BuddyPress.org

Happy new year & best wishes for Twenty Twenty-Three šŸ„³

The BuddyPress Core Team

BuddyPress 11.0.0 ā€œLa Scalaā€ is now available for download from the WordPress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard.

The first release candidate for BuddyPress 11.0.0 is now available!

“Release Candidate” means that we think the new version is ready for release, but with a bit less than 200,000 active installs, hundreds of BuddyPress plugins and Thousands of WordPress themes, itā€™s possible something was missed. BuddyPress 11.0.0 is slated for release on January 5, 2023, but your help is needed to get there ā€” if you havenā€™t tried 11.0.0 yet, doing it now is a great idea!

You can test the 11.0.0-RC pre-release in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the release candidate here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 11.0.0 Beta1 release.

Plugin and Theme Developers

Please test your plugins and themes against BuddyPress 11.0.0. 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 11.0.0 developer notes to figure out what to focus on during your testing.

How you can help

Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate BuddyPress into as many languages as possible! This release also marks the string freeze point of the 11.0.0 release schedule.

If you think youā€™ve found a bug, you can share it with us replying to this support topic or if youā€™re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.

Hello BuddyPress contributors!

If you havenā€™t tested our two first 11.0.0 beta releases, hereā€™s a last opportunity to help us give the final touches to 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 youā€™re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!

Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.

You can test BuddyPress 11.0.0-beta3 in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the beta here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

We’ve lately decided to postpone the final release date to January 5, 2023 šŸ‘ˆ. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.

Since beta2, we’ve fixed 7 tickets and documented two changes BP developers should love:

• Fetch Activities for or Excluding a Group of Users
• bp_has_profile() Now Accepts an Array of Profile Group IDs

beta3 particularly targets installs where the BP Default theme is active. If you are using this theme, we’d be very happy if you could make sure everything is fine for you. If you are not using this theme and wish to give us a hand, add the following line to your bp-custom.php file so that you bring it back into your available themes and activate it:

add_filter( 'bp_do_register_theme_directory', '__return_true' );

If you find something weird testing this beta, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.

Hello BuddyPress contributors!

If you havenā€™t tested our first 11.0.0 beta release, hereā€™s another opportunity to help us give the final touches to 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 youā€™re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!

Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.

You can test BuddyPress 11.0.0-beta2 in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the beta here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

The current target for final release is December 14, 2022 šŸ‘ˆ. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.

Since beta1, we’ve fixed 12 new tickets and documented some important changes BP Themes or Plugins authors should definitely read:

• .webp support is arriving in BuddyPress 11.0.0
• BuddyPress will soon only load its JavaScript and Style assets into the community area of your site
• The way BuddyPress loads deprecated code will change in version 11.0.0

If you find something weird testing this beta, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.

BuddyPress 11.0.0-beta1 is available for testing!

Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.

You can test BuddyPress 11.0.0-beta1 in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the beta here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

The current target for final release is December 14, 2022. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.

Please note BuddyPress 11.0.0 will require at least WordPress 5.7.

As usual, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade šŸ‘‰ so please give us a few minutes of your time to make sure this pre-release behaves the right way with your specific WordPress configuration, your theme, and the other WordPress plugins you are using. Try to use a testing site which is very close to the one you are using in production. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.

If you’re a BuddyPress plugin developer or a BuddyPress theme developer, please make sure to test this 11.0.0-beta1 release as we’re now only loading BuddyPress assets (JavaScripts and styles) inside BuddyPress pages.

Around 40 changes to expect in 11.0.0

You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. We only planned to ship one long awaited feature as a BuddyPress Add-on. At this stage, we’re staying silent about it to keep the surprise effect intact (truth is we are still not sure it’ll be ready for December 14 šŸ¤«).

šŸŽ® Happy testing!

BuddyPress 10.6.0 is a new maintenance release fixing 1 ugly bug with themes using block templates although there are not Block Based themes. For details on the change, please read the 10.6.0 release notes.

Many thanks to the users who quickly reported this issue into our previous maintenance release forum topic.

Update to BuddyPress 10.6.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Immediately available is BP Rewrites 1.4.0. This maintenance release fixes two bugs. For details on the changes, please read the 1.4.0 release notes.

