BuddyPress 2.1 is going to be our best version yet, and is on track for our an almost-on-time release in just a few short weeks. If you are a plugin or theme developer, or are running a BuddyPress powered site with a development environment available, please download the 2.1-beta1 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. We would really appreciate your help testing it out with us.

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but until then here’s a rundown of some of our favorite changes that could use your eyes. (Check out this report on Trac for a more detailed view.)

  • New @mentions interface: type an @ when leaving a status update or commenting on an activity item or blog post, and the new suggestions panel will open.
  • Set more secure passwords with the password strength meter on the registration and user settings pages
  • New “URL” XProfile field type
  • Continued performance enhancements, particularly on the Members and Groups directories.
  • Higher quality translations (automatically fetched by WordPress), courtesy of our translation volunteers; thanks!
  • Tons of under-the-hood tweaks

Please let us know about any issues you find in the support forums or on our development tracker. Remember this is still beta software, and we don’t recommend running it on a production site quite yet.

Thanks for your help, and we look forward to releasing BuddyPress 2.1 soon!