: January 4, 2023

Last 11.0.0 final release tasks

Before releasing 11.0.0 on January 5, we had another look to #8783. This is still a mysterious issue we haven’t manage to reproduce yet (Displaying The Opt-outs Administration page is not generating an error for us on multisite). We also decided @im4th would package the release & draft the announcement post & @dcavins would take care of the release changelog.

Focus on the BP Messages component

Specific needs about this component BP REST API endpoint were brought to @espellcaste‘s attention (see #8696). It made him think about this component more broadly. So far BP Messages is fetching all messages belonging to a thread and he thinks we can improve this behavior and performance using pagination. He shared the roadmap we all agreed on about it:

  • Remove the default behavior of loading all messages;
  • Set reasonable default for page and per_page ;
  • Update the BP Theme to support pagination (currently, it loads all messages);
  • Cache with bp_core_get_incremented_cache – The same approach used in the Activity component;
  • Apply the same suggestions to the recipients’ query.

How do you see BuddyPress at the end of 2023?

That’s the question we took a few minutes to try to reply to.

  • @espellcaste‘s priority is mostly dev-focused: a developer reference site, BP GraphQL Extension, PHPCS/PHPDoc Improvements, VSCode BP Extension,
  • @dcavins would like to see a simple “private site” option land in BP, he believes another big possibility is to make core BP template pieces “insertable” using the WP Site Editor.
  • @im4th‘s predictions are: “To me, at the end of 2023, BuddyPress Activities will use the Blocks API, the Post Form will be a block based one and we’ll have a brand new Block Templates based theme”.

We’ve also discussed about:

  • the opportunity to move the Site Wide Notices feature outside of the BP Messages one,
  • splitting optional components into plugins,
  • community media,
  • the ActivityPub protocol to make BuddyPress a bridge between WordPress sites.
  • the need to organize all the feedbacks we got from last year to take wise decisions.

Open floor

@espellcaste has a conflict of meeting, so he won’t be able to attend future meetings. @im4th & @dcavins are flexible about the meeting day and time (as long as it’s after 19:30 UTC for @im4th), let’s find asap a new day to “biweekly” meet!

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on January 18 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.

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

imath 9:20 pm on December 7, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary: december 7, 2022

11.0.0: we’ll package another beta!

That’s the important decision we made during our meeting a few minutes ago. We prefer to delay 11.0.0 final release to early next year.

Why?

In 11.0.0 we’re making an important change about the way BuddyPress is loading deprecated code. Everything is fine with it when you use one of the BP bundled template packs (BP Nouveau or BP Legacy). Using a template pack to dynamically inject BuddyPress content into one of the templates of your active WordPress theme’s (most likely the page.php one) is the plugin’s default behavior since version 1.7. But we forgot there was still some BP Default old classic theme fans around 😱.

Since version 1.9, The BP Default theme is “hidden behind a filter” for new BuddyPress installs. In other words, you need to add some custom code to bring it back. That’s why we haven’t thought about it so far. Fortunately we were alerted into our Slack channel about issues when this theme was still used and active on the WordPress site (this can be the case if you regularly updated BuddyPress since version <= 1.8).

We’ve been working on it and we think we’ve fixed BP Default issues. Releasing a third beta version instead of directly making the release candidate available seems a wise move. Thanks in advance for your understanding.

11.0.0 updated schedule

  • Beta3: December 8, 2022
  • RC: December 1st, December 15, 2022
  • Release: January 5, 2023.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on December 21 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.

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

imath 8:34 pm on December 5, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : November 23, 2022

11.0.0-beta updates

  • Only one ticket was raised about our usage of an outdated version of moment.js (see #8766). We’ve fixed the ticket deprecating this outdated version and using the one already bundled into WordPress since its 5.0 version.
  • @espellcaste asked whether the ticket about $this usage into function doc-blocks (see #8611) were still in 11.0’s roadmap. It was as it’s now fixed 🤝.
  • @espellcaste also raised @im4th‘s attention about the fact it was not possible for a user to delete their own account using the BP REST API (see #8758). The ticket has since been fixed ✅.
  • A bit after the development meeting @dcavins confirmed he would post developer notes on this site about #4184 (Activity loop arguments change) & #4075 (xProfile groups loop arguments change).
  • @im4th informed he was about to release a second 11.0-beta. It has been released 2 days after the development meeting. If you haven’t tested it yet, please do so!

