BuddyPress.org

If you haven’t heard the word, there is a fury of activity going on at this very moment in the WordPress community. For the first time in over 8 years, the core development team is not working on the next version of WordPress, but rather on an initiative that’s been dubbed “3.org.”

3.org is a very appropriately named project that is focused on building and polishing the surrounding elements of WordPress rather than on WordPress itself. Part of this initiative is the conversion of bbPress from a standalone platform into a neat little WordPress plugin. I’ve volunteered to lead that initiative, and wanted to take a moment to explain what that means for BuddyPress, bbPress, and what you can expect for the next few months.

Since BuddyPress 1.1, bbPress has come bundled in the package to help make the installation as smooth and easy as possible. Through a little bit of massaging we successfully integrated bbPress into a dedicated forum component to allow for group discussion, and we included a central discussion directory to help put all of these topics in one easy place. All of these ideas were great on paper but have had mixed feedback and results in practice. Making bbPress a standalone plugin will help allow for more customizable installations which is great news for anyone that’s currently using BuddyPress for the forum component, or has been holding off because of the complexity of it all.

Our goal with me giving some attention to the bbPress plugin project is to keep it tightly integrated with BuddyPress, but have them act totally independently or alone if necessary. This means in a future version of BuddyPress, bbPress will no longer come packaged in the download, and both plugins will be aware of each other being activated. When that happens, additional features will be available to you to help create the kind of community that you’d like to have, instead of forcing forums to be tucked away into BuddyPress discussion groups.

The end result will be two plugins working harmoniously together, to easily enable setups where bbPress forums can be created for any other kind of object, component, or plugin. This is particularly awesome for BuddyPress developers because it will allow them to internally extend bbPress to fit the specific needs of their own custom BuddyPress components as they see fit.

With all this going on, the loose expectation is for BuddyPress 1.2.6 to roll out asap with a few bug fixes and maybe even a small new enhancement or two, with 1.3 to follow by the end of the year. bbPress 1.2 (the plugin) should be stable enough to start testing as soon as September 15 (give or take a few days and/or missing features) with a full release due around the same time as BuddyPress 1.3.

Dear end users & site owners,

Please note BP Classic 1.4.0 is now available for upgrade/download. 1.4.0 is a maintenance release of the BuddyPress backwards compatibility Add-on helping you to stay classic so that you can carry on:

• enjoying 3rd party BP plugins / themes that are not ready yet for the modern BuddyPress (12.0.0 & up);
• and / or using the deprecated BuddyPress Legacy widgets;
• and / or using the deprecated BP Default theme.

Only 1 issue has been fixed: the bbPress topics/replies pagination should now behave as expected with BuddyPress 12.0 & up (See #44)

Please upgrade!

Immediately available is BP Rewrites 1.3.0. This maintenance release fixes two bugs and brings BP Rewrites compatibility to bbPress. For details on the changes, please read the 1.3.0 release notes.

Update to BP Rewrites 1.3.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Many thanks to 1.3.0 contributors 

shawfactor & imath.

We use to feature BuddyPress usage case studies. These are great ways to share with you how BuddyPress can help you achieve your community site projects reading how other buddies did it. The case study you are about to read now is a bit different. It’s about the steps the lovely BuddyX BuddyPress theme had to take to be widely and freely available from the official WordPress.org theme directory. I’m very happy Varun Dubey took the time to write this guest post to share his experience with all of us. My secret hope is that it will inspire as many BuddyPress Theme authors as possible to do the same 😇.

Varun Dubey is a full-stack WordPress & BuddyPress developer. He’s the co-founder of Wbcom Designs, a WordPress themes and plugins development agency in India. He’s also a regular BuddyPress contributor, we often talk with him about the BuddyPress project during our development meetings (every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC on Slack), he contributes to our development tasks (testing, reporting issues, patching, documenting, etc..) and he still manage to find time to help you regularly replying to your support topics (661 replies so far!). So, once again, many thanks to him for getting involved with BuddyPress 😍.

So let’s learn more from his experience, here’s what he wanted to share with you about it!

The BuddyPress 2020 survey was published the same day we released BuddyPress 6.0.0 “iovine’s” (May 13, 2020). Now that we are about to release our next major release (7.0.0 will be delivered in the coming days), it is time to share with you the survey results.

First, many thanks to all the respondents who participated to this survey 😍. Doing so you contributed to give the BuddyPress Core Team informations about how the plugin is used, could be used and how its usage is evolving. Some of the questions we asked are directions we’re considering for the plugin (eg: Q9, Q10, Q17), so your inputs are very important to us.

