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