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BP Classic 1.0.0

Published on July 31st, 2023 by Mathieu Viet

Dear end-users, site owners,

The BP Classic BuddyPress Add-on has been built to provide backwards compatibility for sites that will not be ready yet for the important changes we will introduce in BuddyPress’s next major release, 12.0.0. As we will soon publish the first pre-release version (beta1) of BuddyPress 12.0.0, we thought it was a good idea to have this compatibility add-on available right away in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

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BuddyPress community & contribution

Published on June 23rd, 2023 by Mathieu Viet

Last but not least! This is the final episode of our post series about the new direction we plan to take regarding the BuddyPress project. If you’re just discovering this series, we advise you to read about the 4 first episodes of it.

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Let’s meet in Paris during the french community contributor day

Published on April 14th, 2023 by Mathieu Viet

The BuddyPress Core Team is very happy to be represented at the Contributor Day the french WordPress community is organizing in Paris on April 20, 2023. Here’s a link to a translated page of the event schedule (Hours are in Central European Summer time).

Mathieu Viet (@imath / me!) explaining BP contribution during WC Paris Contributor day in 2019
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BuddyPress 10.6.0 Maintenance Release

Published on October 31st, 2022 by Mathieu Viet

BuddyPress 10.6.0 is a new maintenance release fixing 1 ugly bug with themes using block templates although there are not Block Based themes. For details on the change, please read the 10.6.0 release notes.

Many thanks to the users who quickly reported this issue into our previous maintenance release forum topic.

Update to BuddyPress 10.6.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Let’s talk about us, BuddyPress!

Published on September 27th, 2022 by Mathieu Viet

First, the facts.

After reaching a result of ~245k WordPress sites using actively BuddyPress at the end of 2019, the “active installations” statistic (the one which is displayed in the sidebar of our plugin’s page on the official WordPress Plugin Directory), has been decreasing progressively and recently fell just below 200k.

As the Plugin directory uses ranges to simplify the “active installations” statistic, we’re no longer in the 200k+ category but felt into the 100k+ one.

-19%

That’s the BuddyPress usage negative growth between the end of 2019 and today.

Meaning?

In short, some users don’t use community features on their WordPress site anymore or, more likely, fewer and fewer users are using BuddyPress to power their community site.

While such negative growth can lead to bankruptcy when you’re running a business, it does not mean maintaining our plugin is under immediate threat. You can count on the BuddyPress core team’s passion to carry on working on fixing bugs and improving features.

Let’s come together and reverse the trend!

Confronted by extraordinary difficulty, people from a family, a tribe, a team, a community, a company, a country, a continent, earth, temporarily forget about their individual need or personal feelings and unite together to find the best way to deal with this difficulty. This is happening because we know that if everyone focuses on a general benefit, we’ll have a better chance of achieving that benefit than if each of us tries to satisfy our own goals.

I believe the English quote for this idea is “In unity there is strength“.

More than ever, BuddyPress needs you to contribute to beta testing, support, documentation, translations and, of course, code.

As a start, we’d love to hear your voice about this simple question:

In your opinion, what is the most important thing that BuddyPress is missing?

Please, tell us about it by replying to this forum topic. Feel free to talk about every aspect of the project and to suggest ways to do better. If you could then take an extra step and share the link of this post or this topic with your friends, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance for your help 😍.

We (the BuddyPress software & community) are 14 years old. We were the first plugin to extend WordPress with community features, giving users a free and open source alternative to commercial “Social Media” (social network companies whose end goal is to sell advertisements based on your data). 

With WordPress and BuddyPress: you keep the freedom to share, data ownership and the control of every aspect of your community site. The BuddyPress core team is committed to preserving this free and totally open source tool for anyone.

BuddyPress 10.0.0-beta2

Published on December 23rd, 2021 by Mathieu Viet

Hello BuddyPress community!

🎶 All BuddyPress wants for Christmas🧑‍🎄 is you 🎵 … to test this new pre-release!

If you haven’t tested our first 10.0.0 beta release, here’s another opportunity to help us put the final touches on our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress-/ BuddyPress-specific configuration.