As no questions were required, it’s difficult to be 100% accurate about how many people took the survey. So we were at least (we also took the survey 😉) 483 from all over the world as it’s the highest number a question was replied to.

Most of the questions were leaving participants the choice to select more than one reply, this is why if you sum up the percentage results you’ll often find more than 100% 😁.

When we had data about a previous survey we made in 2018, we compared the 2020 results with them and calculated the differences between both years percentages. We thought it could be interesting to see how some results are evolving.

BuddyPress 3.0.0 “Apollo” is now available for immediate download from the WordPress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard. “Apollo” focuses on various improvement for developers, site builders and site managers.

Say hello to “Nouveau”!

A bold reimagining of our legacy templates, Nouveau is our celebration of 10 years of BuddyPress! Nouveau delivers modern markup with fresh JavaScript-powered templates, and full integration with WordPress’ Customizer, allowing more out-of-the-box control of your BuddyPress content than ever before.

Nouveau provides vertical and horizontal layout options for BuddyPress navigation, and for the component directories, you can choose between a grid layout, and a classic flat list.

Nouveau is fully compatible with WordPress. Existing BuddyPress themes have been written for our legacy template pack, and until they are updated, resolve any compatibility issues by choosing the legacy template pack option in Settings > BuddyPress.

Support for WP-CLI

WP-CLI is the command-line interface for WordPress. You can update plugins, configure multisite installs, and much more, without using a web browser. With this version of BuddyPress, you can now manage your BuddyPress content from WP-CLI.

Control site-wide notices from your dashboard

Site Notices are a feature within the Private Messaging component that allows community managers to share important messages with all members of their community. With Nouveau, the management interface for Site Notices has been removed from the front-end theme templates.

Explore the new management interface at Users > Site Notices.

New profile field type: telephone numbers

A new telephone number field type has been added to the Extended Profiles component, with support for all international number formats. With a modern web browser, your members can use this field type to touch-to-dial a number directly.

BuddyPress: leaner, faster, stronger

With every BuddyPress version, we strive to make performance improvements alongside new features and fixes; this version is no exception. Memory use has been optimised — within active components, we now only load each individual code file when it’s needed, not before.

Most notably, the Legacy Forums component has been removed after 9 years of service. If your site was using Legacy Forums, you need to migrate to the bbPress plugin.

Make mine Apollo’s

In north-east London, Stoke Newington — or Stokey, as it’s affectionately known — is an area awash with newly-opening restaurants, amidst lapping waves of encroaching gentrification. Apollo’s is an authentically Neapolitan pizza place on the High Street, serving fantastically tasty yet uncomplicated pizzas. If you ever find yourself in north London, don’t miss Apollo’s!

In 2008 (just 10 short years ago) Andy Peatling made the very first code-commit to the newly adopted BuddyPress project, joining bbPress, GlotPress, and BackPress at the time. As most of you can probably imagine, BuddyPress was a different piece of software back then, trying to solve a completely different decade’s worth of problems for a completely different version of WordPress.

BuddyPress was multisite only, meaning it did not work on the regular version of WordPress that most people were accustomed to installing. It needed to completely take over the entire website experience to work, with a specific theme for the primary part of your site, and blog themes for user profiles and everything else.

There was a lot to love about the original vision and version of BuddyPress. It was ambitious, but in a clever kind of way that made everyone tilt their heads, squint their eyes, and ponder what WordPress was capable of. BuddyPress knew exactly what it was trying to do, and owned it without apologies.

It touted itself as a “Social Network in a box” at a time when MySpace was generating 75.9 million unique visitors per month, so if you couldn’t imagine how different BuddyPress may have been before, imagine how excited everyone was at the idea of owning their own MySpace.

Since then, Andy invited Boone, Paul, and me to help lead the project forward, and in-turn we’ve invited several other prolific BuddyPress contributors to help with every aspect of the project, website, design, and so on.

The BuddyPress team has grown in a few different ways. Most recently, we’ve added Renato Alves to the team to help with WP-CLI support. Renato is a long-time contributor who stepped up big-time to really own the WP-CLI implementation and finally see it through to the end.

Slava Abakumov lead the 2.8 release, and we finally met in person for the very first time just last week at WordCamp Miami. He’s another long-time contributor who has always had the best interests of the project in mind and at heart.

Laurens Offereins has been helping fix BuddyPress bugs and work on evolving features since version 2.1, and while we haven’t met in person yet, I look forward to it someday!

Stephen Edgar (who you may recognize from bbPress) also works a bit on BuddyPress, largely around tooling & meta related things, but he’s fully capable and will jump in and help anywhere he can, be it the forums or features.