Update to BP Rewrites 1.4.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Oh wait, what is the goal of this BuddyPress Add-on?

If you’re wondering, with BP Rewrites activated, you’ll get full control on any BuddyPress URLs! BuddyPress plugin developers are strongly encouraged to test it with their plugins and report potential issue on the BP Rewrites’ support page. The goal of this BuddyPress Add-on is to make sure we can safely merge it in BuddyPress Core to migrate our Legacy URL parser to the WordPress Rewrites API. Thanks in advance to all plugin developers or BP Rewrites pioneers for their contributions: once BuddyPress will have performed this migration, life will be easier for everyone:

• Your community site users will be able to enjoy more meaningful URLs,
• BuddyPress Theme authors will stop having headaches trying to understand bp_core_set_uri_globals()
• BuddyPress will be compatible with plain permalinks.
• BuddyPress will improve its compliance with WordPress Standards.

Let’s all help this happen asap, you just need to test it and report bugs!

Many thanks to the one and only 1.4.0 contributor 

imath.

Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.5.0. This maintenance release fixes five bugs and makes sure BuddyPress is ready for WordPress 6.1 latest improvements about Block-Template themes. Just like we’ve done testing BuddyPress into WP 6.1 RC4, we strongly encourage all Plugin developers to do the same and update their “Tested up to: 6.1” plugin main files header.

For details on all changes, please read the 10.5.0 release notes.

Update to BuddyPress 10.5.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Many thanks to 10.5.0 contributors 

 David Cavins, sjregan & imath.

First, the facts.

After reaching a result of ~245k WordPress sites using actively BuddyPress at the end of 2019, the “active installations” statistic (the one which is displayed in the sidebar of our pluginā€™s page on the official WordPress Plugin Directory), has been decreasing progressively and recently fell just below 200k.

As the Plugin directory uses ranges to simplify the “active installations” statistic, weā€™re no longer in the 200k+ category but felt into the 100k+ one.

-19%

Thatā€™s the BuddyPress usage negative growth between the end of 2019 and today.

Meaning?

In short, some users donā€™t use community features on their WordPress site anymore or, more likely, fewer and fewer users are using BuddyPress to power their community site.

While such negative growth can lead to bankruptcy when youā€™re running a business, it does not mean maintaining our plugin is under immediate threat. You can count on the BuddyPress core teamā€™s passion to carry on working on fixing bugs and improving features.

Letā€™s come together and reverse the trend!

Confronted by extraordinary difficulty, people from a family, a tribe, a team, a community, a company, a country, a continent, earth, temporarily forget about their individual need or personal feelings and unite together to find the best way to deal with this difficulty. This is happening because we know that if everyone focuses on a general benefit, weā€™ll have a better chance of achieving that benefit than if each of us tries to satisfy our own goals.

I believe the English quote for this idea is “In unity there is strength“.

More than ever, BuddyPress needs you to contribute to beta testing, support, documentation, translations and, of course, code.

As a start, weā€™d love to hear your voice about this simple question:

In your opinion, what is the most important thing that BuddyPress is missing?

Please, tell us about it by replying to this forum topic. Feel free to talk about every aspect of the project and to suggest ways to do better. If you could then take an extra step and share the link of this post or this topic with your friends, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance for your help šŸ˜.

We (the BuddyPress software & community) are 14 years old. We were the first plugin to extend WordPress with community features, giving users a free and open source alternative to commercial “Social Media” (social network companies whose end goal is to sell advertisements based on your data). 

With WordPress and BuddyPress: you keep the freedom to share, data ownership and the control of every aspect of your community site. The BuddyPress core team is committed to preserving this free and totally open source tool for anyone.

Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.4.0. This maintenance release fixes three bugs. One of them was a pretty annoying regression from the 10.0.0 release that allowed non-members of a group to view and access a group’s invites navigation. Even though these non-members couldn’t actually use the invite functionality šŸ˜…, we chose to avoid waiting too long before making this bug disappear.

For details on all changes, please read the 10.4.0 release notes.

Update to BuddyPress 10.4.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Many thanks to 10.4.0 contributors 

 NekoJonez & imath.