Beta testing is very important, and we need you all, whether you’re a novice or an advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author. Please contribute 🙏.

What has changed in 10.0.0-beta2?

  1. Custom Group Extensions: if you activated one or more plugins adding a new tab to your groups or if you built one or more plugins playing with the Group Extension API. It’s very important you take some time to make sure everything is working as expected in this area.
  2. Contribute to WordPress 5.9 beta tests as well! Let’s all check that BuddyPress pages are getting along well with Twenty Twenty-Two, the next WordPress default theme.
  3. The Private Messages component just got a new feature: messages thread exit. Users can now remove themselves from a conversation.

How to get 10.0.0-beta2?

The final release is slated for early January and we need your help to get there: please test 10.0.0-beta2. If you find a bug, please report it on our Trac or as a reply to this forum topic.

The BuddyPress core team is wishing you all: Merry Christmas 🎄

BuddyPress 8.0.0 “Alfano”

Published on June 6th, 2021 by Mathieu Viet

“Alfano” is our first major release of 2021. It is named after Alfano’s Pizza in Rock Island, Illinois, a family-run pizzeria that’s been around since the 1970s. They know how to keep it simple: there’s nothing on the menu but mouth-watering pizzas and calzones featuring their own made-from-scratch sauce and crust. For the true Alfano’s experience, order a stuffed pizza and dine in with as many friends as you can bring. The massive, two-crust pizza will be brought to the table piping hot, and there will be plenty for everyone!

You can get it clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.

👉 If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, it’s always a good idea to back-up your WordPress database and files ahead of time.

You can review all of the changes in this 8.0.0 release in the release notes. Below are the key features we believe you are going to enjoy most!

Your current members are the best way to recruit fantastic new members for your community.

Whether public registration is enabled or not, you can activate this great new opt-in feature from your site’s BuddyPress settings; with it, your trusted members will handpick new members who will enrich your community.

Illustration showing the Members Invite Screen.

Once activated, each member will be able to send new Member Invitation emails and manage the pending invitations directly from his or her profile area.

Illustration showing the Members Pending Invites Screen.

You keep control of everything thanks to two new screens we added to the BuddyPress Tools dashboard: invitations and opt-outs management.

Illustration showing the Members Invitations Administration Screen.

Improved registration experience.

First, you can select any xProfile field from any xProfile field group to use on your site’s registration form. Second, if your site requires that users accept specific rules such as terms of service or a code of conduct, you can now take advantage of the new Checkbox Acceptance xProfile Field type to record their agreement.

Third, once a user activates his or her account, BuddyPress will send a welcome email to help get him or her engaged with your community. You can customize the content of this email from the Emails menu of your WordPress dashboard. Have a look to this developer note to find out more about it.

WP xProfile field types.

The WP Biography field type lets you include the user’s Biographical Info and thanks to the WP Textbox field you can include the first & last name, the Website URL as well as any of the custom contact methods of your users.

Illustration showing the xProfile Field Edit Screen.

Under the hood

8.0.0 includes more than 45 changes to improve the Activity component, the BP Nouveau Template pack, the BP REST API and many more components and features.

Many thanks to the 47 contributors who helped us build & translate BuddyPress 8.0.0

Adil Oztaser (oztaser), Ahmed Chaion (chaion07), Andrea Tarantini (dontdream), Boone B Gorges (boonebgorges), Brajesh Singh (sbrajesh), Charles E. Frees-Melvin (thee17), Christian Wach (needle), comminski, Dan Caragea (dancaragea), David Cavins (dcavins), dominic-ks, Eduardo Speroni (edusperoni), Fernando Tellado (fernandot), Giuseppe (mociofiletto), hz_i3, Ian Barnes (ianbarnes), Iker Garaialde (atxamart), Javier Esteban (nobnob), John James Jacoby (johnjamesjacoby), Krupa (krupajnanda), Laurens Offereins, mahdiar, Mark Robson (markscottrobson), Mathieu Viet (imath), mattneil, meijioro, Michal Janata (kalich5), modemlooper, Paul Gibbs (DJPaul), podporawebu, Peter Smits (psmits1567), Pieterjan Deneys (nekojonez), r-a-y, Renato Alves (espellcaste), renegade1, Slava Abakumov (slaffik), Stephen Bernhardt (sabernhardt), Stephen Edgar (netweb), studiocrafted, Timi Wahalahti (sippis), Tomas (mobby2561), Topher (topher1kenobe), Utsav tilava (utsav72640), Varun Dubey (vapvarun), Venutius, WeddyWood, Yordan Soares (yordansoares).

