Previously: https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2015/08/06/wp-version-compatibility-guidelines/
In accordance with our WP compatibility guidelines, we’ll be dropping official support for WP 3.8 in BuddyPress 2.5. For more details, see #6805.
Recent Updates
Hi BuddyPress contributors!
Can I bother you to contribute a few more minutes of your time to fill out the 2015 contributor survey? It helps everyone establish some baselines around the contributor experience so that we can gauge how things change over time.
This is being posted to all the Make teams, so if you subscribe to a bunch of p2s and keep seeing this post, know that you only need to fill the survey in once, not once per team.
The survey is anonymous (so you can be extra honest), all questions are optional (so you can skip any that you don’t want to answer), and we’ll post some aggregate results around the end of January. It took testers 5-10 minutes to complete on average (depends how much you have to say), so I bet you could crank it out right after you read this post.
There are two sections of the survey:
* The first has questions about team involvement, recognition, and event involvement, and is pretty much what you’d expect from an annual survey (which teams did you contribute to, how happy are you as a contributor, etc).
* The second section is about demographics so we can take a stab at assessing how diverse our contributor base is. All questions are optional, but the more information we have the better we can figure out what we need to improve. If there’s some information you’d rather not identify, that’s okay, but please do not provide false information or use the form to make jokes — just skip those questions.
The survey will be open until January 15, 2016. Whether you have 5 minutes now, or 10 over lunch (or whenever), please take the 2015 contributor survey. Thanks, and thanks again for making 2015 awesome!
BP Codex Summary for 2015
Status Update
There have been three BP major releases (2.2.0, 2.3.0, and 2.4.0) and 12 minor releases by volunteer contributors for 2015. These activities have generated the following stats for the codex to date:
- 31 New Articles
- 14 Release Change Logs
- 49 Articles Updated
The Codex in 2016
Here’s hoping that barring major technical glitches or hidden grinches, developer.buddypress.org will be launched sometime next year. @tw2113 has been working on the parser to get this going. Some Codex articles will be moved there and some sections will be reorganized. Details of the changes with the Codex and the new developer site will be posted here when it happens. In the meantime, we’ll continue publishing and updating articles in the Codex.
The BuddyPress Codex is volunteer-powered, which means you can contribute too! If you’re interested in updating existing articles or creating entirely new ones, please read our Codex Standards & Guidelines.
Props to Codex Contributors, 2015
Thank you and a Happy New Year to all!
General Summary as of December 23, 2015
This is a compilation of dev chats held in December 2nd, 9th, and 16th. There was no official dev chat last Dec. 23, we just had some BP Holiday fun.
Minor Releases
- 2.4.3 – packaged and released by @im4th
- 2.4.2 – packaged and released by @johnjamesjacoby
BuddyPress 2.4.4
- There are currently two tickets in queue.
- Release date: January 2016
BuddyPress 2.5.0
- BP Beta 1: February 8, 2016
- BP RC 1 (string freeze): February 22, 2016
- BP 2.5.0 Target Release Date: March 2, 2016
Feature scope continued from last November 25:
Email API and customisation features (#6592) @djpaulgibbs reported Things are going well with the new feature.
Comment syncing between activity and post comments for Custom Post Types (#6482) @im4th will try to update patch and write unit tests.
Screen notifications settings page (#6712) @rayisme
Accessibility Improvements Part 2 (has tickets) @mercime
developer.buddypress.org @tw2113 has started work on the parser and fixing errors.
Navigation API tweaks for single items (#6534) @boonebgorges will be working on this for the next 2 weeks.
Create New Invitations API (#6210) @dcavins will update patches. @boonebgorges will be working on this for the next 2 weeks.
BuddyPress Embeds for activity, user profiles, groups (#6772) @rayisme has started working on this. @im4th has given feedback on the ticket.
Companion Stylesheet – Twentytwelve (#6766) @hnla has uploaded the stylesheets to trunk. Feedback welcome.
BP Users front.php (#6769) @hnla
xprofile fielddata visibility should be stored in xprofilemeta (#6413) @boonebgorges
BP JSON REST API @modemloooper. @marmaduka has volunteered to help. @djpaulgibbs and @boonebgorges were in agreement that the project would go through some documentation/vision phases before starting to write code. The BP JSON REST API would be introduced into core when the feature is “complete”, i.e., all read-only endpoints or an entire component, etc. This will be built as a plugin first. @djpaulgibbs also suggested that the eventual BP REST API plugin/module/eventual core integration require modern PHP.
