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by Andy Peatling

BuddyPress 1.1 Released

September 30, 2009 in News

The latest version of BuddyPress is now ready for download.

This release includes a substantial number of core code improvements as well as an array of useful new features.

Some highlights of this version are:

  • One click internal bbPress forum integration allowing you to set up group forums in less than a minute.
  • A global forum directory (example) allowing you to easily browse public facing forum posts regardless of the group they are attached to.
  • Completely re-written theme handling. One theme now controls all of your installation. No hidden HTML, everything is in the template ready for you to skin.
  • Easily create themes that are upgraded automatically when BuddyPress is updated.
  • Total site admin control of all content within an installation. Edit user’s profiles, update avatars, mark users as spammers, manage all groups, delete site activity entries.
  • Activity streams everywhere. Activity streams can be filtered allowing for feature specific activity streams or adding an activity stream to your custom plugin.
  • A new status updates feature is included in BuddyPress 1.1. Actions and filters are included to allow plugin developers to hook into any external service.
  • An awesome group extension API allowing developers to easily extend groups and add completely new features.

If you’re starting with a brand new installation, check out the new setting up a new installation help guide. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, please make sure you read the upgrading from 1.0.x help guide before upgrading. There is a specific help guide on upgrading your 1.0.x custom theme to 1.1.

If you’re interested in building themes and plugins for BuddyPress 1.1, be sure to check out the new version of the BuddyPress Skeleton Component and the creating a BuddyPress child theme help guide.

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone from the community who has helped in reporting problems, submitting bugs, writing patches and answering support queries. Without your help BuddyPress would not have the thriving community and development momentum it has today.

A special thanks to the following developers who submitted multiple bug reports and patches and also spent countless hours in IRC (#buddypress-dev) talking through issues:

JohnJamesJacoby, DJPaul, Junsuijin, JeffSayre, JasonG, Chouf1, GIGALinux, burtadsit, Ezd, Mariusooms, r-a-y, slaFFik, pertronic, j.conti

Happy BuddyPress-ing, and onwards to version 1.2!

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Avatar of Andy Peatling

by Andy Peatling

BuddyPress 1.1 Beta

September 14, 2009 in News

BuddyPress 1.1 is now available for beta testing. This version is intended for testing only, you should not try running it on production sites. You can download the beta via this zip file, or via subversion.

If you download the zip version you will need to download bbPress 1.0 separately. Please extract bbPress into the folder “bp-forums/bbpress” inside of the BuddyPress plugin directory.

As always, please report bugs on our trac site with the milestone “1.1″. You can also view all outstanding bugs for this version. Patches for any of those bugs are very welcome. Please use your BuddyPress.org username and password to log into the trac site.

Update: Please make sure you read the installation instructions as there are changes from previous versions.

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Avatar of Andy Peatling

by Andy Peatling

The New BuddyPress Theme Architecture

August 24, 2009 in News

For the next version of BuddyPress there has been a fair amount of re-factoring work done. We’ve listened to your feedback from version 1.0 and made a number of internal changes that are going to make your lives as plugin developers and theme designers easier.

One of the biggest changes in BuddyPress 1.1 will be the way themes are built.

In version 1.0 BuddyPress required two themes to function. The first theme was a “WordPress home” theme that handled the blog and front page of your site. It was essentially a standard WordPress theme. The second was a “BuddyPress member” theme that would handle the display of pages generated by BuddyPress. There were many reasons for handling themes this way, but as time passed it was evident theming in this fashion was hurting the majority to help the minority.

In BuddyPress 1.1 there will be one single theme to handle everything. BuddyPress will ship with a social network framework theme that acts as a parent theme. The default theme will be a child theme based on this framework and contains only images and css. Building a new BuddyPress theme will be as simple as creating a child theme based on this framework. If you’re not familiar with child themes a quick google search will bring up lots of useful information.

This approach brings big benefits. When building a new theme you don’t need to re-create every template file. You can override specific template files where needed. Most importantly though, your theme will update automatically with the latest functionality when the framework theme is updated.

If you’ve already created a BuddyPress theme using the old system don’t worry, these themes will continue to work for at least the next couple of versions. You should find it fairly simple to convert your themes to the new system. The old default themes only took a few hours to convert over.

Using the framework theme is of course, just an option. You can still go ahead and create your own frameworks or mashups with a completely unique style or structure. As with WordPress themes, the possibilities are infinite.

If you’d like to get started with the new framework, I’d recommend running the trunk version of BuddyPress. The best way is to fetch this via Subversion, or you can download a zip of the current snapshot using the link at the bottom of this Trac browser page.

BuddyPress 1.1 is on track for a September release.

Update:: There seems to be confusion about using existing WordPress themes. You can still use any existing WordPress theme and copy over the extra templates from the framework theme. This will allow you to continue to use your current theme and also keep the same look and feel for BuddyPress features. You may need to make some some CSS adjustments.

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