First, many thanks to all the respondents who participated to this survey 😍. Doing so you contributed to give the BuddyPress Core Team informations about how the plugin is used, could be used and how its usage is evolving. Some of the questions we asked are directions we’re considering for the plugin (eg: Q9, Q10, Q17), so your inputs are very important to us.
As no questions were required, it’s difficult to be 100% accurate about how many people took the survey. So we were at least (we also took the survey 😉) 483 from all over the world as it’s the highest number a question was replied to.
Most of the questions were leaving participants the choice to select more than one reply, this is why if you sum up the percentage results you’ll often find more than 100% 😁.
When we had data about a previous survey we made in 2018, we compared the 2020 results with them and calculated the differences between both years percentages. We thought it could be interesting to see how some results are evolving.
Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute. Here are some of the big changes and features to pay close attention to while testing (Check out this report on Trac for the full list).
New Administration screens to manage BuddyPress types
In BuddyPress 7.0.0 site administrators will be able to add, edit or delete Member & Group types using their WordPress Administration Screens just like they would do for Post tags.
WP-CLI is the command-line interface for WordPress. You can update plugins, configure multisite installs, and much more, without using a web browser. In 7.0.0, you will be able to Enjoy new BuddyPress CLI commands to manage BuddyPress Group Meta, BuddyPress Activity Meta, activate or deactivate the BuddyPress signup feature and create BuddyPress specific testing code for plugins.
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
We are very excited to announce the immediate availability of BuddyPress 6.0.0 code-named “iovine’s“. You can get it clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
If you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, it’s always a good idea to back-up your WordPress database and files ahead of time.
You can review all of the changes in this 6.0.0 release in the release notes. Below are a few of the key features we know you are going to love!
BP Blocks
BuddyPress 6.0.0 comes with two awesome new blocks for your WordPress Editor: Members and Groups. Made available from the BuddyPress blocks category of your WordPress Block menu, these lovely blocks let you insert a rich content block featuring a specific Member or Group from your community site inside any WordPress Post or Page.
If you’re an Advanced BuddyPresser and wish to fine-tune the BuddyPress blocks for your community site, learn more in this section of our development note about these new blocks.
The BP REST API is now complete!
In 5.0.0, we introduced the first REST API endpoints and provided reference documentation for them. In 6.0.0, we are adding the 6 remaining endpoints you were waiting for: Blogs, Blog avatar, Friends, Group Cover Image, Member Cover Image, and User Signups. You can now build full-featured applications using the BuddyPress REST API!
BP Nouveau has been improved
Does your theme support wide layouts? Awesome! The BP Nouveau template-pack now supports wide (and really, really wide) content areas! This is the first of the many improvements we are bringing to our default set of styling components. It never looked so beautiful in your theme.
Under the hood
6.0.0 includes more than 80 changes to improve your BuddyPress experience as users, as contributors to our code and as contributors to our translations. The biggest change moves local avatar management to the Members component. Read more about it in this development note.
Knowing how you use BuddyPress and getting your point of view about future BuddyPress development is very important to us. Please, take some time to help us decide what’s best for the BuddyPress project.
If you come to Paris (France), you’ll probably want to visit the Louvre Museum. The greatest Pizza restaurant around is Nicola Iovine’s place. You’ll fall in love with how he cares to respect culinary traditions, share authentic flavors, select great quality products imported from Italy and use the real neapolitan pizza dough.
Receiving your feedback and suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share your feedback about this version of BuddyPress in the comments area of this post. And of course, if you’ve found a bug: please tell us about it into our Support forums.
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 6.0.0 Beta1 release.
Polyglots contributors, there’s some extra work.
This release candidate should introduce around 50 new strings to translate (the ones that were not included previously due to the issue), so thanks in advance for your comprehension and for your help .
This is an important milestone as we progress toward the BuddyPress 6.0.0 final release date. “Release Candidate” means that we think the new version is ready for release, but with more than 200,000 active installs, hundreds of BuddyPress plugins and Thousands of WordPress themes, it’s possible something was missed.
