Published on June 13th, 2012 by John James Jacoby
Available immediately is BuddyPress 1.5.6. This maintenance release addresses WordPress 3.4 compatibility, and fixes five other annoyances. If you are using anything from the BuddyPress 1.5 family, this is a 100% safe update to make.
Download BuddyPress 1.5.6 from WordPress Extend or BuddyPress.org. The release notes are available on the Codex.
We’re also putting out a beta of BuddyPress 1.6 later this week. The new forums integration is a bit raw, so we’re pushing that out until 1.7 to get all the new BuddyPress hotness out sooner. Stay tuned!
This post was written by Adam Heward, a member of the BuddyPress community and ICT Manager at Newham Bridge Primary School.
Facebook is an endemic problem for UK schools. Issues from outside of the classroom are being brought into school as a result of Facebook interactions and schools are powerless to do anything about it. I found out on my first day in my new job as ICT manager in a primary school in Middlesbrough, UK when I was asked “What can we do about Facebook?”
Our school had experienced everything from name calling to death threats, doctored pictures to stolen identities; all of this from users who were still at least 4 years short of Facebook’s (all too easy to avoid) minimum age requirement of 13 years old. We needed to steer our students away from Facebook and toward something the school could police, and make sure we catch the others before opening Facebook accounts.
That’s where BuddyPress came in.
BuddyPress enabled us to start our own school-oriented social network, where children can communicate with their classmates in a safe and monitored environment. Every child was given a username and password as well as training on how to use the platform. We encourage responsible use of the Internet through teaching our children how to be good e-citizens. Our social network is treated like the children’s school books where the children should produce their best work at all times. This is imposed to produce an environment of high quality writing (typing) which in turn breeds good writing habits both online and in the rest of their school work.
Our social network is hosted on the Internet rather than any internal school server and so it is easily accessible to the children at home which has further encouraged participation. The children have really enjoyed engaging with their classmates, and even their teachers, on the school social network; sharing brief conversations about both in school and out of school matters. Teachers are able to set tasks for whole class groups or give encouragement to individual learners. It’s a valuable tool to enhance communication between teaching staff, reminding colleagues of events, sharing resources for lessons, and taking care of administrative and social notices.
The basic functionality of BuddyPress can be further extended through the use of the ever expanding Plugins library. We use BuddyPress Docs where children can collaborate on a shared piece of work and teachers can make comments and suggestions to help the children to enhance it. We also have the CubePoints for BuddyPress plugin to encourage participation on our social network. Children are awarded points for logging in daily and posting comments and a chart showing to top users is displayed in the sidebar. Points can also be deducted for any issues both online and offline.
In addition to the masses of free plugins that are available, we have a paid subscription to WPMUDEV’s BuddyPress Calendar Plugin to help us to plan events in the school calendar such as Sports Day and Summer Fairs, or for individual groups such as fixtures for the school football team.
BuddyPress is the perfect fit for our school. The flexibility and extensibility of the WordPress platform, the continually updated plug-in environment, well documented support, and the fact it’s all free, leads me to the conclusion that it can be just as successful in all other schools as it has been with ours. Thank you for the opportunity to share our story!
One Million (and four)
Today, BuddyPress saw its one millionth download!
Many thanks to the thousands (and thousands!) of contributors, developers, site admins, and users who have made BuddyPress thrive. The ongoing popularity of BuddyPress is a direct result of the vibrant and growing BuddyPress community – we couldn’t have done it without you.
Here’s to the next million!
BuddyPress is a collection of social networking components that are heavily dependent on the theme of your WordPress.org powered site. In order to view a member’s profile, a list of user groups, an activity stream, your friends, the active WordPress theme needs to have the proper templates to output those things. If the templates don’t exist, the page won’t display. Pretty simple, right?
Wrong.
There are two fundamental problems with this approach:
- Bolting BuddyPress into an existing theme is really difficult. It’s a rabbit hole of modifications just to get things usable, and another hole to make it actually look pretty and cohesive with the existing theme’s styling and layout.
- When the BuddyPress development team wants to update the Default Theme, we do so at the risk of breaking backwards compatibility with existing themes that expect for it to work a specific way.
- Third-party BuddyPress plugin authors feel this pain even more-so, as they’re dependent on parent themes, child themes, and their own functionality all aligning correctly.
The first problem is the most common, and also the most frustrating to most new users. “I already have the site I want, but I want this feature that BuddyPress can provide. How do I make them work together?” The answer to this question isn’t simple, and it’s a huge detriment to the new experience of setting up BuddyPress to have to lurk around the HTML and template files, and butcher your pretty theme to make things fit.
The second problem is more common to developers and designers, and also prevents the BuddyPress development team from exploring any amazing new ideas with the project at its core. When we want to build something new, or improve an existing feature that’s falling a bit behind the times, existing templates can’t evolve to match the functionality because it’s going to potentially break existing installations.
There’s a solution, and we think it’s pretty awesome.
