If you haven’t tested our first 11.0.0 beta release, here’s another opportunity to help us give the final touches to our next major release so that we make sure it will fit perfectly into your WordPress / BuddyPress specific configuration. Beta testing is very important and we need you all, whether you’re a regular or advanced user, a theme designer or a plugin author: please contribute!
The current target for final release is December 14, 2022 👈. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.
Since beta1, we’ve fixed 12 new tickets and documented some important changes BP Themes or Plugins authors should definitely read:
The current target for final release is December 14, 2022. We would greatly appreciate your help making sure this next major version of your community engine is as good as it can be.
As usual, testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade 👉 so please give us a few minutes of your time to make sure this pre-release behaves the right way with your specific WordPress configuration, your theme, and the other WordPress plugins you are using. Try to use a testing site which is very close to the one you are using in production. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac or post a reply to this support topic.
If you’re a BuddyPress plugin developer or a BuddyPress theme developer, please make sure to test this 11.0.0-beta1 release as we’re now only loading BuddyPress assets (JavaScripts and styles) inside BuddyPress pages.
Around 40 changes to expect in 11.0.0
You can check out this report on Trac for the full list of them. We only planned to ship one long awaited feature as a BuddyPress Add-on. At this stage, we’re staying silent about it to keep the surprise effect intact (truth is we are still not sure it’ll be ready for December 14 🤫).
BuddyPress 10.6.0 is a new maintenance release fixing 1 ugly bug with themes using block templates although there are not Block Based themes. For details on the change, please read the 10.6.0 release notes.
Oh wait, what is the goal of this BuddyPress Add-on?
If you’re wondering, with BP Rewrites activated, you’ll get full control on any BuddyPress URLs! BuddyPress plugin developers are strongly encouraged to test it with their plugins and report potential issue on the BP Rewrites’ support page. The goal of this BuddyPress Add-on is to make sure we can safely merge it in BuddyPress Core to migrate our Legacy URL parser to the WordPress Rewrites API. Thanks in advance to all plugin developers or BP Rewrites pioneers for their contributions: once BuddyPress will have performed this migration, life will be easier for everyone:
Your community site users will be able to enjoy more meaningful URLs,
BuddyPress Theme authors will stop having headaches trying to understand bp_core_set_uri_globals()
BuddyPress will be compatible with plain permalinks.
BuddyPress will improve its compliance with WordPress Standards.
Let’s all help this happen asap, you just need to test it and report bugs!
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.5.0. This maintenance release fixes five bugs and makes sure BuddyPress is ready for WordPress 6.1 latest improvements about Block-Template themes. Just like we’ve done testing BuddyPress into WP 6.1 RC4, we strongly encourage all Plugin developers to do the same and update their “Tested up to: 6.1” plugin main files header.
After reaching a result of ~245k WordPress sites using actively BuddyPress at the end of 2019, the “active installations” statistic (the one which is displayed in the sidebar of our plugin’s page on the official WordPress Plugin Directory), has been decreasing progressively and recently fell just below 200k.
As the Plugin directory uses ranges to simplify the “active installations” statistic, we’re no longer in the 200k+ category but felt into the 100k+ one.
-19%
That’s the BuddyPress usage negative growth between the end of 2019 and today.
Meaning?
In short, some users don’t use community features on their WordPress site anymore or, more likely, fewer and fewer users are using BuddyPress to power their community site.
While such negative growth can lead to bankruptcy when you’re running a business, it does not mean maintaining our plugin is under immediate threat. You can count on the BuddyPress core team’s passion to carry on working on fixing bugs and improving features.
Let’s come together and reverse the trend!
Confronted by extraordinary difficulty, people from a family, a tribe, a team, a community, a company, a country, a continent, earth, temporarily forget about their individual need or personal feelings and unite together to find the best way to deal with this difficulty. This is happening because we know that if everyone focuses on a general benefit, we’ll have a better chance of achieving that benefit than if each of us tries to satisfy our own goals.
I believe the English quote for this idea is “In unity there is strength“.
More than ever, BuddyPress needs you to contribute to beta testing, support, documentation, translations and, of course, code.
As a start, we’d love to hear your voice about this simple question:
In your opinion, what is the most important thing that BuddyPress is missing?
Please, tell us about it by replying to this forum topic. Feel free to talk about every aspect of the project and to suggest ways to do better. If you could then take an extra step and share the link of this post or this topic with your friends, that would be awesome. Thanks in advance for your help 😍.
We (the BuddyPress software & community) are 14 years old. We were the first plugin to extend WordPress with community features, giving users a free and open source alternative to commercial “Social Media” (social network companies whose end goal is to sell advertisements based on your data).
With WordPress and BuddyPress: you keep the freedom to share, data ownership and the control of every aspect of your community site. The BuddyPress core team is committed to preserving this free and totally open source tool for anyone.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.4.0. This maintenance release fixes three bugs. One of them was a pretty annoying regression from the 10.0.0 release that allowed non-members of a group to view and access a group’s invites navigation. Even though these non-members couldn’t actually use the invite functionality 😅, we chose to avoid waiting too long before making this bug disappear.
Immediately available is BP Rewrites 1.3.0. This maintenance release fixes two bugs and brings BP Rewrites compatibility to bbPress. For details on the changes, please read the 1.3.0 release notes.
Immediately available is BuddyPress 10.3.0. This maintenance release fixes seven bugs, mainly BP Nouveau improvements. It also makes sure BuddyPress is ready for the upcoming WordPress 6.0 release. For details on the changes, please read the 10.3.0 release notes.