BuddPress 6.0.0 is slated for release on Thursday, May 14, but we need your help to get there—if you haven’t tried 6.0.0 yet, now is the time!
A detailed changelog will be part of our official release note, but you can get a quick overview by reading the post about the 6.0.0 Beta1 release.
Plugin and Theme Developers
Please test your plugins and themes against BuddyPress 6.0.0. 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 6.0.0 development notes to figure out what to focus on during your testing.
Polyglots, we need you!
Do you speak a language other than English? Help us translate BuddyPress into many languages! This release also marks the string freeze point of the 6.0.0 release schedule. For your information, we are now using WP CLI to generate the buddypress.pot file and you’ll see we’ve paid attention to add translators comments to all the strings needing some.
We’ve introduced a repair tool in case something went wrong during the 5.0.0 BP Groups invitations upgrade. Read more about it here.
We’ve gathered all BP Blocks settings into one panel to save you some clicks :). See this ticket for an updated screenshot of the BP Blocks settings sidebars.
We’ve fixed a formatting issue about the total number of members displayed into the Members directory when the BP Nouveau Template pack (the default one) is active. Here’s a link to the commit.
We’ve updated our use of a specific privacy function that has been deprecated in WordPress 5.4.0. Read more about it here.
We’d love you to give us a hand to get there. Testing this new beta release is the very first way you can get involved into BuddyPress. You can test the 6.0.0-beta2 pre-release in 4 ways :
6.0.0 is almost ready, but please do not run this Beta 2 pre-release in a production environment just yet. Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.
We’ve scheduled the 6.0.0 stable release to the end of April, and we’d love you to give us a hand to get there!
Testing for bugs is an important part of polishing the release during the beta stage and a great way to contribute. Here are some of the big changes and features to pay close attention to while testing (Check out this report on Trac for the full list).
User Profile Photo & User Cover Image are now belonging to the BP Members component.
Since the very first version of BuddyPress, the local avatar management feature (renamed as Profile Photo in version 2.1) was depending on the BP Extended Profile component. When we introduced the Cover Image feature in version 2.4, we’ve also made it dependent of the BP Extended Profile component. In 6.0.0, both features has been moved to the BP Members component. It means they will always be available even if the BP Extended Profile component is not active on your setup. We recommend you to read this development note to learn what this move changes for end users and for BuddyPress plugin/theme developers.
The BP REST API is now completed!
In 5.0.0, we’ve introduced the first endpoints and a reference documentation about them. In 6.0.0, we are adding the remaining ones so that you can build great BuddyPress full featured apps!
PS: we will update the reference documentation with these new endpoints during this beta stage.
The first BuddyPress Blocks are arriving 🙂
In 6.0.0, you will be able to feature a specific member or a specific group of your community site into your posts or pages: discover more information about the BP Member Block and the BP Group Block reading this development note.
New PHP and WordPress required versions.
BuddyPress 6.0.0 is requiring PHP >= 5.6 and WordPress >= 4.8
If you think you’ve found a bug, you can post in the support forums. We’d love to hear from you! If you’re comfortable writing a reproducible bug report, file one on BuddyPress Trac.
Yesterday morning we’ve deployed the first stable version of the BP Beta Tester plugin on the WordPress.org plugins directory.
This plugin’s goal is to make it easier to beta test our pre-releases. You just need to install and activate the plugin to be ready to try our beta and release candidate versions once we’ve announced them on this blog. Beta testing BuddyPress is very important to make sure it behaves the right way for you and for the community. Although we, the BuddyPress Development Team, are regularly testing it, it’s very challenging to test every possible configuration of WordPress and BuddyPress. That’s why we absolutely need your help during these pre-release stages.
