April 1, 2011 in Community
During the day of Monday, April 4, we will be taking BuddyPress.org down to perform some routine maintenance. This will effect profiles.wordpress.org as well. We’re not doing anything fancy yet, just updating some of the inner workings to pave the way for future updates and enhancements.
by Paul Gibbs
July 10, 2010 in Community
We’re proud to announce that Boone Gorges and hnla have joined the BuddyPress Support team. Their knowledge of BuddyPress, site deployment, theme design and plugin development complements the existing team and will expand the range of topics we are able to help you with.
Our support team, which also consists of Jeff Sayre, Paul Gibbs and Ray, frequently traffic the forums, help resolve problems, and share their advice and best practices. We’re all you’ve got, and we’re not so bad after we’ve had our coffee.
As a general reminder, if you have a support question please try to provide the information detailed in this post; it really does help us help you.
July 8, 2010 in Community
Over the past few weeks we’ve released 3 bug fix versions of BuddyPress; more than we’ve released for the entire beginning of the year. What I noticed is that when development was slow, so were our support forums and so was the general buzz about the project. Since we’ve started patching bugs and cranking out bug fix releases again, things are picking back up which totally rocks.
I think this is a great example of how activity breeds activity, and it reminded me that social networks and niche communities are as susceptible to becoming stagnant as normal WordPress blogs can be. Most of us have probably had a great idea for a website, spent the $10 on the domain name, installed WordPress, made a fancy theme, posted 3 updates and then for whatever reason, just lost interest in it.
The same thing is totally possible with your social network, and when development slowed down here on the BuddyPress project in the past few months, the community felt that impact and over time there was some concern about what the future of BuddyPress was going to be.
Let me tell you that “the state of the word is strong.” – MM
We’ve recently added some really fancy functionality to BuddyPress.org that integrates any plugin in the WordPress repository that is tagged ‘buddypress’ and gives it a public discussion group. It passes over a plugins’ information like ratings and statistics, gives it its own dedicated support forum where you can assign administrators and moderators, and comes with a built in donate link so people can drop a few bucks in your pocket to show their appreciation. If you’re a plugin author, be sure to check it out!
In the coming months we have a lot of exciting things planned that will revitalize the BuddyPress.org website and help solidify BuddyPress as the ultimate social networking solution for your WordPress powered site. We’re looking at adding more core contributors, more forum moderators, redesigning the site with a completely custom template, improving the codex, and diving head first into some new features for 1.3.
For everyone that was worried about BuddyPress, you can breathe a sigh of relief. For everyone else, thanks for hanging out and staying interested while things were slow. We’re full steam ahead and you can count on seeing much more activity in our community in the coming weeks!
April 19, 2010 in Community, How To, News
Just a quick update on the status of the Ning user import plugin mentioned in the previous post. Boone has now updated the plugin to support the transfer of both users and their custom profile data.
If you’re looking for an easy way to import from Ning then this free plugin is a great choice.
You can find all the latest details and download link over at Boone’s site: Free import from Ning to BuddyPress plugin.
April 15, 2010 in Community
One of the great things about running your own website is that you get to set the course it will take. We’re aware of the upcoming changes that were announced today on the Ning developer site, and we wanted provide some useful resources to help existing Ning users looking to transition to a new platform.
First is the Ning to BuddyPress Blog, currently operated by yours truly. It’s meant to be a raw and simple collection of tools and links to anything relating to easing the transition. It’ll be updated frequently over the next couple of weeks to provide the most up-to-the-minute resources.
Second, Boone B. Gorges has built a Ning to WordPress/BuddyPress user importer, which is a great start at getting some of your data moved over.
Third are our support forums. We have a bunch of really awesome people that are all willing to help should you have any questions or issues.
Lastly, we have our Codex. If you’re not familiar with the word Codex, think of it like a FAQ on steroids. There you’ll find everything from installation steps to higher level techie stuff including how to extend BuddyPress and build your own unique feature set.
