In 2013, BuddyPress introduced its first template pack, BP Legacy, in the 1.7 release along with theme compatibility. This major project milestone made BuddyPress compatible with nearly every WordPress theme, freeing sites from the requirement of using a BuddyPress-specific theme. BP Legacy has served theme developers well in customizing BuddyPress, (more…)
BuddyPress lead developers have decided to bump the minimum PHP requirement for version 2.8 of the plugin to 5.3+. The new guidelines for BuddyPress’ PHP version support, authored by Boone Gorges on behalf of the team, states that the plugin will offer full support for all stable versions of PHP (more…)
Development for the BuddyPress 2.7 release cycle kicked off this week led by @mercime. Contributors chimed in during this week’s meeting to identify their wishlist items for 2.7. Beta 1 is expected September 21 and the official release is scheduled for October 12. During last week’s meeting, lead developers John (more…)
BuddyPress 2.6.0 “Espejo” was released today, named for the owners of an obscure restaurant named Pizza & Subs in Rock Island, IL. Pizza & Subs is known for its excellent pizza and taco calzones, a Quad-City original. Introducing Activity Embeds One of the most visible and exciting new features of (more…)
Three weeks ago, a discussion about the possibility of adding emoji reactions to BuddyPress core turned into a heated conversation in the #BuddyPress Slack channel. The topic was inspired by the new BP Reactions plugin, which recently landed on WordPress.org. This experimental plugin, created by BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet, (more…)
BuddyPress core developer Hugo Ashmore announced a new trial initiative this week that aims to create a library of CSS and JavaScript snippets to help users customize their communities. The Style Modules project will aggregate community-submitted code that enhances BuddyPress components in a plug-and-play manner. Developers who want to contribute (more…)
BuddyPress 2.5, released in March, introduced customizable emails via a new BP Email API. This new feature allows community managers to easily edit BuddyPress-generated emails in the admin and make design changes in the customizer. It didn’t take long for developers to think of bringing this same customizability to bbPress (more…)
In an exceptionally well-documented commit message, BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges introduced a new API to manage single item navigation, thanks to contributions from core developers Mathieu Viet and Raymond Hoh. Gorges summarized the changes to how BuddyPress will handle navigation in the upcoming 2.6 release: The new BP_Core_Nav overhauls (more…)
The BuddyPress codex has a long list of internal configuration settings that are not exposed in the plugin’s admin settings page. These are short definition lines that can be added to a site’s bp-custom.php file to make changes to BuddyPress default settings. BuddyExtender is a new plugin from the development (more…)
Development on BuddyPress 2.6 began this week with a meeting to set the schedule and scope for the release. The BuddyPress project recently moved to adopt release leads as part of the core development process. “The release lead gets a sense at the beginning of the dev cycle what he/she (more…)
Spam is one of the most discouraging things about managing a BuddyPress-powered social network. Since WordPress itself is already a magnet for spam signups and comments, BuddyPress is subject to the same and then some. With an ordinary WordPress site you can block most of it fairly well, but with (more…)
BuddyPress 2.5.0 “Medici” was released today, named for Medici on 57th, a Chicago restaurant famous among BP contributors for its “Garbage Pizza.” The new BP Email API is the highlight of the release. It allows users to edit BuddyPress emails in the admin and change their appearance in the customizer. (more…)