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We’re going to be packaging up BuddyPress 1.7 imminently. Last chance to hit us with any issues regarding:

• Theme Compatability
• Groups Admin
• Users queries
• Security issues

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Spent some time today cleaning up the many international subdomains we have at BuddyPress.org. If you are an admin for one of these sites, take a look around and make sure things aren’t too broken. A few things:

• Cleaned up about 5k pending spam comments across all the sites. Yikes!
• It’s using some unified header magic right now. You don’t have control over the menus yet.
• If you want forums, just ask. I activated bbPress on a few of the recently active sites, though I didn’t make any forums for them.
• If you’re not an admin for any language, but want to be, post here and I’ll be in touch.
• If you’re an admin and don’t want to be anymore, speak up in case someone else wants to take it over.
• If you want to trick out your subdomain i18n site beyond what is immediately obvious, comment here so we can figure out how to make it happen.

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Updated BuddyPress.org to use the latest bbPress trunk, which enables forum wide search.

Finally.

We’ll keep iterating on the templates, sidebar, and layout. Right now it’s a little wonky.

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In BuddyPress 1.7, we’re concentrating on simplifying as much of the experience of using BuddyPress as we can. Part of this involves removing the update/installation wizard and replacing it with simple automation; because making out-of-context decisions immediately after activating BuddyPress didn’t really make anyone happy.

We’ll take care of the complexities and decision making, and redirect to a “What’s New” page similar to WordPress and bbPress.

Developers: if you somehow managed to write a plugin that used the old wizard (we purposefully did not make it very extensible) consider this your warning that it is already gone in BuddyPress trunk.

Those of you that really liked it, we think you’ll like the new experience even more. If not, be sure to let us know what you think and why when 1.7 is released.

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An agenda item for this coming weeks BuddyPress core dev chat, is determining what components we’d like to have on by default. From #4671:

In Vancouver, the core team (minus Paul) discussed the idea of switching up the default components that BuddyPress comes activated with. I think the “all-on” approach is overwhelming for new users, can be confusing, and isn’t a very rewarding experience.

Since every component is pretty awesome, and they all rely on each other in some way, the idea of turning components off at all is a little weird at first. Each component has strengths, weaknesses, and potential to be extended into something more than it starts as.

I’m mostly agnostic about which components make the most sense as the default ones, but if I had to pick a favorite, I think having activity streams and profiles turned on, with everything else turned off, would make the best starter experience, and here’s why:

• Profiles are completely missing from WordPress.
• Friends don’t make sense without profiles.
• Groups don’t make sense without users and profiles.
• Settings doesn’t make sense without profiles.
• Private messaging is useless without a profile to connect it to.
• Forums come with bbPress now, and don’t need profiles to function at all.
• Activity streams don’t make sense without profiles, but they can run pretty silently in the background and aggregate activity.

It’s true that even with the XProfile component off, BuddyPress still fakes the profile experience pretty well. I’m imagining an activation experience without a setup wizard. One where when BuddyPress is activated on a new installation, the admin is greeted with a message like:

Welcome to your new community! Check out your new profile to get started

With a tabbed What’s New/Credits page like WordPress core has, we could easily explain what the components are, and why they might want to roll them out over time. Opening this up for discussion here, with the intention of getting this decided shortly after this weeks dev chat, and into trunk soon after.

Join in on Wednesday (time/location in the sidebar) and help us shape the new user experience in BuddyPress 1.7.

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Just converted our BuddyPress test site (testbp.org) over to using bbPress 2.x for group forums.

• 328 group forums
• 848 topics
• 1204 replies

Because of the way we configured that site originally, it’s an odd setup. Suffice it to say, it works pretty well, but having hierarchically nested forums several layers deep tends to be a performance burden. This is something that the old forums suffered from too, and will be addressed in future versions of bbPress.

That said, what’s in bbPress now should be considered final for a 2.2 release, barring any obvious bugs uncovered in the next few days.

Once bbPress 2.2 is out, I’ll be converting the support forums at BuddyPress.org over. This will come with some significant updates to the site as a whole, as we work towards unifying some of the BuddyPress/bbPress/WordPress .org experience.

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The next feature up for grabs is BuddyPress’s Theme compatibility. #3741 You’ve got to see it to believe how good it works.

For a quick v1, I’ve literally coped templates directly from bp-default, and tweaked them to work.

TwentyEleven:

http://cl.ly/image/3J3v1N0Z3I3M

TwentyTwelve:

http://cl.ly/image/1L3s282b2z3g

Neither theme has any modifications done to them. No child themes, no custom CSS, it’s just BuddyPress filling things in. For release, we’d polish everything up and trim out as much markup and CSS as possible.

Please give this patch some love. It’s pretty large, and could really use some testing.

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Since the inception of WordPress’s custom post type API, the BuddyPress core team has been bouncing ideas back and forth on how we could possibly take advantage of all the goodness it has to offer. With bbPress recently making the move last year, and BuddyPress taking advantage of that in the coming version, we’re slowly and carefully inching towards trying it out.

A few things to consider:

• The scalability concerns of BuddyPress on single-site WordPress become apparent much more quickly when everything is in the same set of WordPress database tables
• Even something as straightforward as bbPress had to pull serious strings to use custom post types. Components like Groups, Friends, and Activity will be exponentially more complex.
• By moving to custom post types, we inherit TONS of awesome features we don’t have in BuddyPress today: Trash, Import/Export, post_status, roles/caps, taxonomies, etc…
• Migration is a pain, and writing scripts to transition each component over safely is hugely important.
• Custom post types take much of the weight off the BuddyPress core team. It lowers the barrier of entry to get familiar with BuddyPress, and hopefully will increase both WordPress and BuddyPress core contributions.
• Some things just aren’t meant to be custom post types. Things like user-to-user relationships, profile fields, etc… The schema for post types doesn’t really make any sense here; does it make sense to move components over just for the sake of doing it?

Any feedback is great feedback. We really want to get as much as we can get from everyone in the WordPress community, to get a sense on the direction you want us to take for future versions. We think we’re on track, but we won’t know unless we ask.

Thanks in advance for your time and thoughts.

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Started chipping away at the admin settings and forums screens this weekend, in preparation for bbPress 2.x migration logic.

• Moved the complicated bbPress 1.x config-file setup to settings page
• New bbPress 1.x installs are no longer possible in BuddyPress trunk
• Forums settings page slowly being deprecated in lieu of it being a temporary setup/migration tab only
• Actual Forums Settings will be controlled by bbPress going forward
• bbPress 2.1-r3773 and beyond have preliminary Group Forums setup in place

Some todo’s:

• bbPress 2.1 Group Forum admin and edit screens
• Clear migration path from bbPress 1.x to 2.x
• Improve bbPress 1.x to 2.x migration script to make sure it’s bullet proof. See #BBP1592

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Pushed a bunch of updates through to the codex. It now matches the refreshed BuddyPress.org site, and has some extra goodies in the sidebar to let everyone know who owns and has revised what pages. Eventually I’ll add some activity stream integration in for revisions, which I think will help give credit where it’s due.

I also enabled some custom taxonomies to help categorize the pages.

Take a look around and report back anything that might be broken.