Today sees BP 2.9.0 move to The final testing phase Release Candidate 1.

This is the last chance to test out this release and report back any issues found before final release in approximately two weeks time.

Any issues found can be reported to our trac ticket home , or raised on the support forum.

Amongst other improvements and fixes to look out for are:

  • Fixing display of older activity comments.
  • Correction of message when removing friends that are not friends.
  • Group invites – omit sending to previously invited members.
  • Profile image upload fix for IE Edge breaksIOS fix.
  • Correct issue with hidden group & CSS specificity.
  • URL compatibility for LightSpeed.
  • Fix inability resizing of member avatar for cyrillic character filenames.

For a full list of commits see 2.9 tickets A full changelog will be available when we release the final version.

You can download the plugin to test from the WP repo BP 2.9.0-RC1 or grab a copy from our SVN repo.

A reminder to all theme developers that there are changes to template markup that could effect layouts and ask that they check their themes carefully, the changes are listed below along with changelog links; again any issues or problems please report as soon as possible to the BP trac or slack channel.

Template changes

In this release there are a number of improvements to templates that add a level of improved a11y performance and markup changes for better semantics & Standards.

Theme authors may want to pay particular attention to changes to profile field visibility links and the profile field descriptions where significant markup changes are made that effect positioning of these elements – changesets for these are r11617 & r11618

Nouveau – new template pack

If you’re looking for Nouveau as we mentioned in the beta2 announcement we have delayed the release of this new template pack to ensure it receives as much code checking & refinement as possible and we’ll be looking to probably package this as it’s own release shortly after 2.9 is released.

We thank you in advance for all testing and reports and it need not be mentioned but please don’t run Beta or RC releases in a production environment only on test installs.

Regards,
The BuddyPress team.