Feedbacks welcome!

Receiving your feedback and suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share your feedback about this version of BuddyPress in the comments area of this post. And of course, if you’ve found a bug: please tell us about it into our Support forums.

BuddyPress in 2020, it’s a wrap!

Published on December 28th, 2020 by Mathieu Viet

Hello dear members of the BuddyPress community,

For this last day of 2020, we are inaugurating our very first End of Year wrap-up post. We believe it’s a good way to congratulate ourselves (the whole BuddyPress community) about the free & priceless hard work we’ve all put together into our open source project.

There are many ways we are getting involved into BuddyPress and we all know the best way to maintain BuddyPress in the long term is to give some of our spare time to carry on bringing that little piece to the project. Every contribution makes a difference.

Let’s thank us all, the users, the support forum moderators, the documentation writers, the translators, the theme designers, the plugin developers & the BuddyPress Core committers team. We have built great community features all along the 2020 year.

👏

Here are our results:

2020 releases

  • 9 releases (3 more than in 2019)
  • 2 major releases (1 more than in 2019)
  • 7 minor releases (2 more than in 2019)

2020 Tickets

  • We’ve fixed 186 tickets, it’s 62% more than in 2019.
  • The 6.0.0 release (May 2020) was the one which fixed the most tickets for 2 years (89).
  • Comparing to 2019, we’ve increased the fixed tickets per release average from 14 to 23.

2020 Code contributors

  • 7.0.0 gathered the highest number of contributors for 2 years. We were 55 involved into the making of this release. It’s almost twice the number of contributors the 5.0.0 release got in 2019.
  • For each release we are an average of 14 contributors per release. In 2019 we were 9 contributors. Contributions to the BuddyPress project grew by 40% in 2020.

2020 Downloads

  • Most important spike for 2 years happened in 2020 for the 7.0.0 releases: 34.236 downloads on December 11.
  • BuddyPress was downloaded more than 1.257.556 times in 2020 (the year is not finished yet 😌).
  • The growth ratio is 23% compared to 2019.

Here are our achievements:

Acknowledging Polyglots contributions

Making BuddyPress available in as many languages as possible is very important to ensure the best user experience of the plugin features. We are always trying to improve how we credits translators and ease their tasks. During the 6.0.0 release, we’ve reviewed all the strings needing translators comments to explain the meaning of the placeholders we use (e.g.: %s, %d, %1$s, etc.).

We’ve also decided to include, from now on, into major release credits the translation contributor names that have given their times to make sure the development (Trunk) translation is 100% ready once our major releases final string freeze step is over. This work is strategic to BuddyPress users as they will be able to get the new strings translation as soon as they upgrade or install the plugin.

Easing & welcoming code contributions

At the end of 2019, we’ve made available a new plugin to ease beta-testing, this year we’ve added the @wordpress/env package to our development version (Trunk) and wrote a tutorial about how you can easily set up a development environment to play with BuddyPress code thanks to it. We believe it’s an important step towards making contributing to BuddyPress easier and we hope it will increase the number of people getting involved into BuddyPress source code improvements.

Before starting the 7.0.0 development cycle and just like the WordPress Core team does before each major milestone, we’ve published our first “Call for tickets”. We’ll do it before each major release so that you can share with the BuddyPress Core committers the tickets you think should be fixed for the next development cycle. The priorities of the BuddyPress community matter, we encourage you to use this call for tickets to make your voice heard.

Informing BuddyPress Theme & Plugin authors about important changes

During the 6.0.0 development cycle we (re)started to take the time to write developer notes as soon as possible. We also organized these notes into categories according to the version number of the release being built.

  • To prepare 6.0.0, we’ve published 4 notes,
  • To prepare 7.0.0, we’ve published 9 notes.

