BuddyPress 2.5 Development Kicks Off, BP-API Dev Chat Begins This Week

BuddyPress contributors met last week to discuss the scope of the 2.5 release, which is slated for the beginning of March. Lead developer Paul Gibbs opened the meeting with a call for tickets that contributors are working on for 2.5.

Core developer Mathieu Viet will be working on comment syncing between activity and post comments for Custom Post Types. His patch is currently awaiting more testing and feedback. In a separate ticket Viet is also working alongside core developer @r-a-y on BuddyPress embeds for activity, user profiles, groups.

BuddyPress lead developer Boone Gorges will be focusing his attention on Navigation API tweaks for single items and a ticket to move xprofile field data visibility to be stored in xprofilemeta (as opposed to a serialized array in usermeta).

Paul Gibbs is working on overhauling BuddyPress emails with a new Email API and customization features. The proposal he’s working towards uses a Post Type for email templates and a Taxonomy to store the different types of emails BuddyPress sends. This project would also introduce new HTML email templates into the BP template stack and new classes to represent an email (BP_Email), one for each type of email.

Other features on the roadmap for possible inclusion in 2.5 include a new Invitations API, making xprofile fields used for signup configurable, and companion stylesheets for the TwentyTwelve default theme.

BP-API Development Chat Starts This Week

On Wednesday, following the regularly scheduled dev chat, contributors interested in discussing the REST API and BuddyPress will meet at 22:00 UTC. During this first chat they will decide where the BP-API will be developed and what steps are necessary to move forward. A few independent API plugins already exist but contributors hope to unify developer efforts to work on an official feature plugin.

This week’s dev chat will include discussion regarding what project lead John James Jacoby has called BuddyPress’ identity crisis. The core team will be gathering feedback on a “Social Network” vs. “Community Software” marketing direction.