imath 1:58 pm on October 18, 2019
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BP Dev Chat Summary: October 16, 2019

The Dev Chat started 20 minutes late: we’re not completely used to the new meeting time (NB: 18:00 UTC every other wednesday)

“Think”

The BuddyPress Blocks poll

@im4th posted the poll on this site and into a topic of the BuddyPress forums on October 10. After 6 days, the community participation is very week. It’s difficult to figure out what are people expectations. Here are the “top blocks” :

  • A block to share a post or a page via the Activity Stream (14 votes)
  • A block to list the recently published posts from across your network (Exists as a widget) (13 votes)
  • A block to dynamicaly list the recently active, popular, newest, or alphabetical groups (Exists as a widget) (11 votes)
  • A block to display Sitewide Notices posted by the site administrator (Exists as a widget) (11 votes)

The least we can say is there doesn’t seem to be a great enthousiasm for BuddyPress Blocks… As JJJ said maybe “the concept of BuddyPress blocks is not an easy one”.

How can we improve the way users get help?

This is a subject we couldn’t talk about during previous dev chat. There are a lot of topics posted on forums, and a lot are remaining without replies. @johnjamesjacoby thinks and I guess he’s right:

I believe, in general, the more activity there is from BuddyPress maintainers on the site, the more that others are likely to engage with us and each other.

So the first thing we can do is to try to contribute ourselves to forum replies as much as we can. Then here are the other ideas we had :

  • A styling refresh of the homepage and forums area.
  • Add some self care content. Eg: the replies to common issues users may encounter when starting with BuddyPress.
  • Moving the “bpdevel site” (this site) to a new make.BuddyPress.org site might help to bring some new contributors to forums. (@im4th announced he will soon share the work he has been doing about this project).

Let’s organize a BuddySesh!

To follow up the nice discussion @im4th had with David Bisset (@dimensionmedia) we’ve been briefly talking about this possible way of gathering BuddyPress contributors from all around the world for a day of conferences / chats. We’ll come back on the subject with David once the WordCamp US is behind us as he’s pretty busy contributing to its Programming team.

“Do”

BuddyPress Beta Tester plugin (& 5.1.0 minor release)

The GitHub repository for the BuddyPress Beta Tester plugin has been published. According to @im4th‘s tests, it’s working fine. To test it with a real Beta Version, @im4th suggested to soon package a 5.1.0-beta. We’ll need to publish it on the WordPress.org official directory once we feel it’s ready.

BP REST API

@espellcaste made great progress about the remaining endpoints of the BP REST API. There are now 3 more endpoints available for testing using the BP REST API Plugin :

BuddyPress Survey for 2019

@im4th suggested to carry on doing the survey @mercime used to do every year for a while now. The last one was done at the end of 2017 for 2018.

Next dev-chat

It will happen on October 30 at 18:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. Friendly reminder that we moved our dev-chat time to one hour earlier, 🙏 don’t miss it!

PS: if you have ideas or questions, feel free (and we are strongly encouraging you) to comment this summary to share them!

#5-0-0, #6-0-0