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • RC: December 1st, 2022 👈 sorry we’re late! It will probably be released after December 7th dev-chat.
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor

@espellcaste is working on a VS Code extension for BuddyPress development and a repository was created to document available BuddyPress hooks.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen this Wedneday on December 7 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.

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

imath 12:56 pm on November 19, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : November 9, 2022

Unfortunately @vibethemes wasn’t able to join the meeting to share with us his progress about the BP Standalone Theme he’s been working on. We adapted our agenda to talk about 11.0.0-beta1 and 11.0.0 changes needing docs.

11.0.0-beta1 first feedbacks

  • An issue was raised into our Support forum topic. We believe this issue is specific to the active WordPress theme as we’re not able to reproduce with one of the WordPress default bundled themes.
  • Within the same forum topic, another minor layout improvement was discussed and later fixed in #8761.

11.0.0 changes needing docs

@dcavins & @im4th selected the tickets they will post documentation about in this site.

  • @dcavins will deal with #4184 (Activity loop arguments change) & #4075 (xProfile groups loop arguments change)
  • @im4th will work on #8679 (restrict BP Assets loading to community areas) & #8687 (Deprecated code loading).
  • About this last ticket @johnjamesjacoby suggested to rename the constant to load all deprecated code to BP_LOAD_DEPRECATED. We all agreed it was the right way of naming it. The change has been committed to Trunk version.
  • Finally the change about the .webp image format support will be documented by the first of us to have finished documented their tickets.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • RC: December 1st, 2022.
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor

During this part of the chat, we took the time to help @dcavins to fix PHPUnit testing suite, if like him you had the right idea to use the one we include into the development version of the plugin based on Docker, you can read this discussion to help you restart from scratch!

@johnjamesjacoby shared his intent to improve BuddyPress.org typography especially into the site’s Forum.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen this week on November 23 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.

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

imath 12:32 pm on November 7, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : November 2, 2022

11.0.0 last tickets to fix

  • #8590: Cache improvements. @dcavins have checked the rest of the buddyboss PR for potential complementary improvements and found out we had previously covered these on our own.
  • #8693: Site Members Invitations & configs using signups only. @dcavins has fixed the issue 💪👏.
  • #7614: Make sure the group members count routine is more accurate. We’ve talked about the edge case when an administrator adds a not yet active user to a group. We came to the conclusion we should sync counts when not active users finally log in for the first time. @dcavins has shared an interesting patch about it on the ticket. @im4th also shared a PR exploring a different strategy: taking in account not yet active users when the current user is the administrator. Please share your opinion about what you think is best on the ticket 🙏.
  • #8746: companion stylesheet for Twenty Twenty-Three. @im4th & @dcavins shared between themselves the work to achieve. During the week-end @im4th updated the PR and committed it to SVN trunk so that this can be done easily. He figured out most of issues were related to CSS color variables that were not used in TT3 compared to TT2. Doing a replacement of these seems to address most issues. Another look to it would be greatly appreciated 😍.
  • @espellcaste should commit the two tickets about the xProfile loop & the Messages BP REST API endpoint soon.
  • @im4th thinks the ticket about stopping using `$this` into `@param` docblocks can wait after the 11.0.0-beta1 version is released.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • First beta: November 8, 2022.
  • RC: December 1st, 2022.
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

10.5.0 & 10.6.0 Maintenance releases

Both versions have been released before WordPress 6.1. @im4th explained why he urgently took the decision to package 10.6.0 shortly after 10.5.0: replies into our support forums showed we needed to improve how we deal with Block only based Themes as the strategy used in 10.5.0 introduced a regression with Themes using block templates, although they are regular themes.

BP Attachments 1.0.0?

There’s still some work to achieve to be ready to package a very first version of this new BuddyPress Add-on:

  • Public Media directory,
  • Attaching media to Activity (when not using the BP Activity Block editor, as this part is already handled thanks to BP Attachments blocks).
  • Attaching media to Private Messages.
  • Including first private sharing options (with friends or group members).

@im4th hopes he’ll be able to publish a first version to the WP.org repository in early December so that it happens slightly before the 11.0.0 BuddyPress release.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen this week on November 9 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.

