Hello dear members of the BuddyPress community,

For this last day of 2020, we are inaugurating our very first End of Year wrap-up post. We believe it’s a good way to congratulate ourselves (the whole BuddyPress community) about the free & priceless hard work we’ve all put together into our open source project.

There are many ways we are getting involved into BuddyPress and we all know the best way to maintain BuddyPress in the long term is to give some of our spare time to carry on bringing that little piece to the project. Every contribution makes a difference.

Let’s thank us all, the users, the support forum moderators, the documentation writers, the translators, the theme designers, the plugin developers & the BuddyPress Core committers team. We have built great community features all along the 2020 year.

👏

Here are our results:

2020 releases

  • 9 releases (3 more than in 2019)
  • 2 major releases (1 more than in 2019)
  • 7 minor releases (2 more than in 2019)

2020 Tickets

  • We’ve fixed 186 tickets, it’s 62% more than in 2019.
  • The 6.0.0 release (May 2020) was the one which fixed the most tickets for 2 years (89).
  • Comparing to 2019, we’ve increased the fixed tickets per release average from 14 to 23.

2020 Code contributors

  • 7.0.0 gathered the highest number of contributors for 2 years. We were 55 involved into the making of this release. It’s almost twice the number of contributors the 5.0.0 release got in 2019.
  • For each release we are an average of 14 contributors per release. In 2019 we were 9 contributors. Contributions to the BuddyPress project grew by 40% in 2020.

2020 Downloads

  • Most important spike for 2 years happened in 2020 for the 7.0.0 releases: 34.236 downloads on December 11.
  • BuddyPress was downloaded more than 1.257.556 times in 2020 (the year is not finished yet 😌).
  • The growth ratio is 23% compared to 2019.

Here are our achievements:

Acknowledging Polyglots contributions

Making BuddyPress available in as many languages as possible is very important to ensure the best user experience of the plugin features. We are always trying to improve how we credits translators and ease their tasks. During the 6.0.0 release, we’ve reviewed all the strings needing translators comments to explain the meaning of the placeholders we use (e.g.: %s, %d, %1$s, etc.).

We’ve also decided to include, from now on, into major release credits the translation contributor names that have given their times to make sure the development (Trunk) translation is 100% ready once our major releases final string freeze step is over. This work is strategic to BuddyPress users as they will be able to get the new strings translation as soon as they upgrade or install the plugin.

Easing & welcoming code contributions

At the end of 2019, we’ve made available a new plugin to ease beta-testing, this year we’ve added the @wordpress/env package to our development version (Trunk) and wrote a tutorial about how you can easily set up a development environment to play with BuddyPress code thanks to it. We believe it’s an important step towards making contributing to BuddyPress easier and we hope it will increase the number of people getting involved into BuddyPress source code improvements.

Before starting the 7.0.0 development cycle and just like the WordPress Core team does before each major milestone, we’ve published our first “Call for tickets”. We’ll do it before each major release so that you can share with the BuddyPress Core committers the tickets you think should be fixed for the next development cycle. The priorities of the BuddyPress community matter, we encourage you to use this call for tickets to make your voice heard.

Informing BuddyPress Theme & Plugin authors about important changes

During the 6.0.0 development cycle we (re)started to take the time to write developer notes as soon as possible. We also organized these notes into categories according to the version number of the release being built.

  • To prepare 6.0.0, we’ve published 4 notes,
  • To prepare 7.0.0, we’ve published 9 notes.

Our goals doing so is to limit the risk of “breaking” your active theme or plugins keeping their authors aware of changes they should check before a major release is published. It can also help developers to start working early on extending BuddyPress new features. Please do read these notes and share them with your networks to increase their audience and contribute to cover this risk.

Checking how you use BuddyPress and what are your needs:

BuddyPress surveys are back! BuddyPress is about users: we are very happy we could organize the 2020 survey to get you inputs about your BuddyPress usage and about the specific directions for the plugin we are thinking of for its future.

Introducing new community features to the BuddyPress plugin:

  • The BP REST API welcomed 6 new endpoints to help you build great interactions from your applications about: Blogs, Blog avatar, Friends, Group Cover Image, Member Cover Image, and User Signups.
  • 5 BuddyPress blocks have landed into the BuddyPress blocks category of your WordPress Block Editor.
  • New Administration screens to manage BuddyPress Types (Member & Group ones) are now available within your WordPress Dashboard.
  • Just like Members & Groups, the Blogs component can now enjoy a new default avatar for Sites.
  • A great 2.0 version of BP WP CLI to help you manage your BuddyPress site right from the command lines.
  • And many fixes and improvements about the existing features (See 6.0.0 & 7.0.0 release notes)

Starting side projects:

If one of these projects is interesting you, don’t hesitate to contribute to it.

2021 Goals

Based on the discussions the Core Team had during our development meetings (every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress), here’s a list of directions we mostly agree on about:

  • A fantastic standalone BuddyPress theme.
  • BuddyPress code reference.
  • A BuddyPress Attachments component.
  • Improve ways to get help about & for BuddyPress.

Let’s try to make them concrete in 2021!

Thanks for reading this post and for your involvement in contributing to BuddyPress in 2020. Let’s wish us all a great new year’s eve 🎉. Bye 2020 and Happy 2021, full of great contributions, to the BuddyPress community.