1.0b2 versions of all components and themes are now available for download.
This release fixes hundreds of bugs found since beta 1, the vast majority found and reported by you, the community. Thank you for all the feedback, bug reports and patches so far.
We’re not quite done yet, please test this second beta as much as possible. Bugs should be reported on the BuddyPress Trac server, but you can also discuss potential issues with other users on the BuddyPress forums.
We’re three days later than expected with this beta. WordPress MU 2.7 was released yesterday, it made much more sense to sync up the release schedules to ensure there were no compatibility problems. The 1.0 release will now be February 12th, exactly two weeks from today.
To avoid any unforeseen incompatibilities as WordPress MU ramps up to version 2.7, the second beta of the BuddyPress components will be delayed until WPMU 2.7 goes final.
The final 1.0 release of the BuddyPress components will also be offset by this amount of time.
I hope everyone had a fantastic Christmas and New Year break.
Looking at the community involvement with beta one, many of you must have decided to skip the turkey and give BuddyPress a whirl! We’ve seen more than 8,000 zip downloads, a fantastic number for such a new project. This has translated into some excellent feedback and quality bug reporting. Thank you to everyone who has given their time to provide bug reports and feedback so far.
Now that there has been time to assess the quantity and severity of bugs coming in, it’s possible to set some dates.
There will be a second beta release available on January 26th, and the final 1.0 version of all component plugins and themes on February 9th.
As always, you can track all known bugs via the BuddyPress trac site. If you’re interested in helping out with bug fixing, there is a useful thread you can read on the BuddyPress forums.
If you’d like to keep up with the latest fixes as they are made, please use the trunk version of BuddyPress via Subversion.
The first beta release of completed BuddyPress components and themes is now available via the download page.
Each component and theme in this beta stage is feature complete for its 1.0 version. The purpose of the beta is to weed out any bugs not found in the pre-release stage and ramp up the plugins to production quality.
If you install BuddyPress and give it a test run, we’d really appreciate your feedback and bug reports in trac. You can also find a list of known bugs.
Thank you to everyone who has helped make this first beta a reality. It’s been ten months of hard work to get to this stage. We’re almost there, there’s only a little bit further to go.
Some updates on the release status of BuddyPress:
– The target is to release beta versions of all the available plugins on Dec 15.
– From then, there will be a feature freeze and there will be a period of bug fixing to stabilize the plugins ready for a 1.0 release.
– Each component will be released as an individual 1.0. There will be no ”BuddyPress 1.0”. BuddyPress is a collection of official component plugins, each adding a new feature with its own roadmap. However, there will always be a zip file available with the current versions of official component plugins to download in one package.
– As soon as all major issues have been resolved, 1.0 versions of each official component plugin will be released. As it’s around Christmas time (most people will be too busy eating turkey to test) I’m not attaching a final date. Each component will be released ASAP after its beta one by one, when ready. By doing this you won’t have to wait for all components to reach release quality before any are made available.
– The photo gallery and status update components will not be available along with the first release of available official components. These will be a priority after the first release and can be added to any installation at a later date. There just wasn’t enough time to fit these in.
So what’s left to do before Dec 15?
– Filtering of friends and groups lists to show ”Recently Active Friends”, ”Recently Added Friends” etc. In groups ”Groups I’ve Created”, ”Groups Recently Updated”, ”Groups Recently Joined”, etc.
– Finish the members directory as well as adding blog and group directories, accessible via ”domain.com/groups/”, ”domain.com/members/”. ”domain.com/blogs/”.
– bbPress forums for groups.
– Private messaging autocomplete on friend names.
– RSS Feeds for activity streams.
Not long to go now, thank you all for helping to test and your contributions. I’m really excited to see what people will do with release quality components. Rock on!
