BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress.org went through another serious clean-up effort in 2012. It now runs a minimal set of plugins, with an emphasis on supporting the project proper.

BuddyPress.org’s group forums were retired. They were a fun experiment, but largely confusing to users and a moderation nightmare for site staffers. BuddyPress.org also experienced another redesign, taking much inspiration from bbPress.org and shifting focus away from evangelizing and towards supporting and showcasing what a nicely integrated BuddyPress installation can be.

BuddyPress Releases

BuddyPress saw both 1.5 and 1.6, with focus on cleaning up the codebase, gently migrating off of bbPress 1.1 for group forums, activity stream administration, performance improvements, and better single and multisite switching support. We also had our very first BuddyCamp in Vancouver, which was an amazing event thanks to Matt, the event organizers, sponsors, and all-of-the-other awesome contributors.

In 2012, we added our 4th core committer, Raymond Hoh. Ray has been a prolific contributor since the early days, and recently stepped up his game where him not having commit access was slowing him down. We also started experimenting with new default themes, codenamed Status, and Turtleshell respectively. Neither has made it directly into core, but TS is showing promise as a great compliment to 1.7 as we roll out theme compatibility in BuddyPress.

In 2013, BuddyPress will likely see:

  • Theme compatibility with all WordPress themes.
  • Dropping the ability to create new bbPress 1.1 powered group forums, relying solely on bbPress 2.x.
  • Notifications being extracted into its own component.
  • More wp-admin integration, starting with Groups management.
  • Retina all-of-the-things.
  • What’s New and Credits pages, ala WordPress core.
  • Again, hopefully another prolific core committer.
  • A BuddyCamp or two wouldn’t hurt.

In closing

2012 has been a great year for the bb’s. The community is really rallying behind bbPress again, and our BuddyPress users are anxiously awaiting the 1.7 release to alleviate all of their theming woes. Overall, I’m very proud about what we were able to accomplish this year, and am excited about what we have planned for 2013.