Making this plugin available was one of the means we thought about during our post 5.0.0 release development meeting to have more BuddyPress contributors. Beta testing is actually a good way to start contributing, to anticipate and fix potential issues before you have the bad surprise to meet them once you’re upgrading to a new stable version of the plugin.
NB: to beta test BuddyPress, we strongly advise you to have a local copy of your live site or a staging site : it’s always safer than doing it on a production site.
During our next pre-release stages, when you will find something is going wrong during your beta tests, please think of warning us about it submitting a ticket on our Development Tracker or posting a new topic in our support forums.
First, we’d like to thank all the people who contributed to the poll we shared on our development updates blog and into a topic of one of our forums a month ago. It was really important for us to have your expectations about the content the plugin should provide to the WordPress Block Editor.
It’s now time for us to share with you the results of this poll and tell you how we plan to work on BuddyPress blocks for the next release(s) of your favorite community engine!
We are very excited to announce the BuddyPress community the immediate availability of BuddyPress 5.0.0 code-named “Le Gusto“. You can get it clicking on the above button, downloading it from our WordPress.org plugin repository or checking it out from our subversion repository.
NB: if you’re upgrading from a previous version of BuddyPress, please make sure to back-up your WordPress database and files before proceeding.
You can view all the changes we made in 5.0.0 thanks to our full release note. Below are the key features we want to get your attention on.
The BP REST API opens a new era for BuddyPress!
You can now enjoy REST API endpoints for members, groups, activities, private messages, screen notifications and extended profiles.
BuddyPress endpoints provide machine-readable external access to your WordPress site with a clear, standards-driven interface, paving the way for new and innovative methods of interacting with your community through plugins, themes, apps, and beyond.
The BP REST API opens great new opportunities to improve the way you play with the BuddyPress component features: we couldn’t resist to start building on top of it introducing…
A new interface for managing group members.
Group administrators will love our new interface for managing group membership. Whether you’re working as a group admin on the front-end Manage tab, or as the site admin on the Dashboard, the new REST API-based tools are faster, easier to use, and more consistent.
The BP REST API is fully documented
The development team worked hard on the features but also took the time to write the documentation about how to use it and how to extend it. BuddyPress developers, let’s start building great stuff for our end users: take a look at the BP REST API developer reference.
Improved Group invites and membership requests
Thanks to the new BP Invitations API, Group invites and membership requests are now managed in a more consistent way. The BP Invitations API abstracts how these two actions are handled and allows developers to use them for any object on your site (e.g., Sites of a WordPress network).
Knowing your WordPress and BuddyPress configuration is very important when one of our beloved support volunteers tries to help you fix an issue. That’s why we added a BuddyPress section to the Site Health Info Administration screen.
The panel is displayed at the bottom of the screen. It includes the BuddyPress version, active components, active template pack, and a list of other component-specific settings information.
Improved integrations with WordPress
BP Nouveau Template Pack
In BuddyPress 5.0.0, the BP Nouveau template pack looks better than ever with the Twenty Nineteen theme.
Nouveau now uses the same password control as the one used in WordPress Core, for better consistency between BuddyPress and WordPress spaces.
BuddyPress Blocks now have their own category into the Block Editor.
Developers building tools for the Block Editor can now add their blocks to the BuddyPress category. This change provides a foundation for organizing custom BuddyPress blocks.
PS: we know, just like Matt, you’re eager to enjoy high quality community blocks: now we have the BP REST API and this new Blocks category available in BuddyPress Core, get ready to be amazed for our next release. Fasten your seatbelts: BuddyPress blocks are arriving!
BuddyPress Le Gusto
5.0.0 is code-named “Le Gusto” after the well known Pizza restaurant in Fortaleza, Brazil. It’s the perfect place to meet with friends and start tasting new flavors like @espellcaste’s favorite one: the “Pizza de Camarão”.
Receiving your feedback and suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share your feedback about this version of BuddyPress in the comments area of this post. And of course, if you’ve found a bug: please tell us about it into our Support forums.