BuddyPress 2.5.0 Released, Features Customizable Emails and Support for Emoji

BuddyPress 2.5.0 “Medici” was released today, named for Medici on 57th, a Chicago restaurant famous among BP contributors for its “Garbage Pizza.” The new BP Email API is the highlight of the release. It allows users to edit BuddyPress emails in the admin and change their appearance in the customizer.

The placeholder text in curly braces, which is replaced with data in the emails, is called a “token.” All available email tokens are listed in the codex. Since BP emails are simply a custom post type, plugin developers can easily hook into BuddyPress’ email system and create new emails that will be triggered by a specified action.

This release also introduces long-awaited support for emoji, which can now be used in activity updates, messages, and group descriptions.

Other highlights of BuddyPress 2.5 include:

Post Type Comments Tracking – Custom post types show in the activity stream and now, with the BuddyPress “Site Tracking” component enabled, replies to CPT-generated activity items will be synchronized with comments on the corresponding post.

Twenty Twelve Companion Stylesheet – BuddyPress now has basic styles that will make it fit in seamlessly when activated with the Twenty Twelve theme.

Autolink Settings for Profile Fields – BuddyPress profile fields can be autolinked to a search of the members directory using the field value as a search term. This release offers as new setting to enable or disable the autolinking on a per-field basis.

34 volunteer contributors worked together to close 95 tickets for the 2.5 milestone. For a full list of all the improvements and fixes, check out the official 2.5.0 changelog.