Mercime would prefer I not blather on endlessly here about how important she is, or how much I appreciate her, or anything like that, so please forget I mentioned it.

Hugo Ashmore has spent the past 2 years completely rebuilding the default template pack. This is an absolutely huge undertaking, and everyone is really excited about sunsetting ye olde bp-legacy.

Tammie Lister has moved on to work on the enormously important and equally ambitious Gutenberg project. Tammie is wonderful, and doing a great job crafting what the future of democratizing publishing is.

Lastly, a few of our veteran team members took sabbaticals from contributing to BuddyPress in the past few years, which I see as an opportunity to return with fresh ideas and perspectives, or maybe moving onto new & exciting challenges. This is a good, healthy thing to do, both for oneself and the project. Space makes the heart grow fonder, and all that.

A small aside but worth saying here & now, is that leading an open-source project is everything you think it is (or maybe have read already that it is) and like a million other things that are hard to understand until you understand. The one constant (and subsequently the hardest and funnest part) is how to provide opportunities for personal growth, without prohibiting contributions, while also doing what’s best for the greater vision of the project itself, amongst a completely remote group of bespoke volunteers. I think Paul, Boone, and I do OK at this, but we are always learning and adjusting, so please reach out to us if there is anything we can do differently or better.

BuddyPress is my personal favorite piece of software. It’s my favorite community. I wake up excited every day because of what it can do and who it does it for. Put another way, I love what we make it do and who we make it for: ourselves, one another, each other, and you.

Cheers to 10 years, and here’s to another 10!

BuddyPress 2.9.3 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release. We strongly encourage all BuddyPress sites to upgrade as soon as possible.

The 2.9.3 release addresses two security issues:

• A dynamic template loading feature could be used in some cases for unauthorized file execution and directory traversal. Reported by James Golovich.
• Some permissions checks and path validations in the attachment deletion process were hardened. Reported by RIPSTech and Slava Abakumov of the BuddyPress security team.

These vulnerabilities were reported privately to the BuddyPress team, in accordance with WordPress’s security policies. Our thanks to all reporters for practicing coordinated disclosure.

In addition, 2.9.3 includes a change that fixes the ability to install legacy bbPress 1.x forums. Please note that legacy forum support will be removed altogether in BuddyPress 3.0; see the announcement blog post for more details.

Peer reviewed by @boonebgorges

StudentsNepal.com is the first and largest community website for students of Nepal with 9,700 registered members and 50,000 subscribers. The site helps students find answers to popular courses and colleges by acting as a bridge between the students and educators/educational organizations.

Background

I started working on this side project in December 2014. I remembered I had very little information about courses and colleges I could choose from after finishing Higher Secondary level back in 2011. There were no websites that could readily help students to explore the various opportunities available in Nepal. There are still a lot of students in Nepal who have been brain-fed that studying abroad is the one and only option to be successful. My vision was to change this mindset among the young students of Nepal by informing them about the abundant opportunities and options available within the country.

The goal for creating StudentsNepal is to increase communication among different students with different educational backgrounds while helping them to learn all sorts of information and get hold of educational resources. Communication and interaction are the core values of StudentsNepal and these are the features that help the platform stand out from rest of the educational websites. BuddyPress and bbPress have helped us to achieve these values in a cost effective and efficient way. The beauty of these plugins is that our members can create content and help to rank us higher with search engines.

Implementation

The investment to create StudentsNepal.com was very low, a fraction of my pocket money during my final years in college. It is now one of the top educational portals of Nepal. Since WordPress was so easy to master, my dev team and I were able to use most of our free time to create initial content and other valuable resources for our visitors – students, parents, and educators – rather than spending time/money coding from scratch or buying a proprietary platform.

Before choosing BuddyPress, I researched open-source social network scripts and platforms. My shortlist included WordPress (BuddyPress), Joomla (JomSocial), and Drupal (social modules). It was clear to me, after reading a lot of support forum posts and articles, that the BuddyPress/WordPress combo was the way to move forward with my dream. I am really happy about this choice today. The other heavyweight plugins that I added were GravityForms, Sucuri, bbPress, and MyCred plus other smaller plugins for specific tasks.

Customizations & Improvements

1. Login and Registration Pages
We found out that the default login and registration pages made it difficult for members to log in and have kept site visitors from registering. We resolved the issues by installing the Gravity Forms plugin and adding log in integration via Facebook, Twitter, or Google+ as well as making the registration page more user-friendly.