Our goals doing so is to limit the risk of “breaking” your active theme or plugins keeping their authors aware of changes they should check before a major release is published. It can also help developers to start working early on extending BuddyPress new features. Please do read these notes and share them with your networks to increase their audience and contribute to cover this risk.

Checking how you use BuddyPress and what are your needs:

BuddyPress surveys are back! BuddyPress is about users: we are very happy we could organize the 2020 survey to get you inputs about your BuddyPress usage and about the specific directions for the plugin we are thinking of for its future.

Introducing new community features to the BuddyPress plugin:

  • The BP REST API welcomed 6 new endpoints to help you build great interactions from your applications about: Blogs, Blog avatar, Friends, Group Cover Image, Member Cover Image, and User Signups.
  • 5 BuddyPress blocks have landed into the BuddyPress blocks category of your WordPress Block Editor.
  • New Administration screens to manage BuddyPress Types (Member & Group ones) are now available within your WordPress Dashboard.
  • Just like Members & Groups, the Blogs component can now enjoy a new default avatar for Sites.
  • A great 2.0 version of BP WP CLI to help you manage your BuddyPress site right from the command lines.
  • And many fixes and improvements about the existing features (See 6.0.0 & 7.0.0 release notes)

Starting side projects:

If one of these projects is interesting you, don’t hesitate to contribute to it.

2021 Goals

Based on the discussions the Core Team had during our development meetings (every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress), here’s a list of directions we mostly agree on about:

  • A fantastic standalone BuddyPress theme.
  • BuddyPress code reference.
  • A BuddyPress Attachments component.
  • Improve ways to get help about & for BuddyPress.

Let’s try to make them concrete in 2021!

Thanks for reading this post and for your involvement in contributing to BuddyPress in 2020. Let’s wish us all a great new year’s eve 🎉. Bye 2020 and Happy 2021, full of great contributions, to the BuddyPress community.

How BuddyX made its way to the official WordPress.org theme directory

Published on December 17th, 2020 by Mathieu Viet

We use to feature BuddyPress usage case studies. These are great ways to share with you how BuddyPress can help you achieve your community site projects reading how other buddies did it. The case study you are about to read now is a bit different. It’s about the steps the lovely BuddyX BuddyPress theme had to take to be widely and freely available from the official WordPress.org theme directory. I’m very happy Varun Dubey took the time to write this guest post to share his experience with all of us. My secret hope is that it will inspire as many BuddyPress Theme authors as possible to do the same 😇.

Varun Dubey is a full-stack WordPress & BuddyPress developer. He’s the co-founder of Wbcom Designs, a WordPress themes and plugins development agency in India. He’s also a regular BuddyPress contributor, we often talk with him about the BuddyPress project during our development meetings (every other Wednesday at 19:00 UTC on Slack), he contributes to our development tasks (testing, reporting issues, patching, documenting, etc..) and he still manage to find time to help you regularly replying to your support topics (661 replies so far!). So, once again, many thanks to him for getting involved with BuddyPress 😍.

So let’s learn more from his experience, here’s what he wanted to share with you about it!

Read more →

BuddyPress 7.0.0 “Filippi”

Published on December 9th, 2020 by Mathieu Viet

This major release introduces new administration screens to manage your Member & Group Types 🙌

We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of BuddyPress 7.0.0 code-named “Filippi“. You can get it clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.

👉 If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, it’s always a good idea to back-up your WordPress database and files ahead of time.

You can review all of the changes in this 7.0.0 release in the release notes. Below are a few of the key features we believe you are going to love!

You can now manage your Member Types and/or Group Types right from your WordPress Dashboard

Illustration showing how to access to the BP Types Admin areas.

Playing with BP Types just became much easier! The Member Types and Group Types were primarily introduced in BuddyPress as features for advanced users, just like the WordPress Custom Post Type feature. Thanks to the two new WordPress Administration Screens, adding, editing and deleting Member & Group Types has never been so easy! Now you can set up BP Types using custom code or by simply using the Administration interfaces.

Let’s watch a demo about how it looks like for Member Types!

