• See previously BP Dev Chat summary May 1st (2023)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

12.0.0 development cycle updates

#4954: The main parts of the BP Rewrites merge has been accomplished and this 10 years old ticket is now fixed 👴 🏁. Huge thanks to all contributors who helped making this happen. Of course, improvements can still be brought to our new BP Rewrites API, but these will be discussed/worked on from new tickets. Our next steps is to finish the job on moving our Deprecated Legacy URL parser inside the BP Classic backward compatibility plugin.

About #8869: the moving process of Legacy widgets to the BP Classic plugin was still in progress at the time of our meeting, it’s now accomplished 🏁.

#8734 @dcavins has started to plan ahead to make the implementation of the visibility feature as flexible/extensible as possible.

Schedule

• 12.0.0-beta1 : July 30,
• 12.0.0 : October 30.

Feedback posts series

@im4th & @dcavins talked about the third post of this series: @dcavins did the review process and it’s now available on BuddyPress.org.

Open floor

We finally talked about the ActivityPub protocol and ways to implement it since @im4th was contacted about it by a WordPress news Podcast. As a French guy, @im4th feels very impressed by the idea of discussing in English so he asked @dcavins to the rescue. After a few minutes of discussion, they both agreed it was a bit early to share BuddyPress vision about the Fediverse. The fall period should be a better timing to do so. @im4th did this reply to the Podcast host.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on May 29 at 21:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#12-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary April 17 (2023)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

12.0.0 development cycle updates

#4954: @im4th thinks the BP Rewrites merge process is almost mainly accomplished. The ultimate Pull Request he was working on before the meeting has been added to our GitHub repository (so that it runs all GH Actions). It will soon be committed on Trunk. @dcavins & @im4th shared some positive thoughts about what this change will mean for Users using BuddyPress in any language “Pretty amazing. Just imagine having /members in your own language (…) Well, you’ll even get /members/edit/group/1 in your own language, every BP URLs 🫡”

About #8457: we’ve migrated to @wordpress/scripts (which uses Webpack) and every BP Blocks now supports the version 2 of the WP Block API.

#8734 is on @dcavins to do list and he will start working on our new visibility feature pretty soon.

Schedule

• 12.0.0-beta1 : July 30,
• 12.0.0 : October 30.

Next minor release 11.2.0

@im4th & @dcavins agreed to publish this release just before next dev-chat (~ 1 week from now). You can discover the minor bugs that will be fixed from this report.

Open floor

We finally talked about the feedback wrap-up posts series: as @im4th wanted to publish the second post on Thursday @dcavins said he would review it before.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on May 15 at 21:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#11-2-0, #12-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary March 27 (2023)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

12.0.0 development cycle updates

Considering the remaining tasks to accomplish to end the BP Rewrites merge process, we’ve decided to update the release schedule so that we have enough time to document the changes and help third party plugin authors to update their work to fully enjoy our new Rewrites API.

Updated schedule

• 12.0.0-beta1 : July 30,
• 12.0.0 : October 30.

BP 12 is replacing the transmission in the car

@dcavins

#4954: we still have two major code tasks to work on: implementing parse_request() methods for Directory components and make our Ajax code use the WP Rewrite API. Once done we’ll need to move our legacy URL parser into the BP Classic backcompat plugin. Then, we’ll need to explain how this major change will modify the way to extend BuddyPress into our Developer documentation site. Here are the first questions we’ll reply to:

• How to fully enjoy the BP Rewrites API?
• How a plugin can preserve backward compatibility with older versions of BuddyPress while enjoying this API?

@dcavins will start exploring the Rewrites API, working on a new visibility feature to allow administrators make their community private.

About #8457: we’ll migrate to @wordpress/scripts (which uses Webpack) and we’ll update every BP Blocks to support the version 2 of the WP Block API.

BuddyPress will be represented at the Contributor day organized by the WP french community in Paris

If you do not have a chance to attend IRL to this contributor day, no worries: you can virtually join us to get involved into BuddyPress contribution going into our Slack channel on April 20, 2023 from 08:15 UTC to 15:30 UTC. It’s today!!

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on May 1 at 21:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#12-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary February 27 (2023)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

BP Attachments Add-on release & first feedbacks

It was released on 15th BuddyPress birthday (March 25). It got two 5 ⭐️ reviews so far, one of them is saying it’s a « game changer ». It’s making @im4th very happy considering the hard work the team already invested into this add-on. @dcavins plans to use it on some of the sites he manages to get feedbacks from more users. Inside the plugin’s support forum, requests were made about supporting the BP Legacy template pack & the Groups component.

