BuddyPress.org

BuddyPress 2.0.1 is now available. Download from the wordpress.org plugin repository, as a zip file, or through WordPress via Dashboard > Plugins.

This maintenance release includes a number of important fixes, including:

• Improvements to some 1.9.x-2.0.x upgrade routines, including the creation of the wp_signups table and the migration of last_activity data
• Fixes for a handful of regressions related to group querying and creation
• Backward compatibility improvements for plugins that extend the xprofile component

For a complete list of changes made for this release, visit the 2.0.1 changelog.

Questions or comments? Visit out support forums or Trac.

The BuddyPress team is thrilled to announce that BuddyPress 2.0 “Juliana” is now available!

This release focuses on administrative tools, performance, and improvements to the activity stream. Let’s take a look at some of the highlights.

New Administrative Tools

If you manage a BuddyPress-powered community, BuddyPress 2.0 is for you. We have built a number of new tools that simplify and centralize common administrative tasks:

• Profile editing – Need to manage a user’s profile information? We’ve integrated a new “Extended Profile” tab into the Dashboard > Users interface, where you can manage profile data, avatars, user status, and more.
  
• Spam User Management – WordPress Multisite has long had the ability to manage spam users from the Dashboard. We’ve brought the same capabilities to non-Multisite installations.
  
• Pending Users – The Pending users tab in Dashboard > Users lets you see a list of signups that have not yet been activated. You can also perform useful tasks like manual account activation and resending activation emails.
  
• Repair Tools – Occasionally, BP friend counts and other data can get out of sync. The new Tools screen lets admins manually reset these values.
  

Performance Improvements

The most successful BuddyPress sites are highly dynamic, with a steady stream of new visitors and new content. This dynamic nature means that BuddyPress is a highly database-driven platform, and database performance is often a bottleneck when it comes to scaling BP sites. BuddyPress 2.0 tackles this problem head-on. We’ve streamlined some of the most common problematic queries – such as those in the Members and Activity directories – to shave up to 95% of the query time off of certain individual queries. The sheer number of queries has been dramatically reduced as well, so that single page views access the database up to 50% less than in BP 1.9. And we’ve totally overhauled the way that BuddyPress utilizes advanced caching systems like APC and Memcached, so that users of these systems will see up to 75% fewer cache misses on costly queries.

If you’re a BuddyPress developer or site administrator, you can get more in-depth explanation of changes and an overview of selected benchmarks in this post on bpdevel.wordpress.com. If you are a BuddyPress user, you can just sit back and enjoy the speedier pageloads and reduced server overhead of your BuddyPress 2.0 site!

Activity Stream Enhancements

Spend a lot of time viewing the activity stream? BuddyPress 2.0 automatically lets you know when new items are ready to be loaded.

The activity stream is better integrated with blog posts, too. Comment on a blog post, and an activity item is posted. Comment on a blog-related activity item, and a blog comment is posted. No more worrying about fractured conversations.

We’ve also reworked the way that phrases like “Boone posted an update” are handled, so that they’re always up-to-date and always translatable.

And much more

BuddyPress 2.0 introduces dozens more small features, and fixes scores of bugs. We’ve compiled a complete 2.0 changelog on the BuddyPress Codex.

Juliana is Number Two

BuddyPress 2.0 is named for Juliana’s Pizza in Brooklyn, NY. Juliana’s is the second pizza establishment opened in the same location by master pizzaiolo Patsy Grimaldi (it’s a long story), and was also the locale for a serious BuddyPress powwow and up-close dining experience by two members of the core team. For these reasons (not to mention the outstanding pizza) we think that BuddyPress 2.0 “Juliana” has a special ring to it.

Thanks, thanks, and more thanks

BuddyPress is built, with love, by a worldwide network of volunteers. The following people contributed patches during the BuddyPress 2.0 development cycle:

boonebgorges, Bowromir, burakali, chouf1, cmmarslender, danbp, dcavins, Denis-de-Bernardy, DJPaul, ericlewis, glyndavidson, graham-washbrook, henrywright, henry.wright, hnla, imath, johnjamesjacoby, karmatosed, lenasterg, MacPresss, markoheijnen, megainfo, mercime, modemlooper, mpa4hu, needle, netweb, ninnypants, Pietro Oliva, pross, r-a-y, reactuate, rodrigorznd, rogercoathup, rzen, SergeyBiryukov, shanebp, SlothLoveChunk, StijnDeWitt, terraling, trishasalas, tw2113, vanillalounge.

Many thanks to these contributors, and to all who have pitched in the forums and elsewhere.