Fullscreen

3 new BP Blocks for your WP Posts & Pages

Illustration showing the BuddyPress Blocks category inside the Block Editor Inserter.

3 new BP Blocks are now available via your WordPress Editor. From the BuddyPress blocks category of the WordPress Block Inserter, you can pick a BP Block to feature a list of members, a list of groups or embed a public BuddyPress Activity into your post or page. Read more about it in this development note.

Here’s a quick video showing you how to insert a list of Members profile images into your home page.

Fullscreen

A default profile image for the sites of your network

Illustration of the BuddyPress Sites directory
Follow the white arrow to discover the new default profile image for sites.

The Site Tracking component now has a default profile image it can use to make your Sites loop prettier if some of them have not customized their WordPress Site Icon. Multisite WordPress configurations will be able to find it when displaying the Sites directory. Read more about it in the development note.

BP Nouveau is ready for Twenty Twenty-One 🎨

Fullscreen

You love the latest default WordPress Theme, so do we! It’s important for us to make sure the BP Nouveau template pack looks great in the default themes included in the WordPress package. This is the first of the many improvements we are bringing to our default Template Pack.

BP REST API improvements

The Developer documentation has been updated according to the latest improvements we’ve brought to the BuddyPress REST API.

To name two: get the groups the logged in user is a member of, and create a blog when BuddyPress is activated on a network of WordPress sites. Read this development note to learn about all the others.

Improved support for WP CLI

WP-CLI is the command-line interface for WordPress. You can update plugins, configure multisite installs, and much more, all without using a web browser. In 7.0.0, you will be able to use new BuddyPress CLI commands to manage BuddyPress Group Meta, BuddyPress Activity Meta, activate or deactivate the BuddyPress signup feature and create BuddyPress-specific testing code for plugins.

Discover more about it from this developer note.

Under the hood

7.0.0 includes more than 70 changes such as image lazy loading support, multiple Member Type assignment, a Docker ready development environment to improve your BuddyPress experience as users, and as contributors to our project.

Many thanks to the 55 contributors who helped us build & translate BuddyPress 7.0.0

Adil Oztaser (oztaser), Boone B Gorges (boonebgorges), Brajesh Singh (sbrajesh), corsky, Dan Caragea (dancaragea), David Cavins (dcavins), devnik,Dilip Bheda, Dion Hulse (dd32), dragoeco,Erik Betshammar (kebbet), etatus, Didier Saintes (ExoGeek)诗语 (f2010525),George Mamadashvili, Giuseppe (mociofiletto), Hareesh,iamthewebbJavier Esteban (nobnob), Jb Audras (audrasjb), John James Jacoby (johnjamesjacoby), Joost Abrahams (joost-abrahams), k3690, Knut Sparhell (knutsp), Laxman Prajapati, Lidia Pellizzaro (lidialab), marbaqueMarcel Claus (geckse), marioshtika,Mark Robson (markscottrobson), Mathieu Viet (imath), mercimeMeet Makadia, Michael Beckwith, Morteza Geransayeh (man4toman), morenolq, N33D, oddev56, Paul Gibbs (DJPaul), Petter Walbø Johnsgård (walbo), Peter Smits (psmits1567), Pooja N Muchandikar (pooja1210), Raruto, r-a-y, Renato Alves (espellcaste), scipi, Scott Bolinger (scottopolis), shanebp, shawfactor, sjregan, Stephen Edgar (netweb), tharsheblows, Tor-Bjorn Fjellner (tobifjellner), Varun Dubey (vapvarun) & wp24.cz (podporawebu).

BuddyPress Filippi

7.0.0 is code-named “Filippi” after Filippi’s Pizza Grotto in lovely San Diego, California, USA. The “Grotto” is in the back room of an Italian grocery and butcher shop in Little Italy. Tall pizza lovers will have to watch out for the Chianti bottles hanging from the ceiling, but the red-and-white-checked-tablecloth atmosphere and piled-high pizza is worth it!

Feedback is always welcome 😍

Receiving your feedback & suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share your feedback about this version of BuddyPress in the comments area of this post. And of course, if you’ve found a bug: please tell us about it into our Support forums.

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