BuddyPress.org

Hi everyone!

First, we’d like to thank all the people who contributed to the poll we shared on our development updates blog and into a topic of one of our forums a month ago. It was really important for us to have your expectations about the content the plugin should provide to the WordPress Block Editor.

It’s now time for us to share with you the results of this poll and tell you how we plan to work on BuddyPress blocks for the next release(s) of your favorite community engine!

The results of the Blocks Poll

It received a total of 161 votes divided as follows:

• A block to share a post or a page via the Activity Stream : 17 votes.
• A block to list the recently published posts from across your network (Exists as a widget) : 13 votes.
• A block to display Sitewide Notices posted by the site administrator (Exists as a widget) : 12 votes.
• A block to dynamicaly list the recently active, popular, newest, or alphabetical groups (Exists as a widget) : 11 votes.
• A block to display Profile photos of online users (Exists as a widget) : 10 votes.
• A block to highlight a single Group : 10 votes.
• A block to highlight a single Member : 10 votes.
• A block to dynamicaly list the recently active, popular, and newest Friends of a given member (Exists as a widget) : 9 votes.
• A block to display the Profile photos of recently active members (Exists as a widget) : 9 votes.
• A block to restrict content to a Group type : 9 votes.
• A block to dynamicaly list the recently active, popular, and newest members (Exists as a widget) : 8 votes.
• A block to restrict content to a Member type : 8 votes.
• A block to restrict content to Group members : 7 votes.
• A block to list the Member types : 7 votes.
• A block to display a selected Activity as a quote : 6 votes.
• A block to list the Group types : 5 votes.
• A placeholder block for directory pages to eventually make them benefit from wide alignments : 5 votes.
• No blocks! : 3 votes.
• Other : 2 votes.

As you can see, top results are mostly corresponding to existing widgets except for:

• A block to share a post or a page via the Activity Stream.
• A block to highlight a single Group or a single Member.

We also analyze from these results that there is no blocks expected to be a must have and it’s interesting to see that the 2 first blocks are about highlighting WordPress content. Finally only one suggestion was made : A “Block for Activity Stream component” (PS: in Nouveau there’s an existing widget for it).

About the BuddyPress development team’s decision regarding BuddyPress blocks.

We think working on blocks to highlight a single Group or a single Member is a good starting point. Moreover it’s something we don’t make possible yet. We also think converting existing widgets to blocks is an obvious move to do.

We’ve decided to work on these blocks from a specific GitHub repository and to merge into the Core of the BuddyPress plugin the “JavaScript built” blocks as soon as they are ready. To the very least, we’ll have the 2 blocks to highlight a Group or a Member of your community site merged into BuddyPress for its next major release (6.0.0).

We’ve just pushed the minimal code to start working on BuddyPress blocks into the BP Blocks’ GitHub repository. We’ll soon add contributing notes into this repository so that you can help us building beautiful BuddyPress blocks. You can already share with us your “Pull Requests” forking the repository.

If you can’t wait for the contributing notes to start working on BuddyPress Blocks, here’s a quick “how-to” :

• Once you cloned your fork into your development environment, do npm install
• The JavaScript (ESNext) code for your block needs to land into the /src/bp-{ID of the BP Component}/js/blocks/ directory.
• Have a look at the way the bp/member block is registered here to build your registration code.
• run npm start to see how your JavaScript code behaves at each edit.

Let’s build awesome BuddyPress blocks, together <3.