BuddyPress.org

Dear contributors, BP Plugin & BP Theme developers,

BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta1 is finally available for testing! 🏄‍♀️ 🏖

• Please note the plugin is still in development, so we recommend running this beta release on a testing site.
• Please note BuddyPress 12.0.0 will require at least WordPress 5.8.

You can test BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta1 in 4 ways :

• Try the BP Beta Tester plugin.
• Download the beta here (zip file).
• Check out our SVN repository: svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/trunk/
• Clone our read-only Git repository: git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/

The current target for final release is: October 30, 2023. Considering the major change we’re introducing with this release, we decided to plan for a 3 months beta testing period to:

• leave enough time for BuddyPress plugin & theme authors to adapt their code to our new BP Rewrites API.
• Update our existing add-ons to demonstrate the changes needed for optimum 12.0 compatibility (e.g., BP Attachments & BP Search Block)
• Explain how the new code affects ways to extend BuddyPress from now on, and document as much as we can the progressive BuddyPress reboot that we’re starting with 12.0.0.
• Identify potential issues or improvements for this release and the BP Classic add-on which neutralizes the BP Rewrites API and ensures 12.0.0 backwards compatibility with plugins & themes that are not ready yet for this API.

More than ever in BuddyPress history, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade. It’s the main reason we actually package beta/RC versions. 👉 Please, with the goal of making this a smooth transition for our end-users, give us a bit of your time to ensure your specific theme or plugin works with this pre-release. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac, post a reply to this support topic or get in touch with us on our WordPress.org Slack channel.

One massive change & around 60 other changes to expect in 12.0.0

You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. Below are the ones we believe will require your attention a lot and improve your BuddyPress experience in the most significant way.

✍️ The BP Rewrites API (the massive change!)

BP 12 is replacing the transmission in the car

@dcavins on April 17, 2023.

This is a 10-year-old issue we are solving in BuddyPress 12.0.0, initializing a reboot was the right opportunity to finally comply with the WordPress way of generating rules to analyze requested URLs and route the visitor to the right site content: the WP Rewrite API. If we’ve tried to minimize as much as we could the needed changes for BuddyPress plugins and themes, 2 constraints couldn’t be worked around:

• WordPress fully analyzes a URL later in the load process than our Legacy URL parser does its job
• Supporting plain permalinks & customizable slugs required us to completely rethink the way we build BuddyPress URLs

That being said, the impressive benefits will outweigh the small efforts we all need to accomplish in the coming 3 months:

• Site Administrators will now have a full control over all BuddyPress-generated URLs. They can choose slugs (or portions of URLs) that reflect their community, maybe using localized language or special terms that are more meaningful to their members. All also means, the URLs generated by 3rd party BuddyPress Add-ons using the BP Rewrites API.
• BuddyPress will be fully compatible with plain URL permalinks.
• Parsing BuddyPress URLs is faster, more reliable, extensible, testable and fully compliant with WordPress best practices.
• We now have a solid foundation to dream bigger!

🔐 A new community visibility level: members only

We’ve heard from BuddyPress end-users that being able to easily restrict access to their community is a necessary feature. And thanks to the BP Rewrites API, we are able to reach this standard. With this first iteration, a site admin can now choose whether the community is fully public or is only accessible by logged-in members. In future versions, we hope to add granularity to this choice, so that community administrators can choose to highlight their members but share activities only inside the community “gates” for example. 

🧙‍♂️ More than 80 deprecated functions & 2 removals

12.0.0 deprecates more functions than any of our previous releases (The 1.5 version, which was the previous “leader”, deprecated 40 functions). 26 of these deprecated functions was actually moved into the BP Classic plugin as they were specific to our legacy way of building, parsing and analyzing URLs.

The BP Default theme and our BP Legacy widgets have also moved to BP Classic, the future is blocks!

This is important: you really need to test BuddyPress 12.0.0 to get ready for it!

🤝 Props @dcavins for his review & great improvements about this announcement post.

🕹 Happy testing! Thanks for your help!

Thanks to BuddyPress: get together safely, in your own way, in WordPress.

Dear end-users, site owners,

The BP Classic BuddyPress Add-on has been built to provide backwards compatibility for sites that will not be ready yet for the important changes we will introduce in BuddyPress’s next major release, 12.0.0. As we will soon publish the first pre-release version (beta1) of BuddyPress 12.0.0, we thought it was a good idea to have this compatibility add-on available right away in the WordPress Plugin Directory.

Read more →

Last but not least! This is the final episode of our post series about the new direction we plan to take regarding the BuddyPress project. If you’re just discovering this series, we advise you to read about the 4 first episodes of it.

Read more →

This is the number 4 of our post series about the new direction we plan to take regarding plugin maintenance and evolutions. Our first post was about shared our new purpose, the second one explained how we think we can better organize the BuddyPress plugin, and the third one dealt with BuddyPress’ next features. It’s now time to analyze the feedback you shared with us here & there about BuddyPress’ user interfaces.

Read more →

Happy…

BuddyPress wishes a great birthday to WordPress, and wishes all local WordPress communities to have great celebrations about it.

🎂 Have fun! 🎉

Hello, here‘s the third post of our series about the new direction we plan to take regarding plugin maintenance and evolutions. In our first post we shared with you our new purpose « Get together safely, in your own way, in WordPress »; in our second post we talked about how we think we can better organize the BuddyPress plugin. Let’s see how the feedback you shared with us here & there contributed to the BuddyPress features roadmap we‘re thinking about tackling in 2023 & 2024.

Read more →

Immediately available is BuddyPress 11.2.0. This maintenance release fixes 6 bugs. For details on the changes, please read the 11.2.0 release notes.

Update to BuddyPress 11.2.0 today in your WordPress Dashboard, or by downloading from the WordPress.org plugin repository.

Many thanks to 11.2.0 contributors 

mystichrome, dave.pullig, r-a-y, armaanfromatg, boonebgorges & imath.

Hi, here‘s the second post of our series about the new direction we plan to take regarding plugin maintenance and evolutions. In our first post we shared with you our new purpose « Get together safely, in your own way, in WordPress », let’s see how the feedback you shared with us here & there helped shape the new way, I believe, we should use to reorganize and simplify BuddyPress.

Read more →

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.

Read more →

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).

Read more →