Please welcome BuddyPress 2.3.0 “Livio”!

Here are the new features the BuddyPress team is really excited about in this release.

 

A New UI for Avatar Creation

avatar-ui

This new “mobile-ready” interface includes an “Upload” tab, letting you drag and drop any image you choose to upload as your profile photo. If your laptop has a camera and you are using a browser supporting webcam video stream access, upload a “selfie” using the “Take Photo” tab!

take-photo

This new interface is available for member avatar management on the front end (member’s Change Profile Photo screen) as well as in the Dashboard (Extended Profile tab in User’s administration screen). The UI is also available on the front end for groups avatar uploads.

The Avatar UI is built on top of our new Attachments API, the long-awaited foundation for media-related BuddyPress components and features.

 

Companion Stylesheets for Themes Bundled with WordPress

BuddyPress 2.3.0 looks more beautiful than ever in WordPress’s Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Fourteen themes, thanks to the introduction of our companion stylesheets. Most screenshots in the post you’re currently reading were taken with Twenty Fifteen; here’s a bonus screencap from Twenty Fourteen!

twentyfourteen

 

Star Private Messages

Thank your lucky stars! Mark important messages in your inbox with the new Star tool. You can view your Starred messages by navigating to Messages > Starred.

star-private

 

Improved Handling of Blog Media in Activity Stream.

BuddyPress now generates better excerpts in the activity streams for blog posts containing images or other embedded media content.

better-representation

 

“Member-Type-Specific” Directories

BuddyPress 2.2 introduced the concept of Member Types. BuddyPress 2.3 makes member types more powerful, with member directories specific to each member type.

member-types

 

And so much more!

Read more about the hundreds of bug fixes and feature enhancements in BuddyPress 2.3 at our official 2.3 changelog.

 

Huge thanks to our contributors – we love you!

BuddyPress is an open source project with contributors from all around the world. There are many areas you can contribute to: testing the betas before a release, translating the software, suggesting new features, improving the existing code, writing documentation, talking about BuddyPress at WordCamps, helping people in support forums, participating in our surveys … Everybody’s welcome!

Aaron Jorbin (aaronjorbin), Boone B Gorges (boonebgorges), Brajesh Singh (sbrajesh), CristinaCannon, David Cavins (dcavins), Dennis (wpdennis), Dominik Schilling (ocean90), ecehren, finzend, George Mamadashvili (Mamaduka), Greg Rickaby (gregrickaby), Henry Wright (henry.wright), Hugo (hnla), jaimieolmstead, John James Jacoby (johnjamesjacoby), jreeve, Justin Sainton (JustinSainton), K.Adam White (kadamwhite), Laurens Offereins (Offereins), lenasterg, Marc (natrio), Markus Echterhoff (mechter), Mathieu Viet (imath), melhop, mercime, Michael Beckwith (tw2113), paresh.radadiya (pareshradadiya), Paul Gibbs (DJPaul), Prometheus Fire, r-a-y, Roger Coathup (rogercoathup), Scott Seitz (dtc7240), Scott Taylor (wonderboymusic), Sergey Biryukov (SergeyBiryukov), shanebp, Stephen Edgar (netweb), svenl77, WeddyWood, wolfhoundjesse, xgz.

 

Livio’s forever

Back in 1964, the Tuscan Livio Innocenti opened a very charming and authentic trattoria near Paris (France), where around twenty people could lunch and have dinner. Nowadays, “Chez Livio” is a very famous restaurant owned by Livio’s grandchildren where 250 guests can taste a wide variety of Italian dishes – and, of course, excellent pizzas! Pizza cooking is taken very seriously at “Chez Livio” – the flour used for their pizza is imported from Italy!

In the summertime, if you can’t find a spot to eat on the terrace you can still enjoy the sun from inside thanks to the opening roof of its patio. Should the next BuddyPress team meetup take place in Paris, you’ll be sure to find us “Chez Livio”!

 

“Bonne dégustation”

You can download BuddyPress 2.3.0 from the wordpress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard.

As always, if you have questions, comments, feature requests, or bug reports you can post them in our support forums or at our development tracker.