John James Jacoby launched an Indiegogo campaign today with the goal of raising $50,000 to fund six months of full-time work on WordPress’ three sister projects: BuddyPress, bbPress, and GlotPress. While WordPress core has many contributors who are sponsored by companies, the sister projects have yet to receive this kind of investment from the community.…
The original Monster Widget plugin is a handy tool created by Automattic to assist theme developers with testing. Essentially, it allows you to quickly drop all core widgets into your sidebar at once, saving you the trouble of having to add them individually. Now you can get the same for bbPress and BuddyPress, thanks to…
BuddyPress 2.1 was released yesterday with a handy new mentions interface that pops up a suggestions panel as you are typing. In the past, you would need to know a member’s username in order to write a mention in the activity stream, which many times meant looking it up. The new mentions interface makes it…
bbPress 2.5 introduced a host of new importers for AEF, Drupal, FluxBB, Kunena Forums (Joomla), MyBB, Phorum, PHPFox, PHPWind, PunBB, SMF, Xenforo and XMB, making it easier than ever to bring forums into WordPress. bbPress 2.5 also improved existing importers to include better support for importing stickies, topic tags, and forum categories. If you’re thinking…
Jason Coleman, creator of the popular Paid Memberships Pro plugin, launched his new SchoolPress app in beta this week. SchoolPress is an open source WordPress-powered web app designed for educators who want to incorporate a virtual component into their online or offline classes. The app is a demo that was created to showcase ideas from…
It’s somewhat unusual for WordPress theme developers to take bbPress into consideration when building themes. Styles and templates for bbPress compatibility usually constitute unnecessary weight for users who don’t have the plugin active on their sites. One smart way to add bbPress support to a theme is through a plugin. This is exactly what Justin…
If you have a WordPress site with a bbPress-powered forum, you may want to set aside a few minutes this weekend to perform updates. bbPress 2.5.4 was released today with five bug fixes, including an important fix for a security vulnerability. bbPress project lead John James Jacoby announced the release, crediting IT Security Reaseacher Mazen…
The results of the 2014 bbPress survey are now available. The survey was conducted between March 7 – April 11, 2014. 183 people from 37 countries participated. The survey gave users a chance to give feedback and shape the direction of bbPress development throughout 2014. A common complaint I often hear is the lack of…
At BuddyCamp Miami 2014, I learned about BuddyPress and what it’s capable of. During the first session, I learned you don’t have to worry about BuddyPress themes anymore since 1.7 introduced theme compatibility. This means that BuddyPress sites no longer require a BuddyPress-specific theme. Later in the day, there was a session devoted to BuddyPress…
WordCamp Miami was held over the weekend, drawing more than 770+ attendees who converged upon the University of Miami to connect over all things WordPress. The event celebrated its 5th anniversary (quite ancient in WordCamp years) with a world-class lineup of speakers and many opportunities for attendees to network. BuddyCamp Miami kicked off the event…
Over the past few years, I’ve had the privilege of conversing with a lot of smart people in the WordPress community. John James Jacoby is one of those people I can talk to for hours on end. Not only does he care about online communities and forums as much as I do, but he’s incredibly…
Similar to BuddyPress, bbPress has announced its own survey to help decide features and which direction bbPress development will go in 2014. The survey is three pages long and contains a mix of generalized questions. It doesn’t take long to complete and it’s nice to be able to have a say in which direction the…
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…
John Blackbourn’s Query Monitor has quickly become a favorite debugging plugin for WordPress developers ever since it was released last November. The plugin has 227 stars on github and has been downloaded more than 5,000 times from WordPress.org. One of the unique features of Query Monitor is the ability to narrow things down by plugin…
bbPress 2.5 is now available! This is a great release filled with a number of improvements. The most notable addition in bbPress 2.5 are forum subscriptions. Forum subscriptions allow users to subscribe to new topics created in specific forums. Other items that contain a new car smell are: A number of new importers BuddyPress Notifications…