Today the BuddyPress team is excited to announce the release of BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy”.

What’s new in 1.9

Notifications

BuddyPress has always come packaged with the ability to alert members of relevant goings-on. Things like friend requests, private messages, and group invitations, have been routed through a very simple core process that alerts members via email and a bubble in the top toolbar area. In BuddyPress 1.9, Notifications graduates to a full component, complete with a user interface for seeing past notifications, an improved API for developers to interface with them, and lays the foundation for future improvements and integrations to this functionality.

Navigation Integration

Since WordPress 3.0, site administrators have been able to easily create and manage the navigational elements of their sites, and until now, BuddyPress’s components have been unavailable as options. In BuddyPress 1.9, we’re introducing context aware navigation menu items that are only available for either logged in or logged out users, allowing your menus to dynamically adjust for your members. We think this is really cool, and is a feature that will really help integrate BuddyPress into existing installations.

Widgets

We’ve added a few more widgets to help connect your community to the rest of your site:

  • Friends Widget: a list of recently active, popular, and newest friends of the displayed member.
  • Log In Widget: adds a simple “Log In” form to your site.
  • Sitewide Notices Widget: display Sitewide Notices from the Private Messaging component.

Developer Bits

BuddyPress 1.9 includes improvements to make it easier to develop plugins and themes for BuddyPress:

  • Improved inline documentation for developers that are crazy enough to go snooping through the code.
  • Improved compatibility with develop.svn.wordpress.org unit-test suite
  • We’ve brought back bp_redirect_canonical() for helping redirect to top level/default members sections.

Sammy’s Pizza

On the east side of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A, on historic Hope St. just a few blocks north of Brown University, sat Sammy’s Pizza, home to one of the most delicious pizzas I’ve ever tasted. Sammy’s was my neighborhood hangout for the 2 years I spent in Providence, and not a day went by I didn’t stop in and at least say hello. The owner expanded into the next-door property and transformed Sammy’s into a gorgeous restaurant now known as The Kitchen Bar, where Sammy still continues baking the best pies in New England (in my opinion, anyways.) BuddyPress 1.9 is named “Sammy” in honor and memory of the great times I spent with some of my favorite people, eating my favorite foods, in one of my favorite places. If you happen to be in the area, stop in and tell Sammy I say hello!

Kudos

BuddyPress wouldn’t be what it is without the continued efforts of a volunteer staff of contributors. If it’s development, design, wireframes, UI, UX, you name it, these people helped make it happen for BuddyPress 1.9:

AliMH, asakurayoh, boonebgorges, burakali, dcavins, ddean, DennisSmolek, dimensionmedia, DJPaul, dtc7240, ericlewis, gametako, geoffroycochard, graha washbrook, hanni, haykayltduk, henrywright, hnla, imath, johnjamesjacoby, jessjurick, lenasterg, mboynes, megainfo, Mike_Cowobo, modemlooper, olivM, needle, netweblogic, r-a-y, ryderlewis, sbrajesh, sgr33n, sooskriszta, terraling, tomdxw, trishasalas, vhauri, williamsba1, wpdennis

Fin

This release cycle, significant effort has gone into improving our documentation. The BuddyPress Codex is the place to get answers about how things work, how to extend the codebase, and to learn a bit about the history of the project. If you think you’ve found a bug, or want to help improve the software, head over to buddypress.trac.wordpress.org and lend a hand.

Download BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy” today from the wordpress.org plugin repository, or from your WordPress Dashboard.