Hello! This post is the first in a series of five posts in which we’ll outline the new direction we plan to take regarding plugin maintenance and evolutions. After some introductory words, we‘ll focus on the new BuddyPress purpose that I believe we should adopt for years to come.
We haven‘t forgotten that, at the end of 2021, we had some conversations (here & here) about this « difficult to answer with a few words » question. These happened once the plugin’s active installs statistics went a bit under 200.000. Our WordPress plugin directory page’s “active installations” value suddenly changed from “200,000+” to “100,000+”—though the actual number only changed from just over 200.000 to about 190.000 active installation–making this decline seem pretty spectacular 📉. It was nevertheless a great opportunity to think together about how the plugin should evolve now that 15 years have passed since its birth.
The BuddyPress Core Team is very happy to be represented at the Contributor Day the french WordPress community is organizing in Paris on April 20, 2023. Here’s a link to a translated page of the event schedule (Hours are in Central European Summer time).
Today is a very special day for the BuddyPress open source project: 15 years ago, Andy pushed the first code commit on BP Trac. To remember the “whys” & the important “whos” of our early days, I advise you to read (again) the great postJohn wrote when we reached 10.
“Release Candidate” means that we think the new version is ready for release, but with a bit less than 200,000 active installs, hundreds of BuddyPress plugins and Thousands of WordPress themes, it’s possible something was missed. BuddyPress 11.0.0 is slated for release on January 5, 2023, but your help is needed to get there — if you haven’t tried 11.0.0 yet, doing it now is a great idea!
You can test the 11.0.0-RC pre-release in 4 ways :
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 11.0.0 Beta1 release.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against BuddyPress 11.0.0. If you find compatibility problems, please be sure to post to this specific support topic so we can figure those out before the final release. We strongly advise you to have a look at the 11.0.0 developer notes to figure out what to focus on during your testing.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can share it with us replying to this support topic or if you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
If you haven’t tested our two first 11.0.0 beta releases, here’s a last opportunity to help us give the final touches to our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. Beta testing is very important and we need you all, whether you’re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!
We’ve lately decided to postpone the final release date to January 5, 2023 👈. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.
Since beta2, we’ve fixed 7 tickets and documented two changes BP developers should love:
beta3 particularly targets installs where the BP Default theme is active. If you are using this theme, we’d be very happy if you could make sure everything is fine for you. If you are not using this theme and wish to give us a hand, add the following line to your bp-custom.php file so that you bring it back into your available themes and activate it:
If you haven’t tested our first 11.0.0 beta release, here’s another opportunity to help us give the final touches to our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. Beta testing is very important and we need you all, whether you’re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!
The current target for final release is December 14, 2022 👈. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.
Since beta1, we’ve fixed 12 new tickets and documented some important changes BP Themes or Plugins authors should definitely read:
The current target for final release is December 14, 2022. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.
As usual, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade 👉 so please give us a few minutes of your time to make sure this pre-release behaves the right way with your specific WordPress configuration, your theme, and the other WordPress plugins you are using. Try to use a testing site which is very close to the one you are using in production. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.
If you’re a BuddyPress plugin developer or a BuddyPress theme developer, please make sure to test this 11.0.0-beta1 release as we’re now only loading BuddyPress assets (JavaScripts and styles) inside BuddyPress pages.
Around 40 changes to expect in 11.0.0
You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. We only planned to ship one long awaited feature as a BuddyPress Add-on. At this stage, we’re staying silent about it to keep the surprise effect intact (truth is we are still not sure it’ll be ready for December 14 🤫).
BuddyPress 10.6.0 is a new maintenance release fixing 1 ugly bug with themes using block templates although there are not Block Based themes. For details on the change, please read the 10.6.0 release notes.
