• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (June 8, 2022)
• In attendance: @dcavins @espellcaste @im4th
• Slack archive.

BuddyPress roadmap for the next major releases

Remove progressively our dependency to jQuery.

• @im4th suggested to modernize BuddyPress JavaScript starting with dropping progressively our dependency to jQuery. @dcavins agreed it was a good time to do so.
• Some parts won’t be easy, eg: the Profile Admin UI, mentions… But we will work on renewing BP Nouveau template pack’s JavaScript at least.
• @im4th will soon audit the BP Nouveau Template pack and write a Trac ticket about this audit’s results.

Block based activity post form

• The work we’ve been doing into the BP Blocks plugin is now broke with latest WordPress version. It’s pretty difficult for us to follow the Block editor evolutions/breaking changes from WP versions to WP versions.
• Let’s try to use the great work done on the Isolated block editor by Automattic to use it for the activity post form.
• @im4th has started playing with it and he believes we’ll be able to include our own BP Block API inside of it to add blocks to share media (BP Attachments), mini surveys, etc…

BP Attachements

• @im4th has made some interesting progress about it (handling the delete action) and he updated the issue where he started to explain how it’s / will be working.
• Next big step is handling the edit actions which can be pretty challenging (eg: moving a file into another directory, dealing with file revisions)
• Private media will be supported in v1 of the plugin for users being able to perform a little server configuration task.

BuddyPress.org

Our current theme is great, but it begins to have more and more little issues and let’s be honest it’s getting old! Building a theme can take a lot of time so @im4th suggested again to do 2 tasks at once:

• Include a new BuddyPress theme into the BuddyPress plugin (a replacement to BP Default?)
• Use this theme on BuddyPress.org

@dcavins brought a very important point about it: we’ll need to attract some new contributors for that especially if the world if drifting toward full site editing themes. @im4th has started exploring block templates and full site editing themes and would really like this theme to support the feature.

We’ll post on BuddyPress.org about it to try to motivate some contributors to give us a hand (even if the last time we did it for documentation it failed…).

BP Rewrites and bbPress incompatibility

This part has been fixed, a specific compatibility script has been added to the BP Rewrites in its latest release.

11.0.0 initial schedule & priorities for this release

Initial schedule

• First beta: October 19, 2022.
• Release: December 14, 2022.

Priorities

As @dcavins noticed, the roadmap we discussed about can takes time to achieve, so we ranked our tasks to know where to focus, and to avoid having 75% finished features around October 19.

1. BP Attachments feature as a plugin ready for 11.0.0
2. JavaScript improvements to BP Nouveau (dropping jQuery dependency progressively)
3. Tickets into the 11.0.0 milestone (only load template pack assets in BuddyPress areas, Members invitations in multisite..).
4. Block based activity post form plugin as a feature
5. a new FSE BP Theme we can include in the plugin and use on BuddyPress.org.

Achieving 1, 2 & 3 is our goal for 11.0.0, but if we find time or new contributors we will try to do 4 and 5 as well!

Open floor

@espellcaste was in Porto for the WCEU 2022 and attended a workshop called “Creating communities with WordPress MU”. He shared his notes with us after the dev chat and we reacted about it as one the workshop conclusion was BuddyPress is not a good tool to build communities. Some good points were raised and we’ll use them to improve BuddyPress and convince the workshop author she was wrong 😉.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on July 6 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

#11-0-0, #dev-chat, #roadmap, #summary