One final point. Technically, BuddyPress “2.0″ is just the version between 1.9 and 2.1. But still, there’s something special about crossing into the 2.x series, especially given the timing: we just crossed 2 million downloads, and it’s been almost exactly five years since BuddyPress 1.0 was released. On behalf of the core team and contributors, I’d like to extend a few special thanks: to founding developer Andy Peatling for getting the ball rolling; to Matt Mullenweg for providing support to the BuddyPress project; and especially to the many thousands of BuddyPress users who have followed and advocated for the project over the years. If BP has done great things for the thousands of communities that depend on it (and I think it has), it’s because of the incredible community around the software itself. A million Two million thanks to all of you.

Upgrade Today

You can get BuddyPress 2.0 from the wordpress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard.

As always, questions, comments, bug reports, feature requests, and general laudatory remarks can be directed toward our support forums or our development tracker.

The first release candidate (RC1) for BuddyPress 2.0 is now available (zip). Since the last beta, we have made about 10 small changes; see the changelog for details.

At this time, BP 2.0 is in a string freeze – we won’t be changing any more text between now and the final release. If you are helping to maintain a BuddyPress translation, this is your chance to make final revisions before 2.0 comes out. (We’re still looking good for April 16.)

Questions, comments, concerns, bugs, praise? Visit the support forums or BP Trac.

The second (and hopefully final) beta for BuddyPress 2.0 is now available (zip). Since Beta 1, we’ve made a few dozen fixes and improvements. Notable changes from the first beta:

• Fixed a potential out-of-memory fatal error in certain activity stream views. #2768
• Fixed broken SQL query format on certain activity stream views. #5503
• Improvements to profile visibility settings appearance #5352
• Fixed a bug where blog comments were not synced to the activity stream when the comment author != blog author #5507
• Better logic to avoid duplicates and invalid results during the activity heartbeat ping #5505
• Miscellaneous localization improvements

Plugin authors, theme authors, and site administrators with access to dev environments: please get out there and test! We need your continued feedback to make our scheduled release of April 16.

Questions? Comments? Visit our support forums or our development tracker.

The first beta for BuddyPress 2.0 is now ready for testing!

BuddyPress 2.0 is shaping up to be a very exciting upgrade, and is currently on track for our an on-time release in mid-April. But we need your help! If you are a plugin or theme developer, or if you are running a BuddyPress site and you have a development/sandbox environment available, please download the 2.0-beta1 zip or get a copy via Subversion, and put it through its paces.

We’ll have more details about the changes in our official release documents, but in the meantime, here’s a quick overview of some of the largest changes that need attention. (For a complete list, see this report). First, user-facing stuff:

• We have a number of new administrative tools:
  • User Extended Profile data is now editable at Dashboard > [Network Admin >] Users
  • Non-Multisite installations can now perform spam actions from Dashboard > Users
  • Dashboard > Tools > BuddyPress contains a number of tools for correcting data that occasionally gets out of sync on BP installs
• In addition, signups/registrations have been completely overhauled. There is now a subsection on Dashboard > [Network Admin >] Users for handling Pending users, where you can resend activation emails, perform manual activations, and more. The way BP integrates with WP’s signup system under the hood has also been rewritten; on non-Multisite, we now mimic WPMS’s wp_signups functionality. We thinkhttps://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/4551 this is a much more flexible, consistent system for all users of BuddyPress. These new workflows need the particular attention of people who are currently administrators on BP sites with open registration – you will best understand the pain points that these changes are meant to address.
• Blog-related activity comments now sync back to the source blog. That is, a reply in the activity stream to a “Boone posted a new blog post” item will create a corresponding comment on the blog post itself.

There have been extensive changes under the hood, including large performance increases and new developer tools:

• Activity actions – strings in the activity stream like “Boone and Ray are now friends” – are no longer (only) stored statically in the database, but are generated dynamically at runtime. This should alleviate several longtime headaches related to data staleness and multilingual sites. But it has also resulted in a number of changes related to the pre-caching of activity-related data. Watch http://bpdevel.wordpress.com in the upcoming days for a discussion of what plugin developers will need to know about the new system (short version – plugins that insert activity items will continue to work as before, but should be good citizens and update to the new technique). See #3856 for background.
• There’s a brand new API for registering xprofile field types, and our own field types have been completely rewritten to use it. See #5220.
• User last_activity data has been moved from the usermeta table to the activity table. This ought to result in very sizable performance improvements for larger sites. Plugin developers should verify that their plugins are working correctly with these changes. See this post on bpdevel for more background and specifics.
• Major improvements have taken place with respect to object caching throughout BuddyPress. If you use Memcached, APC, or some other persistent object caching backend on your BuddyPress site, please consider testing this beta.
• Metadata functions have been completely rewritten to leverage WP’s core metadata API. See #4551 and especially #5399 for what plugin devs will need to know about backward compatibility.