12.0.0 development cycle updates

About #4954: @im4th accelerated on the BP Rewrites merge process as he realized there were more work than expected. Most of the BP URLs are now built using the BP Rewrites API, but quite an amount of functions needed to be deprecated/moved inside the BP Classic backcompat plugin. These deprecations will help us inform users they need to use this plugin to be sure to carry-on enjoying the third party plugin features that are not ready yet for the BP Rewrites API.

As the BP REST API & the BP Attachments Add-on will need to be improved to be ready for Rewrites, working on this will help us to advise third party plugin developers about the best way to stay compatible with pre 12.0 BP versions as well as next BP versions.

About #8457: @im4th decided to stop waiting for ParcelJS v2 to support global variables. The development team weirdly put this v1 feature out of v2 ones and there were no progress about bringing back this support for at least 2 years! The plan is to migrate to @wordpress/scripts which uses Webpack. You can follow our progress about it from this BP Blocks PR.

About #7018: @im4th quickly added some #[AllowDynamicProperties] to be compatible with PHP 8.2, but he thinks a better fix would be to properly declare all properties to our Classes. @dcavins agrees.

12.0.0 schedule

• 12.0.0-beta1 : April 15,
• 12.0.0 : May 31.

NB: we’ll need to update this initial schedule due to the BP Rewrites remaining work to achieve.

2022 feedbacks & 2023 roadmap

@im4th would really like to publish the wrap up post about the feedbacks we got last year. He thinks it’s important to say: « hey we read you, and here’s what we plan to do about it ». This post is waiting for review since February 27 and as it contains some suggestions about important changes he wishes we all agree about it or edit the parts we have different opinions on. @dcavins thinks this post is too long and suggests to split it as he’s afraid that the exciting stuff at the end is after too much text (which people mostly don’t read.).

Let’s try to decide about this during our next dev-chat.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on April 17 at 21:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#12-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary January 30 (2023)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

11.1.0 maintenance release

We mainly discussed about this ticket #8821. In short, if a string containing placeholders has not been updated by a translator of the Polyglots team, it can result in a fatal error when using the sprintf() function. @dcavins and I think it’s a WordPress issue, but WordPress core team don’t, see #55776. As it was too heavy to address this issue in a maintenance release, we’ve decided to use a workaround for 11.1.0 trying to alert translation contributors they need to remove one of the placeholders for specific strings using gettext comments. We’ll try to find a nicer way to avoid these kind of fatals during the 12.0 development cycle, see #8836.

11.1.0 was released on February 16. Many thanks to contributors who shared their time with us to make it happen.

12.0.0: required documentation effort about migrating to using the WP Rewrite API.

@im4th believes most of the work will consist in documenting the changes about the way to extend BuddyPress. A place of choice for this documentation is the developer.buddypress.org site.

@dcavins thinks so too and started talking about the Code Reference part of this website. We haven’t progressed much into this area & @im4th thinks we do need to use composer on the server to benefit from the WP Parser tool. Tests he made about WP export/import tool wasn’t conclusive due to missing relationships between post types. It doesn’t mean we’re giving up, it simply needs some available time.

@im4th’s idea is to create first chapters of a BP Plugin Handbook as it’s very easy to do so on the current developer documentation site. We’ll try this way once most of the BP Rewrites API will have been merged into Core.

About this subject, progress can be followed from this ticket #4954. @im4th will make small steps using pull requests. Once the function to build links using BP Rewrites is available in Core, @dcavins will be able to give him a hand on reviewing all existing BP links so that they are built using this new function.

@dcavins will take in charge #8794 💪

12.0.0 schedule

• 12.0.0-beta1 : April 15,
• 12.0.0 : May 31.

BP Attachments: beta and first stable version schedule

@dcavins tested the plugin and found some issues. The biggest one was with regular WordPress themes. As @im4th only tested it with Block themes he hadn’t figured it out so far.

@dcavins & @im4th then discussed about how site owners need to set the private uploads directory. @im4th is convinced the best way to do it is to put it one level upper the site’s directory: a bit like what you can do to secure your wp-config.php file. Doing so requires a bit more work to make sure the directory is writable for the server’s user, but this feedback from a betatester is very interesting as it seems not too difficult to understand thanks to the admin notices in place.

As @dcavins noted, we’ll need to document the private uploads directory creation process.

BP Attachments 1.0.0 schedule

• 1.0.0-beta: right now!
• WP.org plugin submission: early March.
• 1.0.0 release: March 25.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on February 27 at 21:00 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, #12-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary November 23
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th
• Slack archive.

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 1^st, 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