Today the BuddyPress team would like to tell you a bit about BuddyPress 1.7, release candidate 1.

BuddyPress 1.7 is going to be one of our most exciting releases to date. It comes packaged with the same theme compatibility that was introduced in bbPress 2.0, which means that BuddyPress will now work out-of-the-box with a majority of the WordPress themes available today.

We’ve also fixed a bunch of annoyances, and smoothed out the installation and update experiences, to provide users and site-admins with a less intimidating introduction into building a community with BuddyPress.

Because of the hugeness of 1.7’s features and changes, we’ve spent a little extra time rigorously testing it with various types of themes and installations, to make it a worry-free update from BuddyPress 1.5 or later. The beta-testing phase has gone well, and uncovered only a few loose-ends that needed tying.

With that, we bring you BuddyPress 1.7, Release Candidate 1. Please try it, either on a test site, or wherever you feel comfortable running it, and let us know if you run into any issues.