BuddyPress.org

This year at WordCamp New York there will be a whole track dedicated to WordPress MU and BuddyPress. Some of the topics being presented are:

Getting off the Farm:
WPMU Beyond Blog Hosting. We all know that WPMU can be used to host multiple blogs for public or internal signups. But what else can you do? How far can you stretch it? I’ll be showcasing a number of sites that use WPMU in interesting ways. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Writing Plugins for WordPress/MU:
This session will be directed toward plugin developers. We will discuss platform differences & guidelines to keep in mind when writing a plugin for both WordPress & WordPress MU. Speaker: Ron Rennick.

User Authentication with MU in Existing Ecosystems.
Speaker: Casey Bisson.

How-to with MU: Using Multiple Domains, and Building a Member Directory.
A two-part session where we will dig in to two different concepts. First up, we’ll cover how to domain map member blogs, and the difference between multiple sites and multiple domains. The second half will cover how we built a business/member directory and what plugins we used to accomplish this so you can build one too. Speaker: Andrea Rennick.

Growing Community with BuddyPress:
Speaker: Lisa Sabin-Wilson.

Creating Killer Group Extensions in BuddyPress:
In this session learn how to build highly custom feature extensions to BuddyPress groups. Andy will be talking through how you can use the new group extension API to build Twitter stream integration right into your groups. Speaker: Andy Peatling.

Developing BuddyPress as a Collaboration Hub:
In this presentation, I’ll discuss some of the BuddyPress development I’ve done to bridge the WordPress/bbPress/MediaWiki platforms, taking BP beyond its roots as a social networking platform and turning it into a collaboration hub: a space where users can find, friend, and team up with each other (the social networking part BP that does well), work together to produce content (that’s the “collaboration” part), and feed the content back into BP (that’s the “hub” part). Speaker: Boone Gorges.

Other soon-to-be confirmed sessions: Setting up BuddyPress (workshop); BuddyPress theme framework.

For a full list of sessions please see the program page.

It should be a fantastic event with space for up to 1000 people. Tickets are selling out fast so if you’re thinking of attending, now is the time to hop in and buy a ticket. It looks like this is going to be the east coast WordCamp to attend. I’ll see you all there!

BuddyPress 1.1.2 is now available via an automatic upgrade or manual download.

This is an important security release and fixes two vulnerabilities found in version 1.1.1. To stay protected it is essential that you upgrade to this version of BuddyPress regardless of the version you are currently running.

For a full list of fixes and closed tickets please consult the release history.

The first BuddyPress 1.1 point release is now available for download.

This release fixes a few remaining issues with BuddyPress 1.0 theme backwards compatibility. Upgrade instructions are in the usual spot.

Please consult the release history for a complete list of changes.

The latest version of BuddyPress is now ready for download.

This release includes a substantial number of core code improvements as well as an array of useful new features.

Some highlights of this version are:

• One click internal bbPress forum integration allowing you to set up group forums in less than a minute.
• A global forum directory (example) allowing you to easily browse public facing forum posts regardless of the group they are attached to.
• Completely re-written theme handling. One theme now controls all of your installation. No hidden HTML, everything is in the template ready for you to skin.
• Easily create themes that are upgraded automatically when BuddyPress is updated.
• Total site admin control of all content within an installation. Edit user’s profiles, update avatars, mark users as spammers, manage all groups, delete site activity entries.
• Activity streams everywhere. Activity streams can be filtered allowing for feature specific activity streams or adding an activity stream to your custom plugin.
• A new status updates feature is included in BuddyPress 1.1. Actions and filters are included to allow plugin developers to hook into any external service.
• An awesome group extension API allowing developers to easily extend groups and add completely new features.

If you’re starting with a brand new installation, check out the new setting up a new installation help guide. If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, please make sure you read the upgrading from 1.0.x help guide before upgrading. There is a specific help guide on upgrading your 1.0.x custom theme to 1.1.

If you’re interested in building themes and plugins for BuddyPress 1.1, be sure to check out the new version of the BuddyPress Skeleton Component and the creating a BuddyPress child theme help guide.

I’d like to say a big thank you to everyone from the community who has helped in reporting problems, submitting bugs, writing patches and answering support queries. Without your help BuddyPress would not have the thriving community and development momentum it has today.

A special thanks to the following developers who submitted multiple bug reports and patches and also spent countless hours in IRC (#buddypress-dev) talking through issues:

JohnJamesJacoby, DJPaul, Junsuijin, JeffSayre, JasonG, Chouf1, GIGALinux, burtadsit, Ezd, Mariusooms, r-a-y, slaFFik, pertronic, j.conti

Happy BuddyPress-ing, and onwards to version 1.2!

BuddyPress 1.1 release candidate is available for final testing. As with the beta, this version is intended for testing, so please do not run it on production sites.

As with the beta, the release candidate is available for download via zip or via subversion.

If you download the zip version you will still need to download bbPress 1.0 separately. Please extract bbPress into the folder “bp-forums/bbpress” inside of the BuddyPress plugin directory. This will not be the case with the final 1.1 version.

There have been more than 70 bugs reported and fixed since the beta last week. Thank you to those who opened tickets and submitted patches.

Please report bugs on our trac site with the milestone “1.1”. There are currently no outstanding bugs at the time of writing. Put me to work! Please use your BuddyPress.org username and password to log into the trac site.

BuddyPress 1.1 final is on target for September 30.

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.