BuddyPress 2.2 is shaping up to be an exciting release, packed full of new features for developers. Support for Composer will be included in 2.2, as well as a basic member type API, which will allow developers to create different user types. The upcoming 2.2 release will also introduce the ability for new activity items…
WP Engine announced today that the company will be sponsoring John James Jacoby to work on HHVM compatibility for BuddyPress. Mercury, the host’s new enterprise HHVM WordPress hosting platform, debuted last month with initial benchmarks indicating performance improvements of up to 600%. Jacoby is the project lead for BuddyPress and a former employee of 10up,…
BuddyPress 2.2 is under active development and contributors are close to having the basics of a new Member Type API on board for the upcoming release. The new API would allow developers to separate users into different types, a common request for many BuddyPress-powered communities. User types make it possible to create some interesting community…
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.…
For a long time, BuddyPress has been sorely in need of better support for media, as images, video, and audio play a major part in connecting people on social networks. BuddyPress core has adopted the features-as-plugin development model to help facilitate the development of a new media component called BP Attachments. This new Attachments API,…
BuddyPress lead developer Paul Gibbs committed support for Composer to BuddyPress core this week. Developers who want to check it out can find the json file at: trunk/src/composer.json. If you’re not yet familiar with Composer, it’s essentially a tool for dependency management in PHP. It is designed to manage packages on a per-project basis by…
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…
Every day, millions of people mindlessly pump content into social networks that are owned by someone else. These massive data silos plaster your feed with advertising and blatantly disregard user privacy. It’s a symbiotic relationship wherein you are the product being sold, but you have no control. Even Twitter, which many saw as the last…
Earlier this year, BuddyPress contributors announced that the project would be adopting the features-as-plugins model to help speed up future development. This is the same development model that has been working well for WordPress core, helping four major features land in the 3.8 release. The BuddyPress Media Component and Attachment API was the first feature…
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…
BuddyPress 2.1 “Patsy” is fresh out of the oven, named for a coal-oven pizzeria in East Harlem, NYC. Patsy’s is famous for its traditional New York style thin crust pizza and claims to have originated the practice of selling pizza by the slice. New @mentions Interface The name is fitting, because 2.1 is another slice…
Netropolitan, colloquially dubbed the “Facebook for rich people,” is a new private social network available to those who are willing to shell out $9,000 to join and $3,000/year to continue membership. The site advertises itself as “The online country club for people with more money than time,” and has been featured on CNN and other…
BuddyPress 2.1 is right around the corner. After a fairly quiet beta period, 2.1 RC1 is now in the hands of testers and is your last chance to test before the official release. BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges also posted an important update to let those who maintain BP language packs know that the latest…
When you create profile fields in BuddyPress, they apply to every user in the same way. Each user responds to the same set of questions, but this could stand to be a little more flexible to account for differences in users. What if you could conditionally show profile fields, based on a user’s answers to…
BuddyPress 2.1 is right around the corner with Beta 1 landing in the hands of eager testers today. The upcoming release includes several improvements that make BuddyPress easier to use, more secure, and faster than ever. BP 2.1 is set to introduce a totally revamped @mentions interface with built-in auto-suggestion and beta testers will want…