Published on September 14th, 2009 by Andy Peatling
BuddyPress 1.1 is now available for beta testing. This version is intended for testing only, you should not try running it on production sites. You can download the beta via this zip file, or via subversion.
If you download the zip version you will need to download bbPress 1.0 separately. Please extract bbPress into the folder “bp-forums/bbpress” inside of the BuddyPress plugin directory.
As always, please report bugs on our trac site with the milestone “1.1”. You can also view all outstanding bugs for this version. Patches for any of those bugs are very welcome. Please use your BuddyPress.org username and password to log into the trac site.
Update: Please make sure you read the installation instructions as there are changes from previous versions.
Last night on the WordPress Weekly podcast I was fortunate enough to be interviewed by Jeff Chandler and David Peralty on the topic of BuddyPress. They had a lot of very interesting questions for me to answer, along with a number of others submitted by the community.
Despite getting cut off by Skype right at the start and having to call back in, It turned into a great discussion about the project! I’ve embedded the player here in this post, but you can also subscribe to WordPress Weekly via iTunes or tune in live at 8pm eastern on Tuesdays.
Listen to the podcast here: https://recordings.talkshoe.com/TC-34224/TS-251095.mp3
For the next version of BuddyPress there has been a fair amount of re-factoring work done. We’ve listened to your feedback from version 1.0 and made a number of internal changes that are going to make your lives as plugin developers and theme designers easier.
One of the biggest changes in BuddyPress 1.1 will be the way themes are built.
In version 1.0 BuddyPress required two themes to function. The first theme was a “WordPress home” theme that handled the blog and front page of your site. It was essentially a standard WordPress theme. The second was a “BuddyPress member” theme that would handle the display of pages generated by BuddyPress. There were many reasons for handling themes this way, but as time passed it was evident theming in this fashion was hurting the majority to help the minority.
In BuddyPress 1.1 there will be one single theme to handle everything. BuddyPress will ship with a social network framework theme that acts as a parent theme. The default theme will be a child theme based on this framework and contains only images and css. Building a new BuddyPress theme will be as simple as creating a child theme based on this framework. If you’re not familiar with child themes a quick google search will bring up lots of useful information.
This approach brings big benefits. When building a new theme you don’t need to re-create every template file. You can override specific template files where needed. Most importantly though, your theme will update automatically with the latest functionality when the framework theme is updated.
If you’ve already created a BuddyPress theme using the old system don’t worry, these themes will continue to work for at least the next couple of versions. You should find it fairly simple to convert your themes to the new system. The old default themes only took a few hours to convert over.
Using the framework theme is of course, just an option. You can still go ahead and create your own frameworks or mashups with a completely unique style or structure. As with WordPress themes, the possibilities are infinite.
If you’d like to get started with the new framework, I’d recommend running the trunk version of BuddyPress. The best way is to fetch this via Subversion, or you can download a zip of the current snapshot using the link at the bottom of this Trac browser page.
BuddyPress 1.1 is on track for a September release.
Update:: There seems to be confusion about using existing WordPress themes. You can still use any existing WordPress theme and copy over the extra templates from the framework theme. This will allow you to continue to use your current theme and also keep the same look and feel for BuddyPress features. You may need to make some some CSS adjustments.
BuddyPress 1.0.3 is now available for download.
This version fixes compatibility issues with WordPress MU 2.8.1. Due to major changes in this version of WordPress the updates to BuddyPress are very specific, therefore WordPress MU 2.8.1 is required for BuddyPress 1.0.3 and higher. Please upgrade your version of WordPress MU before upgrading BuddyPress.
There are now complete upgrade instructions, so please follow these step-by-step when upgrading BuddyPress.
Once you have upgraded to the latest, you will need to re-add your BuddyPress widgets. The widgets have been completely rebuilt with the new widget API. This is a one time step only.
As always, please backup before upgrading anything.
I’ve recently noticed some posts on the BuddyPress forums where people are having problems getting WordPress MU and BuddyPress running locally on their machine.
I spent some time today to put together a twenty minute video that will show you how to set up and run WordPress MU and BuddyPress locally on a Mac. There is a tool you can use that will make this very easy called MAMP. For those of you running Windows, there is a similar tool called WAMP that will basically do the same thing.
I also make use of Textmate in this screen cast to edit the hosts file, if you don’t use it you can simply open the Finder, use the “Go” menu, and then the “Go to folder” option. Enter /etc/ as the folder and then scroll to the “hosts” file and use the editor of your choice. If you are familiar with the terminal you can also use your command line editor of choice.
I highly recommend you turn on the HD option for this video and make it full screen, that way you’ll easily be able to read and follow along.
This year at WordCamp San Francisco I gave a presentation on BuddyPress entitled “Cooking WIth BuddyPress”. The idea was to answer three questions:
- What is BuddyPress?
- Why should I use BuddyPress?
- How do I skin and extend BuddyPress?
The presentation was aimed at both non-technical and technical people and should provide you with a better understanding of what the project is, and it’s potential.
BuddyPress 1.0.2 is out now.
As with previous upgrades, the best way to get the latest is through the plugin browser in your WordPress installation (de-activate BuddyPress before auto-upgrading).
If you are using a language file with your installation you will need to re-download this after your upgrade. From version 1.1 onwards, we’ll bundle as many language files as possible to make the upgrade process smoother for non-english installations.
If you would like to upgrade manually you can download the latest then simply overwrite your existing plugin files (and themes if you are using the defaults). Please make sure you backup everything first.
This is not a critical upgrade, so it is not essential that you install this update. It does however fix a number of bugs that will improve your BuddyPress experience. For a full list of fixes, please see the updated release history.
Update: Please make sure you de-activate any 3rd party BuddyPress plugins before deactivating BuddyPress and running the auto-update.
The votes are in, tallied, and the BuddyPress roadmap is now complete, ready for all to see. Thank you to everyone who gave their input.
The roadmap should give everyone a good idea of what they should expect to see in the next four versions of BuddyPress. You will also see both the status updates and albums components show up within these versions.
I really want to encourage developers to get involved with the project. If you’re a developer and would like to see some of these features (in v1.2+) appear sooner, here’s your chance to help make a big difference.
Group creation is now open on this site, why not pick a feature you’d be interested in working on and create a group for it? By doing this you’ll encourage other BuddyPress developers to join in, discuss the feature and give feedback. I’ll be more than happy to take a look at plugins that add roadmap features and consider them for inclusion in the core of BuddyPress. You may even end up as a core committer.
If you’re interested in development, you should also be spending time in the #buddypress-dev IRC room on Freenode (don’t rely on the Java client though). We frequently have BuddyPress development and plugin discussions in there.
If you have any specific questions, please feel free to DM me or comment on this post, I’ll do my best to answer.
BuddyPress 1.0.1 is now available. The easiest way to upgrade is through the plugin browser on your WordPress MU installation, you should see a notification for the latest version. If you would like to upgrade manually you can download the latest then simply overwrite your existing files. Please make sure you backup first.
This point release fixes a number of security issues in the 1.0 version so it is a critical upgrade for everyone currently running BuddyPress. There is also a number of other bug fixes so please review the release history for more information.
