The code that powers the BuddyPress.org and bbPress.org websites is now open source. John James Jacoby, the lead developer for the projects, announced that all of the custom code used on these sites is now available in the Meta Subversion repository.
If you browse the repository, you’ll notice that the trunk has a BuddyPress.org directory but no bbPress directory. In Jacoby’s announcement on bbPress.org, he explained that the bbPress website is actually part of BuddyPress.org’s WordPress installation and they share some of the same code.
Open sourcing the code for these sites makes it possible for the community to take a more active role in contributing to improvements. Jacoby hopes that contributors will be enthusiastic about working together to bring new design, features, and direction to the websites:
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.
His post was essentially an open invitation to the bbPress and BuddyPress communities. Now it’s possible for anyone to jump in and contribute using the same workflow that you’ve used for contributing to bbPress and BuddyPress software in the past. What would you like to change or add to the project sites?