In an undetermined future version of BuddyPress, we’re going to start bundling template parts along with features. These template parts are intended to be the canonical set of skeletal styling that BuddyPress provides out of the box. It has the benefit of being a turn-key installation for everyone, and allows us to push out updates more quickly and evolve the platform without worrying about how themes that are outside of our control might break. These templates will work with *any* existing standard WordPress theme without any modifications.
Sounds neat, eh?
Surprise! bbPress already works this way, and it’s not far off for BuddyPress to inherit this new functionality, too. The purpose of this particular post and announcement is really two-fold:
- We know that this is an issue for our users, and we don’t like being stuck in this rut either.
- We want to get the word out early about the change so anyone that needs to adapt has ample time to do so.
What does this really mean for me?
Very little, actually. 🙂 If you’re using a derivative or a child theme of “bp-default” it will continue to work as it always has. If you’d rather check out what the bundled and white labeled styling looks like, you’ll be able to switch back and forth between the two seamlessly. The Default BuddyPress theme has had a good run, and we’re going to continue to include it and support it for the foreseeable future. What we want to do is shift our dependency from a theme we’re afraid to change, towards a set of templates that we love to improve.
We’ve created a forum topic specifically for this discussion about how theme compatibility will work, and to answer any questions and talk more about its future.
Available immediately is BuddyPress 1.5.5. This maintenance release fixes 14 issues with BuddyPress, including a potential security vulnerability that affected earlier releases in the 1.5.x series. Thanks to Ivan Terkin for responsibly disclosing the bug to our security team.
Download BuddyPress 1.5.5 from WordPress Extend or BuddyPress.org.
Available immediately is BuddyPress 1.5.4. This is a bug fix release that will prevent your members from inviting friends to groups they are already members of (say that three times fast.) It is a recommended update for all existing BuddyPress 1.5 and WordPress 3.3 installations.
Download BuddyPress 1.5.4 from WordPress Extend or BuddyPress.org.
We all know how critically important the WordPress.org Codex is. Countless laborious hours have gone into making it the de-facto resource for all things WordPress.org related. It serves as an online encyclopedia of WordPress functions, actions, best practices, and examples on how extend WordPress far beyond its initial reach.
You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help.
Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.
The BuddyPress Codex is a WordPress installation where everyone is an editor. You are free to contribute your knowledge into it exactly the way a traditional Wiki works, all using WordPress pages and a few custom taxonomies specific to the BuddyPress project.
In addition, we’ve added a few small social integrations to show off who created and edited each page, and we’re keeping track of all those edits through the BuddyPress Activity component so you can show off your contributions back to the community.
We really think you’ll like the changes, and hope you’ll let us know your thoughts in the comments below!
Earlier today, we released BuddyPress 1.5.3, with a number of fixes related to WordPress 3.3+. Shortly after release, a number of users let us know that one of these fixes – related to users changing their passwords – had uncovered a more serious bug with the way settings are saved. BuddyPress 1.5.3.1, available immediately, fixes this bug.
One the one hand – boo to Boone for letting the bug through! On the other hand – many thanks to blindMoe, luccame, and johnjamesjacoby for their help isolating and fixing it in very short order.
BuddyPress 1.5.3 is now available. This is a compatibility release to fix a few issues with WordPress 3.3+, and is a recommended update for all existing BuddyPress 1.5+ and WordPress 3.3+ installations.
For information on what’s changed, please see the 1.5.3 release notes. Download BuddyPress 1.5.3 from WordPress Extend or BuddyPress.org.
Today we’re exited to unveil a refresh to the BuddyPress.org site. It’s something we’ve been tinkering with for a while, and we think you’ll like some of the improvements we’ve made:
- Activity updates are turned off
Over the course of using the previous design, there was always confusion whether to use the Support Forums or ping someone directly via their activity stream. The verdict is in, and the Support Forums won.
- Hidden Groups and Members Directories
Since BuddyPress.org is used primarily to support the platform itself, we really wanted to show off everything it can do here. That proved to be more than we needed, so we’ve scaled it back a bit and hidden the links to the directories. They still exist, there’s just not really any reason to visit them anymore.
- Restyled Profile Pages
We consolidated the user profile into the header area to better match the new WordPress.org profiles site. With the removal of the direct activity stream updates, we think this simplifies the whole profile browsing experience.
- Updated Plugins, Themes, and Showcase
This is huge, and these areas have needed some attention for a while.
- Group Gravatar Changes
In the past we’ve relied on Gravatar to serve up monsters for Plugin Groups. We’ve turned them off in most places honestly because it really didn’t make any sense; we’re using the primary plugin author’s Gravatar instead.
- Toolbar Integration
We’ve updated BuddyPress.org to the latest versions of WordPress and BuddyPress to take advantage of the cool new toolbar introduced in WordPress 3.3.
A big thank you to everyone that’s been using BuddyPress.org so far. You’ve really helped us shape BuddyPress.org into something we’re happy and proud to be using. If you experience any weird issues with these new changes, please leave us some feedback and we’ll be sure to get things fixed.