BuddyPress 2.4.3
BuddyPress 2.4.3 is now available, this is a maintenance release.
https://buddypress.org/2015/12/buddypress-2-4-3/
BuddyPress 2.4.2
BuddyPress 2.4.2 is now available. This is a security and maintenance release.
https://buddypress.org/2015/12/buddypress-2-4-2/
Dev Chat Summary for November 25, 2015
BuddyPress 2.4.1
- As of 11/30/15, 2.4.1 will be released this week.
- Six of the 7 tickets slated for this release are all good to go.
- (#6675) WP 4.4. deprecates wp_title() will be moved to BP 2.4.2 which is scheduled sometime after WP 4.4.0 is released.
BuddyPress 2.5.0
- @djpaulgibbs proposed start of dev cyle on Wednesday, Dec. 2, and release by March 2, 2016. He also mentioned that “we will lose probably a few weeks’ worth of development over Christmas, but I’d rather keep the pace up even if that means a smaller release.”
- @boonebgorges noted that “in the last couple releases we’ve done fairly long beta/RC periods. I think it’s been good to be conservative. But they’ve also been too long for what we’ve actually needed. So if we think the release might be a bit smaller, we might consider a somewhat condensed period between feature-freeze and release. Not something we have to decide today.”
Wishlist
These are a few of our favorite things and suggestions for this dev cycle:
Improve BP Navigation from @im4th. @boonebgorges has started work on ticket last week refreshing the `BP_Nav` ideas. He will “dive into it after WP 4.4 comes out.”
Clear out all trac bugs from@tw2113.
Update Member home page to match new functionality of Group home page from @hnla. Can start off with user’s own `front.php` template and expand on top of this later.
BP Emails from @djpaulgibbs. This involves “architectural improvements to emails, and customizable emails. (#6592)
xProfiledata_meta from @boonebgorges. Fix the way xProfile field visibility is stored (move from usermeta to xProfiledata_meta), which will make the data schema saner and also allow us to fix some search-related bugs.
Do the @todo items in codebase from @tw2113.
Improved caps from @im4th. Currently doing it in his template pack project.
Hashtags from @jconti. @slaffik noted that there are two BP-compatible hashtag plugins in WP repo. Chat continued on whether hashtags will be used for search vs. auto-completing hashtags or both. @rayisme has worked on a fork of etiviti’s older hashtags plugin, will require at least some form of unicode support. He will be working on “Better compatibility when using ‘BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE’ and UTF-8” which would also support emoji hashtags mentioned by @djpaulgibbs.
BP Template Versioning from @hnla. Feedback requested on current ticket to move the project forward. (#6642)
developer.buddypress.org from @mercime. @djpaulgibbs noted the logistics required and testing will be needed before deployment. @boonebgorges mentioned some devs expect projects with stable APIs to have web-based documentation generated even when they are already big fans of the inline documentation.
Add “semi-private group” from @mercime. @boonebgorges pointed out that there were a couple tickets about separating the various parts of group status into standalone bits, so that you could make custom group types like visibility vs join/invite vs who-can-invite etc. A version of “semi-private” would be some combination of these things. (#6094)
Bulk mentions for Groups from @jconti. Feature is akin to Slack’s @ {here} {channel} {etc}. @djpaulgibbs noted that “the complexity there is around updating the notifications and probably a per-group setting to turn that on/off, when I rewrote the auto-suggest lookup stuff about a year ago, I had it in mind to be able to support group mentions, so there’s some work done already. @im4th brought up concern about notifications (emails) if a group has 200,000 members.
Reactions instead of favorites, dream from @im4th. @boonebgorges replied with “A dream: BuddyPress Relationship Table and API.” @djpaulgibbs: both ideas fill me with memories of many hours spent on those, I have like a quarter-done github branch somewhere porting Posts2Posts over if anyone’s really really keen. “
Update default templates from @hnla. Explore what we can do to update the default templates – perhaps with a focus on markup in core that can be extracted out to template directories.
There are more features, bug fixes, and enhancements not mentioned above that already have tickets in Trac and some that will have tickets soon. Join the fun in making this dev cycle another awesome one for the community!
Trac Tickets for the 2.5.0 milestone are available on this page.
Slack log: https://wordpress.slack.com/archives/buddypress/p1448481734000967
