BuddyPress 10.0.0-beta1 is finally available for testing! 🎄

Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.

You can test BuddyPress 10.0.0-beta1 in 4 ways :

The current target for final release is early next year : January 5, 2022. That’s only 3 weeks away 😱, so we would appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.

Please note BuddyPress 10.0.0 will require at least WordPress 5.4.

As usual, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade. It’s the main reason we actually package beta/RC versions 👉 so please give us a few minutes of your time to make sure this pre-release behaves the right way with your specific WordPress configuration, your theme, and the other WordPress plugins you are using. Try to use a testing site which is very close to the one you are using in production. If you find something weird (aside from the great new features below), please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.

Around 70 changes to expect in 10.0.0

You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. Below are the ones we believe will improve your BuddyPress experience in the most significant way.

🛂 Site Membership Requests

Site Administrators wishing to have more control over who can join their community will be able to enable site membership requests from their BuddyPress Options Administration screen. Once done, BuddyPress sign-ups are transformed into membership requests to be manually reviewed and approved by an Administrator to validate new user accounts.

🗞 More engaging logging activities

These simple activities about specific user interactions or events (e.g.: a user became a friend of another user) will be more visually attractive to improve user engagement in your community. The most impressive new activity is that which is generated when a user updates their profile photo: it will include the profile photo that spurred the creation of the activity item, even if it has been updated since 📸!

🎨 WordPress Full Site Editing compatibility

You’re beta testing WordPress 5.9: first thank you, second please take a few more minutes to check the improvements we’ve made to our BP Theme Compatibility API to play nice with themes supporting Full Site Editing such as the next WordPress default theme: Twenty Twenty-Two.

➕ A new place to easily discover our next BuddyPress Add-ons

BuddyPress Add-ons are side projects/projects as features/next BuddyPress blocks maintained by the BuddyPress development team we’ll soon make more widely available by publishing them on the WordPress plugin directory. When BuddyPress 10.0.0 is released, you’ll find a new tab to your “Add Plugins” Administration screen. On it, you’ll see a new add-on for a potentially upcoming feature: BP Rewrites. We think this will bring more contributions to the BuddyPress project as a whole.

🎮 Happy testing!