bbPress 2.5.11 Adds WordPress 4.7 Compatibility

The bbPress development team has released 2.5.11 to add support for a technical change in WordPress 4.7. Users are highly encouraged to update to bbPress 2.5.11 before updating to WordPress 4.7. In 4.7, the loading order for the current user in the function stack was changed to accommodate user locale switching.

Previously, BuddyPress and bbPress displayed a custom notice when a user was initialized without using WP->init(). In addition to patching the issue in BuddyPress and bbPress, a new wp_roles_init filter was added to WordPress that allows plugins to add custom roles when they’re initialized.

The changes mentioned above are technical in nature so I asked John James Jacoby, lead developer of bbPress, what the update really means. “bbPress loads its roles on-the-fly, in a similar way to how post-types and taxonomies are registered,” Jacoby told the Tavern.

“With locales and roles now having a reversed load order, bbPress needed some code changes to work for both WordPress 4.6 and 4.7 without causing any problems for third-party bbPress plugins and non-English installations.”

This particular improvement has personal historical meaning to Jacoby, “This change to WordPress core in 4.7 is a long time coming,” he said.

“It was the very first bug I ever reported in WordPress’ IRC channel back in 2008, when I was working on a large multi-lingual multisite installation. It’s how I met Peter Westwood and Jen Mylo, and it was their kindness that made it clear that WordPress was the platform for me.”

Jacoby also notes that per-forum moderators, favorites, and subscriptions have been rewritten in bbPress 2.6. During testing, performance enhancements were discovered and submitted to WordPress core and have been implemented across the forums on WordPress.org. Work continues on bbPress 2.6 which is expected to ship in 2017.