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

imath 7:36 pm on October 20, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : October 19, 2022

We’ve updated the 11.0.0 release schedule, delaying first beta to November 8. But we still plan to package the final release on December 14. This means, we’ll have less time to test and package new betas. RC is slated to December 1st.

11.0.0 last tickets to fix

  • #8590: Cache improvements. @dcavins will work on including the improvements that are common with the buddyboss-platform.
  • #8693: Site Members Invitations & configs using signups only. @dcavins has a patch almost ready and he should be able to attach it to the ticket very soon.
  • #7614: Make sure the group members count routine is more accurate.
  • #8052 Should we stop using an activity meta to retrieve the new_blog_post activity action? @im4th will take the risk to decide 🤫
  • @im4th asked @espellcaste (once again 👮‍♂️) to try to make the list of the tickets he owns for 11.0.0 less bigger (selecting the tickets we absolutely need to include in 11.0.0 and punting others to a next release). Later after the chat, he said he will look into it during the coming week-end 👀

NB: although it would have been nice to include the global community visibility switch feature, we still need to discuss about the how: @im4th‘s personal opinion is “the later we make things invisible to not logged in users, the more issues we’ll be facing” which contrast with the idea of doing it just before rendering the BuddyPress content…

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • First beta: October 19 November 8, 2022.
  • RC: December 1st, 2022.
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

10.5.0 Maintenance release

The Twenty Twenty-Three companion stylesheet probably won’t be included into this maintenance release but should be included into the 11.0.0 one. @im4th confirmed he will package this maintenance release at the end of October and before WordPress 6.1 final release.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen November 2 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.

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

imath 4:29 am on October 18, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : October 5, 2022

We’ve started the meeting talking about the 17 replies our call for feedbacks got at the time of the meeting. There are great remarks, ideas and suggestions. Many thanks to the contributors who shared their very inspiring thoughts. We value them a lot 😍.

11.0.0 updates

  • #8590: Cache improvements. The initial PR made by @nickchomey has been committed. We had a discussion about whether to include the other improvements that were added by a buddyboss-platform team member (This ticket was firslty added as a PR to the buddyboss-platform GitHub repository). The majority of the team thinks as code is open source & GPL compatible, there’s no reason not to enjoy these improvements as long as we properly credit its author and the buddyboss-platform project.
  • #8734: we’ve discussed about @dcavins first patch about how to implement a basic “private community” feature. Although the patch is already doing a great job and is a very interesting first approach, @im4th agrees with @johnjamesjacoby : a better one would be to think of it as a community visibility “level”. As announced during the chat, @im4th had a closer look to the patch and started an alternative PR to suggest the introduction of a bp_read cap which led to interesting new feedbacks on the ticket. Don’t hesitate to test it, and contribute to the ticket’s discussion.
  • #4184: being able to exclude a list of users from the activity stream is now possible in Core. This commit closed the ticket.
  • @im4th reminded the team we had 2 weeks left before the date we initially scheduled 11.0.0 first beta and asked @espellcaste to try to make the list of the tickets he owns for 11.0.0 less bigger (selecting the tickets we absolutely need to include in 11.0.0 and punting others to a next release).

11.0.0 schedule reminder

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

10.5.0 Maintenance release

@im4th announced he will package this maintenance release shortly before WordPress 6.1 is released so that BuddyPress behaves the best way into the next WP Default theme (Twenty Twenty-Three). If he finds the time, he’d like to finish optimizing some CSS rules about it. Don’t hesitate to give him a hand contributing to this ticket.

Open floor

About the BuddyPress.org website @johnjamesjacoby really wants us to feel more comfortable iteratively improving it, and asked the team to think about how we want to contribute to it. @im4th volunteered to give John’s a hand and maybe try to work on the list of submitted tickets about the website. As @dcavins noted, some of their authors are first time contributors and it would be great to include their suggestions. @espellcaste wants to spend more time on developer.buddypress.org along with PHPDoc improvements.

The new & gorgeous BuddyPress theme has a name and a GitHub repository, don’t hesitate to contribute to it.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen tomorrow on October 19 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.

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

imath 8:22 pm on October 4, 2022
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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

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 7:22 am on September 4, 2022
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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