Published on March 6th, 2014 by John James Jacoby
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!
This report presents the results from the 2014 BuddyPress Survey held from Jan. 7 – Feb. 10, 2014. Three hundred thirty-eight developers from fifty-two countries completed the survey. Thank you all.
Goal of Survey
Guide the direction of BuddyPress plugin development in 2014
Objectives:
1. Discover current and actual BuddyPress usage.
2. Provide users the opportunity to post their feature requests.
3. Identify key areas for improvement.
4. Prioritize areas of BuddyPress development.
5. Set benchmarks to streamline development processes.
6. Identify volunteers who are interested in contributing to BuddyPress development.
Read more →
Today marks the first official day of BuddyPress 2.0’s development cycle. As such, we want to keep everyone in the loop about what we’re planning for 2.0, and what our release dates are, so you can better plan your sites, updates, contributions, and testing.
Features:
- bp-forums retirement #5351 (johnjamesjacoby)
- WordPress Rewrite Rules API integration #4954 (johnjamesjacoby)
- Move XProfile visibility from each field into Settings #5352 (johnjamesjacoby)
- last_activity usermeta improvements #5128 (boonebgorges)
- Activity comment sync for comments (r-a-y)
- Ticket triage and general maintenance (paulgibbs)
- BuddyPress Profile editing from wp-admin (imath)
- New template pack #4952 (karmatosed)
Dates:
- Development starts (today): Wednesday, February 4, 2014
- Beta 1 (8 weeks from today): Wednesday, March 26, 2014
- Release (3 weeks after beta): Wednesday, April 16, 2014
If you’d like to tag along with us for the next 8 weeks, the 2.0 Roadmap is a great place to start. On behalf of the core development team, we’re really excited about what we have planned for 2.0, and can’t wait to get started!
BuddyPress 1.9.2 is available. This is a security and maintenance release, fixing two possible security issues with Group creation (responsibly disclosed by Pietro Oliva) along with some fixes to our WordPress Menus integration, bp-default theme switching, and improvements to theme compatibility.
A complete list of closed tickets can be found at the 1.9.2 milestone, and a full changelog is at https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/releases/version-1-9-2/.
This is a recommended update for all installations of BuddyPress 1.5+.
Upgrade via your WordPress Dashboard > Updates. You can also download the latest version at https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress.
Questions or comments? Check out our support community and development tracker.
BuddyPress 1.0 launched just over 5 years ago, and it’s quite a different piece of software today than it was back then. We’ve added (and retired) several components, reinvented the way it integrates into WordPress’s themes, and even changed our logo color (from orange to red.)
BuddyPress wouldn’t be what it is without the feedback of the community. While the core leadership team has a vision, how we ultimately prioritize features and releases is determined from a cocktail of wants, needs, desires, trends, availability, and is also largely influenced by WordPress too.
We want to start this year off at least facing the right direction, so Merci Me was kind enough to put together a survey based on some questions that we have for you. The answers to these questions will help us build a better BuddyPress by ensuring we’re still creating what you still want to use, and help us determine if any course corrections are necessary.
If you’re reading this post, you’re exactly the person we want to take this survey. Users; developers; even interested parties have opinions and expectations, and we want to hear all of them. You will find the survey embedded below.
http://mercime.polldaddy.com/s/2014-buddypress-survey
Thanks for taking the time to help us out. We really appreciate it, and we’ll post the results of this survey in the next few weeks.
BuddyPress 1.9.1 is now available. This is a maintenance release, improving compatibility with WordPress 3.8, adding Notifications support for the old bp-default theme, and improves third party Notifications integration. A complete list of closed tickets can be found at the 1.9.1 milestone, and a full changelog is at https://codex.buddypress.org/developer/releases/version-1-9-1/.
This is a recommended update for all installations of BuddyPress 1.5+.
Upgrade via your WordPress Dashboard > Updates. You can also download the latest version at https://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress.
Questions or comments? Check out our support community and development tracker.
We’re excited to start 2014 on a happy note: Mathieu Viet, better known online as imath, is joining the BuddyPress core team. Mathieu has contributed extensively to BuddyPress, particularly over the 1.8 and 1.9 development cycles. He has written many popular BP plugins, and is a prominent member of the French WordPress community. The core team is confident that his extensive knowledge of the BuddyPress codebase, his technical ingenuity, and his enthusiasm for BP will bring huge benefits to the project, in 2014 and beyond.