2. Newsletters
I thought about adding a newsletter because I loved the way some of the blogs I subscribed to sent organized information and recent activities of the blog in a beautiful email format. I decided to add an optin form to start collecting names and emails 2 to 3 months after launching the site. During the first 6 months, only first names and emails were collected with the popup optin form. Later, I changed the optin forms to collect email addresses and phone numbers. I have been using the free package of mailmunch for optin forms (popups) and Amazon AWS for sending newsletters. The newsletter contains scholarship notices for different universities/colleges, student stories, youth events, and other useful academic information.

The newsletters have become one of the most popular features for the community. We did a lot of testing for the positioning and timing of the popup to get the most sign ups. StudentsNepal had around 20,000 subscribers by the end of 2015. The number of subscribers started growing after I inserted the forms in all the subdomains. (news.studentsnepal.com, jobs.studentsnepal.com, quiz.studentsnepal.com, blog.studentsnepal.com). After 3 years, the site has 50,000+ subscribers.

Currently, StudentsNepal sends 1 newsletter per week, and my dev team and I are planning to make it 2 newsletters per week. We had invited students and educators/institutions to contribute content for the newsletters and the response has been just great! Students, particularly, submit generously and regularly to benefit other members, subscribers, and online visitors.

In addition, this project has also helped me connect with lots of awesome individuals and similar-minded startup owners.

3. Design and CSS tweaks
Out of the box, BuddyPress has a plain and simple design and interfaces which can be customized easily. At the end of the day, the features and performance are what matters most to my users whether on mobile, tablet, or desktop. For me, due to extensibility and ease of customization, BuddyPress reigns as king when it comes to a free open source script for a social network.

4. Upgrading Servers
StudentsNepal.com was on a shared hosting plan when I launched it in 2014. It took around 3 to 4 months to cross the benchmark of 500 visitors/day. After getting articles indexed in search engines and started getting higher ranks, StudentsNepal started getting a lot of visitors (especially from Google). Mid-2015 we upgraded to VPS hosting when the website’s articles and contents started getting listed on the 1st page of search engines and it started getting a couple of thousand visitors daily. Based on my experience, it’s a good decision to get a shared hosting plan while the site was starting out and then upgrade to more powerful hosting plan when data showed the increases in user engagement and participation.

With a community of 9,700 registered members, 50k subscribers, and around 150k visitors/month, I am happy to say that our site runs smoothly with nary a downtime on all devices. If you install BuddyPress, you will need a bit more power on your server.

Fast Forward

Future plans for StudentsNepal.com include moving the Shopping and Jobs sections to separate domains and setting up a new site for online classes. I am testing Woocommerce, WP Job Manager, and Moodle for the other projects to expand our services to the community.

If you are creating a site for any niche community and are not sure on which platform to choose, I definitely suggest using WordPress with BuddyPress. These have a lot of stable and robust add-on plugins to help you create awesome and feature-rich communities.

StudentsNepal.com is the first website of its nature in Nepal and it has garnered a lot of media attention and praise. I received a lot of positive and encouraging messages from educators and students in Nepal for creating this platform. I’m just glad that the services provided by the site have been very helpful to so many Nepalese students as well to those who would like to study in Nepal.

Thanks to WordPress and BuddyPress for making this site possible. If you want to learn more about the site or the other customizations implemented, please feel free to contact me. Also, I can help you promote your social network or other related websites with a guest post in the blog section of StudentsNepal.com 😀

Arjun Bhattarai is a member of the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants (ACCA) and is currently working towards MA (Economics) at Tribhuwan University, Nepal. Apart from writing and playing with code, he loves swimming and watching sci-fi videos.
Links: Facebook, Linkedin

Peer reviewed by @boonebgorges

Naturkontakt (Nature contact) is the home for members of the Swedish Society for Nature Conservation (SSNC), Sweden’s largest environmental NGO with over 200,000 members. This is a private site where SSNC members can read and publish internal news about the organisation, take part in forum discussions, and join or create groups to help them organise their work. Members of SSNC can create WordPress user accounts using their membership numbers from the organization’s CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software.

Background

Naturkontakt has been around since the 90’s, powered by FirstClass. By 2010, that platform had become outdated and its market share was declining. This led some members to write proposals to find a new platform. Their goal was to select a platform which would serve as a hub for all the different aspects of SSNC’s mission and vision. These include “spreading knowledge, charting environmental threats, proposing solutions, and influencing politicians and authorities, both nationally and internationally. Under democratic forms, we work regionally in 24 county branches and locally in 270 community branches.”