Please feel free to ask any short questions in the comments, we’ll do our best to answer common queries.
April 7, 2010 in Community, News
For those of you who spend a bit of time interacting in the BuddyPress community, Marshall (MrMaz) will need no introduction.
Marshall is the developer of the BuddyPress Links plugin that adds rich media sharing to your BuddyPress install. If you’ve used it you’ll know it’s one of the most tightly integrated plugins available, interacting with the core BuddyPress components as though it’s actually one itself. He’s done a fantastic job and that’s one of the main reasons he’s now coming on board as the newest core BuddyPress developer.
Marshall will be focusing specifically on developing the BuddyPress API and making it easier for developers to seamlessly and efficiently integrate their plugins into the BuddyPress experience. He’ll be working his API wizardry for version 1.4 and onwards. In the meantime to ease himself in he’ll be helping JJJ and I out with outstanding tickets and patches for version 1.3.
Welcome aboard Marshall! We’re really looking forward to what you can do to continue to make BuddyPress one of the best social platforms around.
March 23, 2010 in Community, News
Last month saw the release of the very first BuddyPress book – “BuddyPress For Dummies“. The book was written by Lisa Sabin-Wilson who is a very active contributor within the BuddyPress community. She worked tirelessly to keep up with the rapid pace of development and the book is all the better for it. It’s a fantastic introduction to the world of BuddyPress, what you can do with it, and how you can customize it to suit your needs.
If you’re interested in discovering exactly what the book has to offer, you can download a sample chapter (pdf link), or take a look inside via Amazon.com.
BuddyPress For Dummies is currently on promotion at Barnes & Noble through April 30, or you can always grab a copy at Amazon.com.
February 4, 2010 in Community
The release candidate version of BuddyPress 1.2 is now ready for download and testing (svn link). Thank you to those who have contributed so far, we’ve closed over 125 tickets since we released the beta last week.
We’re almost there, but we still need your help with this final testing phase. We’re looking for testers on both standard WordPress and WordPress MU version 2.9.1 and above. You can also test the release candidate without installing on our testing community site.
As before you can find a list of known issues and a place to post bugs via the BuddyPress Trac installation.
There are also instructions for upgrading test installations from previous versions of BuddyPress on the codex.
Please do not post bugs in the comments as they may be missed.
Update: If you’re upgrading from 1.2 beta then you can simply overwrite your existing BuddyPress files, you do not need to follow the official upgrade instructions.
January 15, 2010 in Community, News
As we start to prepare BuddyPress 1.2 there will be a fury of activity both in the support forums and in the development trac. To help keep up with these changes and make it easier for you to get involved, we’ve followed the success of the WordPress devs and started our own development blog. We’ll be using it to talk about roadmaps, features, APIs, future enhancements, and the general technical details that maybe aren’t fitting for support forums or official announcements.
Because blogging and commenting back and forth sometimes aren’t enough to get the point across, we’ve also setup dedicated time each week to have a developers discussion in #buddypress-dev on Freenode on IRC. We’ll be using the development blog to set each weeks’ agenda and will be following a similar format to the WordPress dev chat, so if you’re familiar with that setup you should feel right at home.
Join in to #buddypress-dev on Wednesdays at 19:00 UTC (currently 7pm GMT, 2pm EST, 11am PST) and check out http://bpdevel.wordpress.com to come chat with us and help shape the future of BuddyPress!
October 30, 2009 in Community, News
I’d like to congratulate John James Jacoby (aka jjj) for doubling the size of the core development team and gaining commit access to the project!
BuddyPress is growing, and at a pace that just one core developer cannot possibly keep up with. I’ve been looking to expand the size of the core development team for a while now and I’m excited to be able to announce the first stop along that road.
If you’re a regular in the forums or trac you’ll already know who John is. He has been an unrelenting force for some time with quick responses to questions and quality core patches.
John will be helping with bug fixing to begin with, then looking to take on some of the new features listed on the roadmap. Congratulations again John, I’m very excited to have you on the core team.