Congratulations to imath from the entire BuddyPress community!
Today the BuddyPress team is excited to announce the release of BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy”.
What’s new in 1.9
Notifications
BuddyPress has always come packaged with the ability to alert members of relevant goings-on. Things like friend requests, private messages, and group invitations, have been routed through a very simple core process that alerts members via email and a bubble in the top toolbar area. In BuddyPress 1.9, Notifications graduates to a full component, complete with a user interface for seeing past notifications, an improved API for developers to interface with them, and lays the foundation for future improvements and integrations to this functionality.
Navigation Integration
Since WordPress 3.0, site administrators have been able to easily create and manage the navigational elements of their sites, and until now, BuddyPress’s components have been unavailable as options. In BuddyPress 1.9, we’re introducing context aware navigation menu items that are only available for either logged in or logged out users, allowing your menus to dynamically adjust for your members. We think this is really cool, and is a feature that will really help integrate BuddyPress into existing installations.
Widgets
We’ve added a few more widgets to help connect your community to the rest of your site:
- Friends Widget: a list of recently active, popular, and newest friends of the displayed member.
- Log In Widget: adds a simple “Log In” form to your site.
- Sitewide Notices Widget: display Sitewide Notices from the Private Messaging component.
Developer Bits
BuddyPress 1.9 includes improvements to make it easier to develop plugins and themes for BuddyPress:
- Improved inline documentation for developers that are crazy enough to go snooping through the code.
- Improved compatibility with develop.svn.wordpress.org unit-test suite
- We’ve brought back
bp_redirect_canonical() for helping redirect to top level/default members sections.
Sammy’s Pizza
On the east side of Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.A, on historic Hope St. just a few blocks north of Brown University, sat Sammy’s Pizza, home to one of the most delicious pizzas I’ve ever tasted. Sammy’s was my neighborhood hangout for the 2 years I spent in Providence, and not a day went by I didn’t stop in and at least say hello. The owner expanded into the next-door property and transformed Sammy’s into a gorgeous restaurant now known as The Kitchen Bar, where Sammy still continues baking the best pies in New England (in my opinion, anyways.) BuddyPress 1.9 is named “Sammy” in honor and memory of the great times I spent with some of my favorite people, eating my favorite foods, in one of my favorite places. If you happen to be in the area, stop in and tell Sammy I say hello!
Kudos
BuddyPress wouldn’t be what it is without the continued efforts of a volunteer staff of contributors. If it’s development, design, wireframes, UI, UX, you name it, these people helped make it happen for BuddyPress 1.9:
AliMH, asakurayoh, boonebgorges, burakali, dcavins, ddean, DennisSmolek, dimensionmedia, DJPaul, dtc7240, ericlewis, gametako, geoffroycochard, graha washbrook, hanni, haykayltduk, henrywright, hnla, imath, johnjamesjacoby, jessjurick, lenasterg, mboynes, megainfo, Mike_Cowobo, modemlooper, olivM, needle, netweblogic, r-a-y, ryderlewis, sbrajesh, sgr33n, sooskriszta, terraling, tomdxw, trishasalas, vhauri, williamsba1, wpdennis
Fin
This release cycle, significant effort has gone into improving our documentation. The BuddyPress Codex is the place to get answers about how things work, how to extend the codebase, and to learn a bit about the history of the project. If you think you’ve found a bug, or want to help improve the software, head over to buddypress.trac.wordpress.org and lend a hand.
Download BuddyPress 1.9 “Sammy” today from the wordpress.org plugin repository, or from your WordPress Dashboard.
A quick note that BuddyPress.org has been updated to WordPress 3.8. Also, BuddyPress 1.8 is fully compatible with the latest and greatest version of WordPress, so you can safely update knowing that BuddyPress will cooperate completely.
We’ve also updated BuddyPress.org to run what will be BuddyPress 1.9, which we’re preparing to release on Monday, December 16.
The second beta of BuddyPress 1.9 is now available. Since Beta 1, we’ve fixed a number of issues with the new Notifications component, as well as a number of other miscellaneous issues, notably related to BP_User_Query, xprofile field visibility settings, and the Read More AJAX on the activity page.
Many thanks to those who took the time to test 1.9-beta1 and report issues. We hope that the intrepid among you will kick the tires on 1.9-beta2 as well. As always, we don’t recommend that you run beta software on a production site.
Get BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 2 via Subversion or as a zip.
