Published on February 23rd, 2011 by John James Jacoby
Our next item up for bid is BuddyPress 1.2.8, which includes a few small bug fixes to the 1.2 branch of code and is a highly recommended update if you are updating to WordPress 3.1.
This release backports a few important fixes from the currently in-development 1.3 version of BuddyPress to play nicely with the new and very much improved WordPress network administration interface. We’ve also updated the bundled version of bbPress from 1.0.2 to 1.0.3, which addresses a few issues that do not effect BuddyPress directly.
Every effort has been put into supporting both WordPress 3.0 and 3.1 with this release to make updating your sites as painless as possible, so this should be another worry-free update!
BuddyPress 1.2.7 has just been tagged, and is ready for download! This maintenance release fixes several problems, and is an important upgrade for all BuddyPress installations. Check out the details of the 1.2.7 release at the official changelog.
Before upgrading your BuddyPress installation, make sure to back up your data and files, and deactivate BuddyPress-dependent plugins. (Or, as I like to call it, BUD. Somehow I have a feeling that won’t catch on….)
The community of BuddyPress contributors continues to grow! Huge thanks and überprops go out to those who have contributed to this release cycle: andrewteg, bizybee, calvin_42, cnorris23, intimez, jond, ptahdunbar, r-a-y, swinton. If I missed your name, let me know in the comments below.
Enjoy BuddyPress 1.2.7!
Ready immediately is BuddyPress 1.2.6 which includes a number of important bug fixes to the 1.2 branch of code and is another highly recommended upgrade. As always, be sure to back-up your installations before upgrading, and deactivate any dependent plugins that you might have to ensure there are no conflicts or errors during the process.
This version improves WordPress 3.0 compatibility, makes some minor tweaks to the included theme, and fixes a total of 91 reported issues! Check out the BuddyPress release history for details on the important fixes in this release.
BuddyProps
With almost 100 bugs fixed and issues addressed in 1.2.6, you can bet we have some people to thank. Firstly, congrats and thanks again to Boone and Paul for all of their help and contributions. They are both huge assets to the BuddyPress project and Andy and I are really happy to have their continued support. Props go out to benfremer, cnorris23, dwenaus, erich73, francescolaffi, hempsworth, intimez, jeffsayre, kunalb, paulhastings0, r-a-y, wpmuguru, and everyone else that contributed. (If I missed you, slap me with a trout and leave a comment below.)
Paul, Boone, and I spent almost 3 full days together at WordCamp New York talking about what we’d like to focus on and what direction we’d like to see things go. This version of BuddyPress has been one of our longest development cycles to date since we’ve gone 1.0. By bringing on Paul and Boone we’re going to ramp up production and set our sights on the next major version somewhere around the end of 2010.
Have fun and thanks for using BuddyPress!
Today at WordCamp New York (about 30 minutes ago in fact) I had the privilege of introducing Boone B. Gorges and Paul Gibbs as new core committers to the BuddyPress project.
In recent months both Boone and Paul have been heavily involved in team meetings, forum moderation, and producing outstanding core code patches. If you spend any amount of time in our forums or in our development Trac, then you have definitely spent some time with them and know that this isn’t really a huge surprise. 🙂
You know what this means, right? Look forward to some more awesome stuff coming in the next few weeks from the BuddyPress team, the project as a whole, and stay tuned to this blog for more news coming soon!
Congrats gents!
The Open Source Awards is an annual online event held by Packt Publishing to distinguish excellence among Open Source projects.
Now in its fifth year, the Award (formerly known as the Open Source Content Management System (CMS) Award) is designed to encourage, support, recognize and reward not only CMSes but a wider range of Open Source projects.
This year BuddyPress has the honor of being a finalist in the “Most Promising Open Source Project” category, which is for all Open Source projects that made their debut within the past 2 years. We’re up against some stiff competition with LiveStreet CMS, Pimcore, Tomato CMS, and WolfCMS, so we’re asking for your support!
I’d be lying if I said I didn’t want or care about the $2,500 prize for winning our category. Andy would really like a sweet 3D-TV, and I could use a posh new living room set myself, but we decided donating the proceeds to the WordPress Foundation was probably the best way to use any cash winnings. 🙂
To help make voting worth your while, PacktPub is giving away free Amazon Kindles to random voters and nominees. If showing your BuddyPress pride isn’t enough, do it for the opportunity to score a free Kindle!
So click the banner below and be whisked away to Packt Pubs voting page, where you can [help Andy enjoy Jurassic Park like it was meant to be enjoyed] [help John take epic naps on a new comfy couch] help support BuddyPress and maybe win yourself a Kindle!
If you haven’t heard the word, there is a fury of activity going on at this very moment in the WordPress community. For the first time in over 8 years, the core development team is not working on the next version of WordPress, but rather on an initiative that’s been dubbed “3.org.”
3.org is a very appropriately named project that is focused on building and polishing the surrounding elements of WordPress rather than on WordPress itself. Part of this initiative is the conversion of bbPress from a standalone platform into a neat little WordPress plugin. I’ve volunteered to lead that initiative, and wanted to take a moment to explain what that means for BuddyPress, bbPress, and what you can expect for the next few months.
Since BuddyPress 1.1, bbPress has come bundled in the package to help make the installation as smooth and easy as possible. Through a little bit of massaging we successfully integrated bbPress into a dedicated forum component to allow for group discussion, and we included a central discussion directory to help put all of these topics in one easy place. All of these ideas were great on paper but have had mixed feedback and results in practice. Making bbPress a standalone plugin will help allow for more customizable installations which is great news for anyone that’s currently using BuddyPress for the forum component, or has been holding off because of the complexity of it all.
