BP 1.5.3 is available, with some fixes for better WP 3.3.x compatibility. Read http://buddypress.org/2012/01/buddypress-1-5-3/ for more details.

Adding admin screens for all BuddyPress content is one of our long-term goals, so for BuddyPress 1.6, we’ve created a brand-new Activity admin screen. On it, you’ll be able to manage activities made on your site similar to the way you manage posts, comments, and other content.

List of all activity items

Editing an activity item

Editing an activity item with the Screen Options panel expanded

Editing an activity item with the Contextual Help panel expanded

It’s pretty neat, and we’ve been using on TestBP.org for some time, and it’s made managing activity much easier. We’re looking forward to sharing it with you in BuddyPress 1.6, but if you want to play with it now, early adopters can get a copy of “trunk”, our development build of BuddyPress, and take a look. (Don’t run it on a live site!)

Our trac ticket for this change is #3660, and was first introduced to trunk in r5262.

Several recent changes in the BuddyPress trunk have added better cache support for group meta (r5460) and activity meta (r5505). In brief, these changesets make it so that every time you call up groups or activity (as in, for example, bp_has_groups() or bp_has_activities()), BuddyPress will automatically fetch all of the metadata for those items and add it to the WordPress object cache. The net effect of these changes is that, inside of the group and activity loops, the performance of groups_get_groupmeta() and bp_activity_get_meta() is radically improved, since individual database queries are no longer required. (This behavior is modeled on how WordPress handles postmeta after a posts query – our new bp_update_meta_cache() is based on WP’s update_meta_cache().)

For the most part, plugin authors do not need to do anything to take advantage of these new features. However, in order to make bp_update_meta_cache() as flexible as possible, the format of the keys used to cache activity meta has changed. It used to be of the form:

'bp_activity_meta_' . $meta_key . '_' . $activity_id

but is now of the form

'bp_activity_meta_' . $activity_id . '_' . $meta_key

to better match other components. As a result, your activity meta cache will be flushed when you upgrade to BP 1.6. And if you made any manual references to the activity meta cache in your own plugin, you’ll need to change those references. (If you used bp_activity_update_meta() and bp_activity_get_meta(), you don’t need to do anything.) This should affect very, very few (if any) BP customizations.

In BuddyPress 1.6 we are introducing a top level admin menu for moderating the Activity Streams. While in development we’ve been using the BuddyPress icon for now, but we want a snazzy theme of icons or when we incorporate Groups, Private Messages, and Friendships in there too.

I really like how the bbPress icons aren’t so literal. If you haven’t seen them, they are pretty sweet. This got me thinking about what kind of metaphorical icons we could have for BuddyPress, and as it turns out I’m not that creative at 2pm on a Friday.

Example: Instead of having literal icons (envelope for PM’s, user silhouette for Groups, etc… We could have little party icons – Cake, Piñata, Candles, Cards, Gifts, etc…

We could do cities, clubs, teams, leagues, anything community related really. What’s important is that they have a loose connection to the thing they are associated with and fit the overall BuddyPress project.

If you have any ideas or suggestions, we could really use your brainstorming abilities!

Why

One of the most noticeable changes for site administrators with BuddyPress 1.6 will be the location of BuddyPress’ settings screen in the WordPress admin. Since 1.0, BuddyPress has occupied a top-level, front-of-list menu position, alongside the Posts, Media, and Pages menus (and so on). In 1.5, the BuddyPress menu was unstuck from the front of the list, and for most users, it dropped to the very bottom of the list. Most plugin authors, myself included, added their plugin’s settings screen as an item inside this top-level BuddyPress menu.

In 1.6, we’re removing the top-level BuddyPress menu.

Our settings screens will be inside WordPress’ Settings menu (as one item, with our existing tabs), and the Profile Fields screen will be inside the Users menu.

The new Settings menu’s location

Support for plugins adding items to the old BuddyPress menu

The WordPress Codex has good documentation to help plugins decide where to locate settings:

Adding a top-level menu should only be considered if you really need multiple, related screens to make WordPress do something it was not originally designed to accomplish. Examples of new top-level menus might include job management or conference management.

It seemed appropriate that Profile Fields should go into the Users menu, as there is a logical relationship between a user and user profile fields. BuddyPress’ other settings screens allow people to change configuration; they don’t manage content.

If you’re thinking that BuddyPress does let users create new types of content (activities, groups, private messages, forums, and so on), but there’s no truly convenient way for site administrators to manage these, we totally agree.

In 1.6, we’ve created a brand-new top-level Activity admin screen, giving you full management and moderation over your site’s activity items. We’ll be blogging more about this soon, but early adopters can get a copy of “trunk”, our development build of BuddyPress, and take an early look. (Don’t run it on a live site!)

For Site Administrators

Don’t panic! To manage your site’s Profile Fields, you’ll find that under the Users menu. For everything else, you’ll just need to navigate to Settings > BuddyPress, and you’ll find the same set of BuddyPress settings screens that you’re used to.

If you’re using plugins that added items underneath the old top-level menu, you’ll continue to access those in exactly the same place that you do now. We’ll auto-detect and add the top-level menu back, just for those plugins’ screens.

For Developers

Don’t panic! If you’ve written a plugin that added an item underneath the old-top level item, everything will continue to work as it does today — just fine.

To provide that compatibility, we’re auto-detecting and adding the top-level menu back, just for your plugin. We hope that you will consider re-locating your plugin’s settings screens to under WordPress’ Settings menu (or other more appropriate location).

Our trac ticket for this change is #3708, and was first introduced to trunk in r5406.

Today some primitive moderation functions were introduced to BuddyPress core to help combat unwanted submissions to your social network. These take advantage of the same Discussion Settings and illegal keys the WordPress Comments system uses to prevent them from being displayed immediately to your blogs’ audience.

This code currently exists in a new core component file named: bp-core-moderation.php

https://buddypress.trac.wordpress.org/browser/trunk/bp-core/bp-core-moderation.php

The Activity Stream is the first component to take advantage of this new ability. Any new Activity Stream updates that contain any of the illegal keys entered in your Discussion Settings will simply not be saved to the database. This is due to there currently not being a ‘moderation’ queue for activity stream items, which we may implement in a future version of BuddyPress.

The reason we are introducing this feature is simple: it’s your social network, and you reserve the right to keep your members safe from harassment and unfriendly interaction.

We’ll be testing this new feature over at testbp.org shortly, and hope you’ll test and report any issues you find!

• Killed a bunch of bp.org spam overnight… Relentless.
• Patched branch/trunk with user status checks to further prevent topics/posts from spam/deleted users.
• Started building bbPress 2.0 site-wide BuddyPress.org support forums

BP 1.5.1 was just released. Check out the blog post, the changelog, and the Trac milestone.

Thanks to all contributors for your hard work!

Notes from yesterday’s dev chat:

• 1.5.1 will be out soon. Read the fixes so far.
• 1.6′s scope was discussed. The plan is to release 1.6 very close to the WordPress 3.3 release.
• If something doesn’t get finished for 1.6, it will go into 1.7. We really don’t want another release as long as 1.5 took!
• 1.6 big tickets: Akismet & Activity Stream integration (#3660), full bbPress 2.0 support (#3598), an autocomplete/autosuggest for @mentions (#3278), switch to the WP Admin Bar (#3661), new child theme (#3662), and FOAF (#2738).

BuddyPress dev chat is on at its usual time tomorrow, at 19:00 UTC in Freenode. If you want to get involved with the next dev cycle (1.6), now’s a great time!