When we first launched BuddyPress.org, the BuddyPress software hadn’t even been officially launched yet. By the time it had, requests for what software the website was running on were already coming into the forums. It wasn’t just BuddyPress people were asking for, it was the theme powering the site, the extra little plugins we were running to trick it out, and just general curiosity about what we were doing to make things go.

In October of 2012, the core teams started the Meta Blog which lead us towards releasing bits of WordPress.org code for peer review over on the Meta Trac. Since then, we’ve simplified BuddyPress.org’s codebase to make reviewing it and extending it really easy, and we are excited to announce today that all of the custom code is now publicly available in the Meta Subversion repository.

You’re now able to checkout, review, and patch the code that makes BuddyPress.org happily hum along. This is exciting for a few obvious reasons (like security, and really putting our open source philosophies where our code is) but the one I’m most excited about is it takes enhancements to the site out of our hands, and potentially puts them into yours.

Building software that powers millions of websites is one job (a heck of a fun one, too) and building and maintaining your own support site is actually quite another (like a self portrait; it’s a fun challenge.) Now, anyone can help improve not just BuddyPress, but also the site that supports it — that’s huge — and we can’t wait to see how BuddyPress.org evolves now that it’s in your hands!