Moving to WordPress

In 2011, SSNC acted on their decision to set up a new web-based platform for internal communications and contacted us at Klandestino to work on this project. After evaluating different platforms, we chose WordPress. Some deciding factors include WordPress’ open source licensing, our experience working with the platform, and the plethora of different plugins that extended WordPress to make it suitable for online communities.

The first iteration of the new Naturkontakt site was launched in 2011, powered by WordPress and WP Symposium. This was quite a while ago but as I recall (plus email logs), the choice stood between BuddyPress and WP Symposium. At that time, WP Symposium already had a forums component while BuddyPress lacked a solid forum integration. Remember that this was the time of the stand-alone bbPress forums which took a tortuous and unstable route to integrate to both WordPress and BuddyPress.

bbPress 2.0 to the Rescue

A year after we launched the new site, we undertook an evaluation which revealed some pain points. To name a few, WP Symposium had limited extensibility, some security issues, and major problems with performance. With those challenges in mind, we researched again into other community solutions for WordPress. By that time, the new bbPress 2.0 plugin was available and it worked very well with BuddyPress.

It was an easy decision to switch from WP Symposium to BuddyPress and bbPress. The major tasks were the arduous migration of data and continuous testing. This new set up has stood the test of time, we’re really pleased with it. The BuddyPress-bbPress combination gave us a running start with forums, groups, profiles, and messages, which are some of the required pieces of functionality needed on Naturkontakt.  

Further development of Naturkontakt 2.0 led to the introduction of multisite features to the community. Fortunately, BuddyPress works very well in a multisite environment. Each local organisation (group) of SSNC could have their own subsite to publish news.

To make this work as smoothly as possible, we wrote custom plugins for the following functionalities:

• Many-to-many relationships between groups and subsites. For example, the group coordinating work on forest issues could be connected to the subsite publishing news about forest issues.
• File archives for groups so that members can upload and version docs, PDFs, images, etc.
• Sitewide search, a plugin that indexes all content from the entire multisite network into a “ghost” site to make it possible to have a centralised search throughout the entire network and blog/archive pages that lists posts from all sites.
• A drag and drop front page workflow where the editors of the site can search for and list articles from all sites on the network on the main site front page.

This second version of Naturkontakt was released in late 2012. Since then, the basic functionalities have remained more or less the same. The site did get a facelift a few years ago when we focused on making the site work better on phones and tablets.

Going forward with PHP 7

Last year, after a month of capacity/speed problems, a new evaluation showed that some long-delayed upgrades had to be made. We started a new project to focus mainly on stability and speed improvements. We finished the project just right before this article was written.

We implemented the following improvements:

• Combed through the codebases. We searched for deprecated functions and places where custom functionality could be replaced with newly added functionality from BuddyPress, WordPress, and bbPress. We decreased the number of active plugins by a third because of the new features that had been rolled into the above-mentioned projects.
• Switched over to Elasticsearch/ElasticPress. Our custom sitewide search has served its purpose well. However, since it’s only been used on this platform its development has fallen behind. And compared to new technologies such as Elasticsearch it didn’t cut the mustard. By switching to Elasticsearch we have offloaded a lot of the most expensive queries currently done by WordPress to a server/platform that’s fine-tuned for that kind of work.
• Upgraded to PHP 7. This was the last part of the project. We’ve seen major improvements in the response time from the server, on average about 50%-70% decrease in response times! That is, of course, very important on a dynamic site such as for any community where static page caching often isn’t an option.

In conclusion

Our stats show the continued growth of the SSNC community, even though the competition from Facebook can be really hard. One of the major advantages of using WordPress, BuddyPress, and bbPress is that SSNC owns its own data.

Of course, there are always things to improve on. When we completed the recent project to improve performance, despite limited budgets and time constraints, we were all satisfied and hopeful that the site will be around for many more years. We also expect that upcoming development work will be focused more on the user interaction elements of the site, hopefully by building upon and extending the great work that has gone into BP Nouveau. <3

To end on a personal note I’d like to thank all of the wonderful contributors to BuddyPress who have welcomed me into the community and helped me along with trac tickets and patches. Beyond my satisfaction with Naturkontakt and working with SSNC (whom I share a lot of political views with), and the functionality that BuddyPress has provided for the project, the best part of having worked on this site is that I also feel that I’ve become part of a community that tries to do something constructive about the unpleasant grip that Facebook has over our personal and professional lives.

Alexander Berthelsen and his two colleagues are co-owners of the web development co-operative Klandestino AB. Based in the suburbs of Stockholm, Sweden they mainly do WordPress work with a focus on NGO’s and member organisations. Alexander spends most of his five-for-the-future time on making small contributions to BuddyPress.