Hello BuddyPress contributors!

If you haven’t tested our first 8.0.0 beta release, here’s another opportunity to help us give the final touches to our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. Beta testing is very important and we need you all, whether you’re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!

Test BuddyPress 8.0.0-beta2

What’s new since beta1?

First we applied to ourselves the advice we just gave you into the first paragraph of this post: we’ve tested BuddyPress on WordPress 5.8-alpha and on latest stable WordPress & Gutenberg’s plugin. Our goal was to check the very promising Widgets Block Editor that is announced to be part of the WordPress 5.8 release. This helped us anticipate some deprecation notices and prevent an issue to happen into the new Widgets Block Editor Administration screen. If you were worried about losing your favorite BuddyPress widgets once WordPress 5.8 is released: be reassured, we can tell you there’s a back-compatibility mechanism into the Widgets Block feature making sure legacy widgets can still be managed from the new Widgets Block Editor Administration screen. If you’re wondering if we have a plan about migrating these widgets as blocks, we confirm we do and we actually started building these next BP Blocks!

We also tested the Full Site Editing feature. For now, there’s a breaking change preventing our BP Theme Compat API to behave as expected but we’re on it and we’ll make sure BuddyPress is Full Site Editing ready before this feature is merged into WordPress core.

We started documenting the new features arriving in BuddyPress 8.0.0, you can already learn about the selectable signup xProfile fields and the CheckBox Acceptance xProfile field.

Finally we’ve polished the very promising BP Members Invitations feature and made sure it was easier to extend the BP Messages UI into the BP Nouveau template pack.

The final release is slated to early June and we need you to get there: do test this beta release of BuddyPress šŸ™.

You can test BuddyPress 8.0.0-beta2 in 4 ways :

  • Try theĀ BP Beta TesterĀ plugin.
  • Download the beta here (zip file).
  • Check out our SVN repository:Ā svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
  • Clone our read-only Git repository:Ā git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

Thanks in advance for your contributions šŸ„°