Our goal with me giving some attention to the bbPress plugin project is to keep it tightly integrated with BuddyPress, but have them act totally independently or alone if necessary. This means in a future version of BuddyPress, bbPress will no longer come packaged in the download, and both plugins will be aware of each other being activated. When that happens, additional features will be available to you to help create the kind of community that you’d like to have, instead of forcing forums to be tucked away into BuddyPress discussion groups.
The end result will be two plugins working harmoniously together, to easily enable setups where bbPress forums can be created for any other kind of object, component, or plugin. This is particularly awesome for BuddyPress developers because it will allow them to internally extend bbPress to fit the specific needs of their own custom BuddyPress components as they see fit.
With all this going on, the loose expectation is for BuddyPress 1.2.6 to roll out asap with a few bug fixes and maybe even a small new enhancement or two, with 1.3 to follow by the end of the year. bbPress 1.2 (the plugin) should be stable enough to start testing as soon as September 15 (give or take a few days and/or missing features) with a full release due around the same time as BuddyPress 1.3.
We’re proud to announce that Boone Gorges and hnla have joined the BuddyPress Support team. Their knowledge of BuddyPress, site deployment, theme design and plugin development complements the existing team and will expand the range of topics we are able to help you with.
Our support team, which also consists of Jeff Sayre, Paul Gibbs and Ray, frequently traffic the forums, help resolve problems, and share their advice and best practices. We’re all you’ve got, and we’re not so bad after we’ve had our coffee.
As a general reminder, if you have a support question please try to provide the information detailed in this post; it really does help us help you.
Over the past few weeks we’ve released 3 bug fix versions of BuddyPress; more than we’ve released for the entire beginning of the year. What I noticed is that when development was slow, so were our support forums and so was the general buzz about the project. Since we’ve started patching bugs and cranking out bug fix releases again, things are picking back up which totally rocks.
I think this is a great example of how activity breeds activity, and it reminded me that social networks and niche communities are as susceptible to becoming stagnant as normal WordPress blogs can be. Most of us have probably had a great idea for a website, spent the $10 on the domain name, installed WordPress, made a fancy theme, posted 3 updates and then for whatever reason, just lost interest in it.
The same thing is totally possible with your social network, and when development slowed down here on the BuddyPress project in the past few months, the community felt that impact and over time there was some concern about what the future of BuddyPress was going to be.
Let me tell you that “the state of the word is strong.” – MM
We’ve recently added some really fancy functionality to BuddyPress.org that integrates any plugin in the WordPress repository that is tagged ‘buddypress’ and gives it a public discussion group. It passes over a plugins’ information like ratings and statistics, gives it its own dedicated support forum where you can assign administrators and moderators, and comes with a built in donate link so people can drop a few bucks in your pocket to show their appreciation. If you’re a plugin author, be sure to check it out!
In the coming months we have a lot of exciting things planned that will revitalize the BuddyPress.org website and help solidify BuddyPress as the ultimate social networking solution for your WordPress powered site. We’re looking at adding more core contributors, more forum moderators, redesigning the site with a completely custom template, improving the codex, and diving head first into some new features for 1.3.
For everyone that was worried about BuddyPress, you can breathe a sigh of relief. For everyone else, thanks for hanging out and staying interested while things were slow. We’re full steam ahead and you can count on seeing much more activity in our community in the coming weeks!
A quick update from our release on June 29, BuddyPress 1.2.5.2 fixes a bug where marking a user as spam or attempting to delete them would result in the sky falling on your head. It also fixes a few other odds and ends from 1.2.5 which you can read at our release history.
We’ve also bumped the WordPress version requirement up to 3.0. BuddyPress 1.2.5.2 has been tested to work with WordPress 2.9.2, but our mantra has always been to support the current version of WordPress and maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible.
For the best possible BuddyPress experience (and for the security of your social network and your users) be sure to upgrade to WordPress 3.0.
Happy social networking!
Ready immediately is BuddyPress 1.2.5, which includes a number of important bug fixes to the 1.2 branch of code, and is another highly recommended upgrade. As always, be sure to back-up your installations before upgrading, and deactivate any dependent plugins that you might have to ensure there are no conflicts or errors during the process.
This version addresses a few WordPress 3.0 compatibility issues introduced in 1.2.4, and fixes a total of 49 reported issues.Check out the BuddyPress release history for details on the important fixes in this release.
We are Family
This time around we had a lot of community participation, which rocks because we’re starting to find lots of little obscure bugs that would have been overlooked otherwise. Props go out to abackstrom, boonebgorges, cnorris23, dwenaus, erich73, francescolaffi, hempsworth, jeffsayre, paulgibbs, paulhastings0, nuprn1, r-a-y, rvenable, wpmuguru, and everyone else that contributed. (If I missed you, leave a comment below and I’ll add you.)
Communication
Near the end of this versions’ development cycle, participation really ramped up mostly in part to better communication in the support forums from our core developers and moderation team. 1.2.5 would not have been possible without the passion and enthusiasm of our users, and we really appreciate your involvement in the project.
Plugin Authors
If you are a plugin author, you’re going to want to read this post about the new actions you should be using to load your code exactly where it belongs. BuddyPress 1.2.5 takes a big step forward towards being much more ‘dependent plugin’ friendly, but possibly at the risk of breaking existing plugins depending on how they’ve been developed.
Now go update!
