BuddyPress 2.4.0 Beta 2 is available for testing. Please download the 2.4.0-beta2 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. If you are a plugin or theme developer, or are running a BuddyPress powered site with a development environment available, we’d love to have your help with testing.

Some improvements we’re introducing in this release are involving changes to our Template Pack. If you are partially or completely overriding it within your theme, we strongly recommend you to test and get ready to update your templates (if necessary) when 2.4.0 is released. If you are still using WordPress 3.6 or 3.7, we remind you BuddyPress 2.4.0 will require at least WordPress 3.8.

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but until then, here’s a rundown of some of our favourite changes. (Check out this report on Trac for a more detailed view.)

  • Accessibility: we’ve made great improvements about this important topic in our Template Pack.
  • Members Type & xProfile fields: you will be able to restrict profile fields to specific member types.
  • Cover Images for Members and Groups are arriving in 2.4.0 and they are bringing very nice improvements to our BP Attachment API. Developers, make sure to give a look at this codex page.
  • New companion stylesheets: Twenty Thirteen and Twenty Sixteen (to be shipped with WordPress 4.4).
  • Groups single items: you can now customise their front page according to the ID/Slug of the Groups or their status thanks to a specific Template Hierarchy.
  • Continued object & query cache enhancements.
  • Tons of under-the-hood improvements.
  • Continued coverage of inline code documentation, actions, & filters.

2.4.0 is almost ready, but please do not run it in a production environment just yet. Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.

Thanks everyone for all your contributions, and we are excited to release BuddyPress 2.4.0 very soon!