Published on October 21st, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Hello community!
We usually build pre-releases for next BuddyPress major versions, this one’s goal is to make sure we can safely publish our next maintenance release (11.4.0). Why?
To prepare the release of our next major version (12.0.0), we want to make sure as much as possible WordPress site Administrators acknowledge important informations about it, before upgrading. To do so we exceptionally decided to include a new feature into the 11.4.0 maintenance release, which should be the last 11.0 branch release.
Introducing a new Admin Notifications center.
BP Admin Notifications are important messages from the BP Core Team to all WordPress Site Administrators using the BuddyPress plugin.
If the BP Notifications component is active, BP Admin notifications are temporarily replacing regular notifications for all members having the Administrator role on the site. As soon as one of the site Administrators has clicked on all Admin Notification’s “dismiss” links or call to action buttons, they’ll find back their regular notifications.
BP Admin Notifications will be generated and viewable even if the BP Notifications component is not active.
What is the expected behavior of this feature we want you to test?
We need to make sure the 11.4 BP Admin Notification is generated when you perform an upgrade from a previous BuddyPress version or when you install BuddyPress for the first time using the 11.4.0 release. In other words, on a staging site or locally, we’d love you to:
- Download and activate the BuddyPress latest stable version (11.3.2), then once done, use the Upload Plugin button of your WP Administration’s “Add new” plugin screen to replace it with the 11.4.0-beta1 version.
- on a fresh WordPress installation, directly activate the 11.4.0-beta1 version.
If for 1 of these 2 scenarios, as an Administrator, you can’t see the exclamation mark inside the BP Notifications bubble of the WP Admin Bar or if when you click on it you are not reaching the BP Admin notifications center’s screen as shown in the screenshot above, please send us a bug report here.
We plan to release BuddyPress 11.4.0 on next Thursday (October 26), please help us respect this plan contributing to testing 11.4.0-beta1.
You can get BuddyPress 11.4.0-beta1 in 3 ways :
- Download the beta here (zip file).
- Check out our SVN repository:
svn co https://buddypress.svn.wordpress.org/branches/11.0
- Clone our read-only Git repository:
git clone git://buddypress.git.wordpress.org/ buddypressgit checkout 11.0
Thanks in advance for your help 🙏.
Published on October 17th, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
BuddyPress 11.3.2 is now available. This is a security release. All BuddyPress installations should be updated as soon as possible.
The 11.3.2 release addresses the following security issue:
- A Potential Cross Site Scripting using Members/Groups block props by a user having a contributor role vulnerability. Discovered by Rafie Muhammad (Patchstack).
This vulnerability was reported privately to the BuddyPress team, in accordance with WordPress’s security policies. Our thanks to the reporter for practicing coordinated disclosure.
For complete details, visit the 11.3.2 changelog.
You can get the latest version by clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
If for a specific reason you can’t upgrade to 11.3.2, we have also ported the security fix to BuddyPress versions going all the way back to 7.0. Here’s the list of the available downloads for the corresponding tags, you can also find these links on our WordPress.org Plugin Directory “Advanced” page:
- If you are using BP 7.x and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 7.3.4
- If you are using BP 8.x and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 8.0.4
- If you are using BP 9.x and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 9.2.2
- If you are using BP 10.x and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 10.6.2
Published on October 3rd, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Hello BuddyPress contributors!
If you haven’t tested our two first beta releases (👉 please read this post about beta1), please consider testing this third and last beta release. Beta testing is the best way to make sure the final release will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. 12.0 is introducing a very important change about how BuddyPress URLs are built, analyzed and routed and more than ever we need your help to reach this important milestone for the plugin.
What’s new since beta2?
We’ve fixed 4 bugs and improved the BuddyPress URLs settings screen help area.
12.0.0 is slated to October 30, thanks in advance to all the contributors who will give us a hand to get there 😍.
You can test BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta3 in 4 ways :
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.
Happy testing 👩🏻💻🧑🏾💻
Published on September 24th, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Immediately available is BP Attachments 1.2.0. This BuddyPress Add-on maintenance release main goal is to fix two annoying issues (one of them is a regression introduced in previous minor release). Please make sure to upgrade asap.
Read more →
Published on September 23rd, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Dear end users & site owners,
If you don’t know yet what’s the purpose of BP Classic, we advise you to read the Add-on’s first version announcement post. In short: BP Classic is a BuddyPress Add-on that is being developed and maintained by the official BuddyPress development team. It mainly provides backwards compatibility for BuddyPress 12.0.0 & up in case your active BuddyPress plugins or theme are not ready yet for the great BP Rewrites API introduced in BuddyPress 12.0.0. It basically brings back the BP Legacy URL parser.
Read more →
Published on September 7th, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Hello BuddyPress contributors!
If you haven’t tested our first 12.0.0 beta release (👈 please read this post), here’s another opportunity to help us make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. Beta testing is very important and more then any other BuddyPress major release, we need you all, whether you’re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!
What’s new since beta1?
We’ve been working on improving documentation about 12.0.0 changes and giving advanced users some more customization options about the coming visibility feature.
We’ve fixed 8 bugs, the most important one was about the BuddyPress menu items we are making available in the WP Nav Menu management interfaces (Administration screen and customizer). We took this opportunity to document how BuddyPress is dealing with these interfaces.
The final release is slated to October 30 and we need you to get there: do test this beta release of BuddyPress 🙏.
You can test BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta2 in 4 ways :
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.
Thanks in advance for your contributions 🤝
Published on September 2nd, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
Immediately available is BP Attachments 1.1.0. This BuddyPress Add-on maintenance release main goal is to make it ready for the next BuddyPress major release (12.0). If you haven’t read about the important change BuddyPress 12.0.0 will introduce, please read this post about its first beta version.
Read more →
Published on August 24th, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
BuddyPress 11.3.1 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release. All BuddyPress installations should be updated as soon as possible.
The 11.3.1 release addresses the following security issue:
- A blind SQL Injection from unauthenticated users vulnerability was fixed in
BP_XProfile_Query->find_compatible_table_alias(). Discovered by Michael Mazzolini.
This vulnerability was reported privately to the BuddyPress team, in accordance with WordPress’s security policies. Our thanks to the reporter for practicing coordinated disclosure.
BuddyPress 11.3.1 also fixes 3 bugs. For complete details, visit the 11.3.1 changelog.
You can get the latest version by clicking on the above button, downloading it from the WordPress.org plugin directory or checking it out from our Subversion repository.
If for a specific reason you can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, we have also ported the security fix to BuddyPress versions going all the way back to 5.0. Here’s the list of the available downloads for the corresponding tags, you can also find these links on our WordPress.org Plugin Directory “Advanced” page:
- If you are using BP 5.2.1 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 5.2.2
- If you are using BP 6.4.2 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 6.4.3
- If you are using BP 7.3.2 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 7.3.3
- If you are using BP 8.0.2 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 8.0.3
- If you are using BP 9.2.0 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 9.2.1
- If you are using BP 10.6.0 and can’t upgrade to 11.3.1, please upgrade to 10.6.1
Published on August 3rd, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
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 :
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.
Published on July 31st, 2023 by Mathieu Viet
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 →
