Fire up your test environments; BuddyPress 2.0 Beta 1 was just released. 2.0 is going to be a stellar release and is packed full of exciting updates and performance optimizations. BuddyPress core developer Boone Gorges announced the beta and summarized new features and changes that will be important for you to test.
This release will introduce a handful of new admin tools for managing BP communities:
- User profile data can be edited in the admin: Dashboard > Users
- Non-multisite installations can ham/spam users: Dashboard > Users
- New admin screen for managing signups: Dashboard > Users > Pending
- BuddyPress tools menu has new tools for correcting data that occasionally gets out of sync: Dashboard > Tools > BuddyPress
One front-end feature that should be tested is the synchronization of blog-related activity comments with blog comments. If a user replies to a new blog post activity item, that activity reply will also post back to the blog as a comment. This helps to keep the conversation synchronized in both places.
Those are the most visible items to test. However, a large portion of the updates in this release are non-visible improvements under the hood. This includes performance improvements for object caching and pre-caching of activity-related data, a new API for registering xprofile field types, and rewritten metadata functions that now use WordPress’ core metadata API. Refer to Boone Gorges’ beta announcement post for more details on what to test.
If you have some free time this weekend or can dedicate some time in the coming week, give BuddyPress 2.0 Beta 1 a test drive. Please report any bugs to the BuddyPress trac.