Now that BuddyPress 2.0 has been released, the core development team is refining its workflow to make use of Grunt, the Javascript task runner that the WordPress project adopted last year. The BuddyPress development trunk will be adopting a similar Grunt-powered build system that will automate many tedious tasks. The BuddyPress trunk will be reorganized…
BuddyPress 2.0 “Juliana” arrived on schedule today, less than a week after the plugin crossed two million downloads. This release focused heavily on improving BuddyPress performance, adding new administrative tools and enhancing the activity stream. It’s named for Juliana’s Pizza in Brooklyn, NY, a pizza joint that is special to members of the core development…
BuddyPress reached a major milestone today, crossing the two million download mark just a week ahead of the official 2.0 release. The plugin, known as “a social network in a box,” now has more than 500 related community extensions. Over the past 7 years, BuddyPress has developed a strong international community of users and contributors.…
For the past four years, BuddyPress developer Brajesh Singh has maintained a popular tutorial for allowing BuddyPress activity as a wire. This was the default behavior for activity during the early 1.x era of BuddyPress, which allowed users to “write on each other’s walls” without having to use @mentions. Singh’s updated tutorial shows you how…
One of the best things about BuddyPress is that it gives you the ability to bring together people who share a common goal or interest. Sometimes this requires getting people together at the same time for a meeting or rendezvous. With just the bare basics you could try to mention specific members in the activity…
For the past couple months, BuddyPress core developer Boone Gorges has been hinting at some big performance improvements coming to BuddyPress 2.0. He’s been working tirelessly to make the plugin faster and has published some benchmarks to demonstrate the improvements in 2.0. He posted statistics that compare the number of MySQL queries and the total…
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…
BuddyPress 2.0 is due in approximately three weeks. The release roadmap shows it as being 74% complete. In addition to big performance improvements, this release will introduce several new WordPress admin tools to speed up common maintenance tasks for community managers. An update committed today makes it easier for administrators to mark users as ham/spam…
BuddyPress 2.0 will include a new “Manage Signups” screen in the WordPress admin for tracking the status of pending accounts. This enhancement helps community administrators moderate registrations and help facilitate the signup process for new users who are experiencing difficulty. BuddyPress requires new users to confirm their accounts by email before activation, but sometimes these…
BuddyPress themes are still few and far between, despite the popularity of the social networking plugin for WordPress. After theme compatibility was introduced, effectively making BuddyPress able to work with nearly any WordPress theme, the market slowed its production of new products tailored specifically for BuddyPress. When you see a theme that highlights BuddyPress features…
Just one month after launching its WordPress beginner’s course, Treehouse has added BuddyPress education to its collection of interactive learning resources. The “Learn BuddyPress” course is geared toward BuddyPress beginners and covers all the basics of setup, user management, and core social components. After reviewing the course, I was impressed by how quickly Gordon is…
The BuddyPress Theme Development book hit the shelves late last year and I had the chance to review it for our readers. This book is a much-needed resource for the BuddyPress community and could not have come at a better time. BuddyPress theming has evolved over the years but it has always had a steep…
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…
The BuddyPress 2014 Survey results are in and are now posted on github with graphs to visually represent the data collected from 338 developers in 52 countries. The survey provided an opportunity for participants to post feature requests as well as identify important areas for improvement. When prioritizing new development for 2014, the team will…
BuddyPress 2.0, due sometime in mid-April, officially kicked off development a couple weeks ago. This release will include some exciting, visible new features, including the ability to edit BuddyPress profiles in the WordPress admin. But there are also some major improvements happening under the hood that will help BuddyPress to scale better in the near…