BuddyPress.org

It’s almost a month to WordCamp Europe, and we can’t wait! The conference, which is rapidly becoming one of Europe’s largest WordCamps, always attracting an intelligent and diverse audience of WordPressers. At time of writing, tickets are still on sale, but if you haven’t got yours yet, move quickly!

The BuddyPress team find any WordCamp very valuable as they let us talk directly to people who use the plugin, which keeps us up-to-date with how well the plugin is being received within the WordPress community. It also gives us an opportunity to listen to your feature proposals and BuddyPress ideas.

Paul Gibbs from the BuddyPress team is attending this year’s conference. BuddyPress will be one of the available contribution groups at the conference’s contributor day, so if you’d like to learn how to contribute back to BuddyPress, we invite and welcome you to join us! Paul’s recorded a message for WordCamp Europe attendees:

For more information about WordCamp Europe’s contributor day, and how to register for it, please visit the WordCamp Europe website.

BuddyPress 2.3.0 Release Candidate 1 is now available for testing. Please download the 2.3.0-rc1 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. If you are a plugin or theme developer, or are running a BuddyPress powered site with a development environment available, your help testing is greatly appreciated.

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but check out the 2.3.0 Beta 1 post for the rundown of our favorite changes until then.

Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.

BuddyPress 2.3.0 Beta 2 is now available for testing. Please download the 2.3.0-beta-2 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. If you are a plugin or theme developer, or are running a BuddyPress powered site with a development environment available, your help testing is greatly appreciated.

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but check out the 2.3.0 Beta 1 post for the rundown of our favorite changes until then.

Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.

Thanks again for your help. BuddyPress 2.3.0 is going to be awesome!

This report presents the results from the 2015 BuddyPress Survey held from Feb. 18 – April 8, 2015. Two hundred eleven developers from 42 countries contributed to BuddyPress by participating in the survey. Thank you.

Goal of the Survey

Guide the direction of BuddyPress plugin development in 2015.

Objectives

1. Discover current BuddyPress usage.
2. Gauge user interest in potential new features.
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.

Read more →

BuddyPress 2.3.0 Beta 1 is available for testing. Please download the 2.3.0-beta1 zip or get a copy via our Subversion repository. If you are a plugin or theme developer, or are running a BuddyPress powered site with a development environment available, we’d love to have your help with testing.

A detailed changelog will be part of our official release notes, but until then, here’s a rundown of some of our favorite changes. (Check out this report on Trac for a more detailed view.)

• The new Attachments API will allow developers to more easily manage user-generated media, and is the long-awaited foundation for media-related BuddyPress components and features.
• Core Theme Companion Styling improves BuddyPress’s integration with the latest two bundled WordPress core themes, Twenty Fifteen and Twenty Fourteen.
• The Avatar Upload UI has been completely revamped, with drag-and-drop upload, improved mobile support, & integration with phone/laptop cameras.
• Blog Post Activity generates better looking excerpts when posts contain images or other embedded media content.
• Star Private Messages allows for improved marking of important inbox messages.
• The Member Types API now supports member-type-specific directories.
• Continued object & query cache enhancements.
• Tons of under-the-hood improvements.
• Continued coverage of inline code documentation, actions, & filters.

2.3.0 is almost ready, but please do not run it in a production environment just yet. Let us know of any issues you find in the support forums and/or on our development tracker.

Thanks everyone for all your help, and we are excited to release BuddyPress 2.3.0 in early June!

BuddyPress 2.2.3 is out, which fixes several instances where URLs were not made safe (escaped) for output to the browser. If you’re using any version of BuddyPress and have not yet updated, please do so right away. If you need help, please reach out in our support forums and someone will be happy to assist you.

The BuddyPress team worked closely with the WordPress core team and several other plugin authors to coordinate the release of 2.2.3 alongside other libraries with similar issues.

These fixes have also been ported over to what will be 2.3, which we continue to run here at BuddyPress.org.

Hot off of BuddyPress 2.2.1 is 2.2.2. It’s both a security and maintenance release that fixes two potential security issues (responsibly disclosed by Todd Gibson & Justin Heideman) and improves our filtering of the title tag.

• Activity: sanitize output of “Load More” link
• Members: better nonce check on members widget
• Core: improve filtering of wp_title

Sorry for the late Friday release, and thanks for keeping your BuddyPresses up-to-date!

The BuddyPress team and many of our contributors regularly attend WordCamps around the world. If you’re unfamiliar with WordCamps, they are affordable WordPress conferences organised by volunteers who are passionate about WordPress and the WordPress community. Contributor Days often accompany WordCamps, and they are a chance for you to learn how to contribute back to WordPress from people who are already contributors.

You can find your nearest WordCamp at WordCamp Central.

At WordCamps, the BuddyPress team enjoy meeting people who use BuddyPress, and we love to discover what’s being built with it! WordCamps are one of our most important touchpoints with our community, and they help us to refocus our goals and expectations alongside those of the community.

Next weekend (20th – 22nd March, 2015) is WordCamp London (UK), at the London Metropolitan University. Tickets are still available. There is a Contributor Day on the 20th.

If you are going to WordCamp London and want to talk BuddyPress, then you’re in luck! London is going to have a sizeable gathering of regular BuddyPress contributors. You might recognise the following people from the BuddyPress team who are attending: Mathieu Viet (@imath), Hugo Ashmore (@hnla), Henry Wright (@henrywright), Paul Gibbs (@djpaul) — amongst others.

Don’t miss regular contributor Bowe Frankema’s presentation on the Saturday, “How I Used WordPress for my Dream Project: CFCommunity“, and learn about how BuddyPress played a part in that project.

If you want to learn how to contribute to BuddyPress, or in any other part of BuddyPress, then don’t forget the Contributor Day!. You do not need to be a developer or coder to be involved in the Contributor Day – help with design, documentation, and user testing is always welcome. Contributor Day is free to attend, but there is a separate registration form that you need to complete.

See you soon!

Every year we put together a survey to better gauge how things are going. The core team often has an idea of the direction we’d like things to go (largely influenced by improvements to WordPress) but generally speaking, we really try to build and improve the things you think are the most important.

Mercime once again was kind enough to build a survey of questions to help us build a better BuddyPress, and determine if any course corrections are necessary. If you’re reading this post, or have ever used or considered using BuddyPress in the past, we want to hear from you. The survey is embedded below for your convenience.

We really appreciate you taking a few moments to fill this out, and we’ll post the results in the next few weeks. Thank you!

BuddyPress 2.2.0 was so good, we knew you’d want 2.2.1 right away. It’s a maintenance release that fixes a few accidental features we didn’t know we introduced. Included below for your enjoyment is an elegant log of changes made over the past 2 weeks. Give it a peek, if you’re curious, or just go get to updating your BuddyPress’s instead.

• Multisite: Deleting a post from non-root blog may delete root pages (#6226)
• Activity: ‘just-me’ scope not using correct user ID (#6215)
• Notifications: Pagination query string argument fix (#6205)
• Register: Fix root page settings saving (#6197)
• Members: Displaying member types within members loop fails (#6193)
• BP-legacy: Improve directory page template wrapper handling (#6190)

Special thanks to Ray who stepped up and promptly patched most of these to get them to you ASAP.

Happy BuddyPress’ing!