Hello community!

We usually build pre-releases for next BuddyPress major versions, this one’s goal is to make sure we can safely publish our next maintenance release (11.4.0). Why?

To prepare the release of our next major version (12.0.0), we want to make sure as much as possible WordPress site Administrators acknowledge important informations about it, before upgrading. To do so we exceptionally decided to include a new feature into the 11.4.0 maintenance release, which should be the last 11.0 branch release.

Introducing a new Admin Notifications center.

Screenshot of the new Admin notifications center

BP Admin Notifications are important messages from the BP Core Team to all WordPress Site Administrators using the BuddyPress plugin.

If the BP Notifications component is active, BP Admin notifications are temporarily replacing regular notifications for all members having the Administrator role on the site. As soon as one of the site Administrators has clicked on all Admin Notification’s “dismiss” links or call to action buttons, they’ll find back their regular notifications.

BP Admin Notifications will be generated and viewable even if the BP Notifications component is not active.

What is the expected behavior of this feature we want you to test?

We need to make sure the  11.4  BP Admin Notification is generated when you perform an upgrade from a previous BuddyPress version or when you install BuddyPress for the first time using the 11.4.0 release. In other words, on a staging site or locally, we’d love you to:

  1. Download and activate the BuddyPress latest stable version (11.3.2), then once done, use the Upload Plugin button of your WP Administration’s “Add new” plugin screen to replace it with the 11.4.0-beta1 version.
  2. on a fresh WordPress installation, directly activate the 11.4.0-beta1 version.

If for 1 of these 2 scenarios, as an Administrator, you can’t see the exclamation mark inside the BP Notifications bubble of the WP Admin Bar or if when you click on it you are not reaching the BP Admin notifications center’s screen as shown in the screenshot above, please send us a bug report here.

We plan to release BuddyPress 11.4.0 on next Thursday (October 26), please help us respect this plan contributing to testing 11.4.0-beta1.

You can get BuddyPress 11.4.0-beta1 in 3 ways :

  • Download the beta here (zip file).
  • Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/branches/11.0
  • Clone our read-only Git repository: 
    • git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/ buddypress
    • git checkout 11.0

Thanks in advance for your help 🙏.