If you think you’ve found a bug, please report it to the support forums or our development tracker. And remember, this is beta software – we don’t recommend that you run it on a production site. Thanks in advance for your help – onward we march to 2.0!

When we first launched BuddyPress.org, the BuddyPress software hadn’t even been officially launched yet. By the time it had, requests for what software the website was running on were already coming into the forums. It wasn’t just BuddyPress people were asking for, it was the theme powering the site, the extra little plugins we were running to trick it out, and just general curiosity about what we were doing to make things go.

In October of 2012, the core teams started the Meta Blog which lead us towards releasing bits of WordPress.org code for peer review over on the Meta Trac. Since then, we’ve simplified BuddyPress.org’s codebase to make reviewing it and extending it really easy, and we are excited to announce today that all of the custom code is now publicly available in the Meta Subversion repository.

You’re now able to checkout, review, and patch the code that makes BuddyPress.org happily hum along. This is exciting for a few obvious reasons (like security, and really putting our open source philosophies where our code is) but the one I’m most excited about is it takes enhancements to the site out of our hands, and potentially puts them into yours.

Building software that powers millions of websites is one job (a heck of a fun one, too) and building and maintaining your own support site is actually quite another (like a self portrait; it’s a fun challenge.) Now, anyone can help improve not just BuddyPress, but also the site that supports it — that’s huge — and we can’t wait to see how BuddyPress.org evolves now that it’s in your hands!

This report presents the results from the 2014 BuddyPress Survey held from Jan. 7 – Feb. 10, 2014. Three hundred thirty-eight developers from fifty-two countries completed the survey. Thank you all.

Goal of Survey

Guide the direction of BuddyPress plugin development in 2014

Objectives:

1. Discover current and actual BuddyPress usage.
2. Provide users the opportunity to post their feature requests.
3. Identify key areas for improvement.
4. Prioritize areas of BuddyPress development.
5. Set benchmarks to streamline development processes.
6. Identify volunteers who are interested in contributing to BuddyPress development.

Read more →

Today marks the first official day of BuddyPress 2.0′s development cycle. As such, we want to keep everyone in the loop about what we’re planning for 2.0, and what our release dates are, so you can better plan your sites, updates, contributions, and testing.

Features:

• bp-forums retirement #5351 (johnjamesjacoby)
• WordPress Rewrite Rules API integration #4954 (johnjamesjacoby)
• Move XProfile visibility from each field into Settings #5352 (johnjamesjacoby)
• last_activity usermeta improvements #5128 (boonebgorges)
• Activity comment sync for comments (r-a-y)
• Ticket triage and general maintenance (paulgibbs)
• BuddyPress Profile editing from wp-admin (imath)
• New template pack #4952 (karmatosed)

Dates:

• Development starts (today): Wednesday, February 4, 2014
• Beta 1 (8 weeks from today): Wednesday, March 26, 2014
• Release (3 weeks after beta): Wednesday, April 16, 2014

If you’d like to tag along with us for the next 8 weeks, the 2.0 Roadmap is a great place to start. On behalf of the core development team, we’re really excited about what we have planned for 2.0, and can’t wait to get started!

BuddyPress 1.9.2 is available. This is a security and maintenance release, fixing two possible security issues with Group creation (responsibly disclosed by Pietro Oliva) along with some fixes to our WordPress Menus integration, bp-default theme switching, and improvements to theme compatibility.

A complete list of closed tickets can be found at the 1.9.2 milestone, and a full changelog is at http://codex.buddypress.org/developer/releases/version-1-9-2/.

This is a recommended update for all installations of BuddyPress 1.5+.

Upgrade via your WordPress Dashboard > Updates. You can also download the latest version at http://wordpress.org/plugins/buddypress.

Questions or comments? Check out our support community and development tracker.

BuddyPress 1.0 launched just over 5 years ago, and it’s quite a different piece of software today than it was back then. We’ve added (and retired) several components, reinvented the way it integrates into WordPress’s themes, and even changed our logo color (from orange to red.)

BuddyPress wouldn’t be what it is without the feedback of the community. While the core leadership team has a vision, how we ultimately prioritize features and releases is determined from a cocktail of wants, needs, desires, trends, availability, and is also largely influenced by WordPress too.

We want to start this year off at least facing the right direction, so Merci Me was kind enough to put together a survey based on some questions that we have for you. The answers to these questions will help us build a better BuddyPress by ensuring we’re still creating what you still want to use, and help us determine if any course corrections are necessary.

If you’re reading this post, you’re exactly the person we want to take this survey. Users; developers; even interested parties have opinions and expectations, and we want to hear all of them. You will find the survey embedded below.

Thanks for taking the time to help us out. We really appreciate it, and we’ll post the results of this survey in the next few weeks.