imath 8:22 pm on October 4, 2022
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BP Dev-Chat summary : September 21, 2022

We’ve started the meeting talking about the latest discussions that happened since we’ve shared our concern about the active installs statistic negative trend into our September 7 dev-chat’s summary. There is some interesting conversations into this WP Tavern post and into these Slack threads here & here. On this subject, we’ve done what we wrote: we’ve published a post explaining the situation and also called for feedbacks and contributions to reverse this trend! We often say it, but it doesn’t hurt to always repeat it: BuddyPress is free & open source software, everyone is welcome to help the project various fields of improvements (documentation, beta testing, support and of course code!)

Our progress about 11.0.0 (next BuddyPress major release)

  • #8734: a basic “private community” feature, instead of using a new option to switch between a public and a private community, we could use the BuddyPress WP Pages post status.
  • #4184: being able to exclude a list of users from the activity stream is an interesting first step to help us building a “muting/blocking” member activity feature.

Both tickets are in need of a first patch, don’t hesitate to jump in!

BP Attachments / Activity block editor update

  • The BP Attachments’ feature as a plugin is now adding a front-end users Media Library (screenshot on the left) as well as Media blocks (screenshot on the right) to use into the Post/Widgets Block Editor as well as the Activity Block Editor 👇.
  • The Activity Block Editor feature as a plugin now includes a new Activity Admin area (to replace the current one) and users can now edit posted activities.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

  • First beta: October 19, 2022 🚨 that’s in two weeks!
  • Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor (how to reverse the trend?)

Here are the various topics we’ve been talking about to start replying to what BuddyPress needs the most to reverse its usage trend.

  • A “health community check” or a Diagnostic/Audit tool to improve security and help users fight against spam accounts, rude behaviors… Quoting @johnjamesjacoby: “A rudimentary and obvious set of global anti-spam settings that are used by every active component, too. Throttling requests. Keywords. Profile fields values. PMs. Group data. Status updates. And an admin-area inbox to funnel all of the failed attempts into, with some kind of crappy confidence score, might not be perfect, but an OK thing to as a new component that could be unplugged or replaced if something better comes along, AI etc…“
  • A new & gorgeous BuddyPress theme block-based (👈 @im4th‘s preference) or not, @vibethemes shared a lot of interests about it and raised some concerns with BuddyPress’ registration area, current design, the lack of customizability, Block template based theme compatibility and… the bp-core-catch-uri.php file which houses our legacy URL parser. @im4th and all the team share the same concerns about this last one, it’s the reason why the BP Rewrites plugin was published on the WordPress Plugin directory (to get more users testing it with their plugins to avoid potential missed back compatibility issues before merging it into BP Core)… @vibethemes even prepared a very interesting presentation. We talked about various stuffs related to theme design (CSS framework/library, webpack etc..). The BuddyPress Core team is totally in favor of building that new great looking theme and will help @vibethemes, @dunhakdis and any other contributors to make this come true asap.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen tomorrow on October 5 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points or ideas you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments, the agenda will be published shortly.

#11-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary, #the-future