BuddyPress 2.0 To Add Profile Editing in the WordPress Admin

BuddyPress 2.0 is underway and an exciting new feature is in the works. This next release will add profile editing to the WordPress admin. Navigating to the admin Users screen and clicking on “profile” will take you to a new “Community Profile” tab for backend profile management.

New Community Profile Tab

In addition to editing profile fields, this new screen allows administrators to quickly mark a user as “Active” or “Spammer,” delete the avatar and view member stats.

The code for this feature has already landed in the BuddyPress trunk and core developers plan to iterate on it throughout the 2.0 cycle. Profile editing adds the following to BuddyPress:

New bp-members-admin.php and accompanying assets to handle the initial admin page creation (outside of XProfile).

New stats template functions in Blogs, Friends, and Groups components, to provide additional meta data about a members community involvement.

Modifies some existing XProfile admin/template/filters to make it more accommodating to querying for profile data outside of BuddyPress’s traditional displayed_user context.

The new Community Profile tab should save administrators quite a bit of time when managing their communities, since they won’t have to switch to the front end to view profiles. Sometimes it isn’t clear if a user is a spammer and having a quick way to view profiles in the backend helps to clarify that, especially with the addition of community involvement stats for each member. This feature is enabled by default for administrators only. Further down the road, this setting may be something that can be turned on for non-admins via a filter, but that has not yet been implemented.

Roadmap For BuddyPress 2.0

The features that are currently under active development for the BuddyPress 2.0 milestone include:

bp-forums retirement

WordPress Rewrite Rules API integration

Move XProfile visibility from each field into Settings

last_activity usermeta improvements

Activity comment sync for comments

Ticket triage and general maintenance

New template pack

Additionally, Boone Gorges has been working on refactoring the Activity query to improve BuddyPress performance. He hopes to implement persistent caching for individual activity items before BuddyPress 2.0 is released. “It’ll be a good test case for spreading some individual object caching throughout the rest of the components,” he said. This should help to provide a little boost for any BuddyPress sites that make use of object caching.

Results of the most recent BuddyPress development survey should be available early next week. An exact date has not yet been set for the 2.0 release but it should drop sometime in March. The dates will be finalized at the next development meeting.