BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 Released and Ready For Testing

BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1 was released over the weekend. You know what that means: some very exciting improvements to BuddyPress are right around the corner after a short period of testing. BuddyPress users are encouraged to fire up their development environments to start testing the beta.

So far there are 84 closed tickets for the 1.9 milestone. BuddyPress developer Boone Gorges highlighted new features and changes in the upcoming release that need testing:

The new Notifications component, which adds a Notifications menu to user profiles

New widgets: Friends and Log In

Dynamic BuddyPress links for nav menus created at Dashboard > Appearance > Menus

Improvements in the performance of BP_ENABLE_USERNAME_COMPATIBILITY_MODE

Improvements to the way that scheduled posts are handled in the Activity stream

How to Test BuddyPress 1.9 Beta 1

You don’t have to be an expert developer to help test this beta. There are no special skills required, just a willingness to poke around and try the new features. The beta is not recommended for use in production, so you’ll need to put it on your test environment. Download the 1.9 beta 1 zip file or get it via SVN. If you find anything broken while trying out new features, venture over to the BuddyPress trac and see if there’s already a ticket for it. If not, feel free to create one.

You can expect the official BuddyPress 1.9 release within the next couple of weeks. We’ll take you on a grand tour once it hits the shelves.