#4184: @espellcaste did right including this ticket into this development cycle: being able to exclude activity based on their author is an interesting enhancement.
#8734: we talked about it 2 weeks ago and we should really consider adding a BP Native way to set a site’s community as restricted to its members.
Who’s in to build a new great looking BuddyPress theme? We had very interesting discussions lately into #BuddyPress about working on a BP standalone theme and why not one supporting block templates (in other words a “Full Community Site Editing” theme). We think it’s a great idea, let’s organize to make this happen 🎨
If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.
@im4th & @dcavins had another look to the fix applied in #8715 and agreed it was the right move to avoid having the page to send group invites viewable by non-members of the group (even if it’s not usable to actually invite people to join the group).
This fix is the main reason why @im4th thinks we need to package a maintenance release.
Decision was made to release 10.4.0 before next dev-chat (as dev-chat is tomorrow, it’s more likely to happen before the end of the week, sorry for this delay 😞).
11.0.0 tickets needing attention
#8643.webp image support for user profile images & user cover images. @dcavins gave his feedback about it & thanks to it @im4th improved the patch and committed it. In 11.0.0, you’ll be able to use a .webp image to set your profile photo or cover image 🙌 ✅.
#7614 Group members count routine needed improvements. @dcavins will give a deeper look to it. @im4th suggested to put in place a specific repair tool to eventually perform a recount for out of sync group members counts. This suggestion led to a longer discussion later during the chat see this part of the summary.
Some other tickets were discussed during the chat:
#8604@dcavins & @im4th agreed generating a richer content for mini activities when they are displayed into single items is a bit “too much”. We’ve decided to bring back mini displays for these activities in these areas. In other words, Richer content will only be generated when viewing these mini activities into the Activity Site Wide directory. See this commit for more information about it.
#4535@dcavins volunteered to work on adapting @im4th first patch so that it also fixes the issue about activity duplicates when loading the load more button for the BP Legacy template pack.
Open floor
Let’s introduce a mechanism to safely upgrade a big range of data in batch. This was the subject of the long discussion we had first, calling @boonebgorges to the rescue 🦸🏼♂️. To go straight to the point, he suggested us to use the same mechanism he included into WordPress Core when he needed to upgrade taxonomies to achieve shared-term-splitting, because “you have to make sure that upgrades of this sort degrade gracefully. You have to leave logic in place for what happens when a site hasn’t run through its upgrade routine“. He shared with us links to the key parts of the WordPress code so that we can get some inspiration from his work 😍.
BuddyPress PHP Code Standards: @espellcaste suggested to create a custom BuddyPress PHPCS ruleset that any BP project can use. @im4th agreed it was a good idea and this GH repository has been created to house this ruleset. @espellcaste‘s plan is to progressively improve BP Core’s code so that it comply with this ruleset. It’s a lot of work and if some of you want to give him a hand, you’re very welcome.
#8687: improving the way we load deprecated functions. @dcavins & @im4th had a new discussion about the updated patch @im4th suggested. The new logic is still to only load the last 2 versions deprecated functions in case BuddyPress was upgraded. Improvements were made about dealing with the BP_IGNORED_DEPRECATED constant. If set to true: no deprecated functions are loaded, if set to false all are loaded. @dcavins also thinks we’re going into the right direction. The ticket has been fixed since July 26, 2022. Please read this commit message for more information about it.
#8679: only load template pack assets (styles and JavaScripts) in site’s BuddyPress specific areas. We’ve finally decided to carry on loading template pack assets everywhere by default in version 11.0.0. But we introduced the needed code to stop doing so and restrict the loading of these assets to BuddyPress pages only. Site owners who wish to enjoy it and help us identify potential issues with BuddyPress plugins still expending assets to be loaded everywhere are encouraged to use the filter we’ve put in place – add_filter( 'bp_enqueue_assets_in_bp_pages_only', '__return_true' ); – and keep us updated so that we can safely switch to restricting assets loading during the 12.0.0 development cycle. Have a look at this commit message to know more about it.
#8052: improving how new_blog_post activities content is generated. To go straight to the point: opening the corresponding post should be more intuitive. Links to it were added to the title, featured image and “more link” of the activity content. This “read more” link is generated using the WordPressthe_content_more_link filter which means if your theme is using this filter to adapt the “read more” link, these adaptations will also be applied to the activity “read more” link. Have a look at a preview of how it will look soon:
11.0.0 Tickets needing feedbacks
#8604 Richer logging activities display according to context.
#8643.webp image support for user profile images & user cover images.
#4535 Avoid loading duplicates when clicking on the Load More button.
During the development meeting @dcavins wisely advised to check the number of the WordPress version when the .webp image support were added. After checking, it was in WordPress 5.8. As BuddyPress 11.0.0 will support WordPress back to its 5.7 version, we’ll need to include a version check to the patch.
BP reNouveau and BP Activity Block Editor demo
We’ve used the private audio/video chat feature of slack to run this demo. It worked pretty well! People who attended to it were able to see our latest progress about both features and they look very promising 🤩. About the new template pack, you can follow our progress from this ticket. About the BP Activity Block Editor, @im4th will soon make it testable from a BuddyPress GitHub repository. The achieved worked so far on both features already brought some interesting improvements to our BP REST API (See PRs #447 & #448).
11.0.0 schedule reminder
First beta: October 19, 2022.
Release: December 14, 2022.
Next Dev-Chat
It will happen on August 03 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.
#8604 Richer logging activities display according to context.
#8643.webp image support for user profile images & user cover images.
#4535 Avoid loading duplicates when clicking on the Load More button.
BP reNouveau (see #8722) & BP Activity Block Editor first demos!!!
About the last point on our agenda, we’ll try to use the Slack Group DM’s Audio/Video/Screen sharing tool. If you want me to add you to this group chat, don’t hesitate to say hi! at the beginning of our public dev-chat.
If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.
#8709: bumping BP 11.0.0 required WP version to 5.7. @im4th added a patch to the ticket and will soon commit it. He requested some new eyes to check nothing was missed.
#8687: improving the way we load deprecated functions. @dcavins & @im4th had a longer discussion about it. The new logic is to only load the last 2 versions deprecated functions in case BuddyPress was upgraded. This means brand new installs won’t load deprecated functions. Defining the BP_IGNORED_DEPRECATED constant to true would let new installs load the 2 last versions deprecated functions and defining it to false would load all deprecated functions. @dcavins is amazed by the fact BP > 2.7 installs never had issues although deprecated functions is never loaded in thesee cases. @im4th pointed him to #8702 to illustrate this was actually the opposite happening and said this ticket also needs to be fixed.
#8679: only load template pack assets (styles and JavaScripts) in site’s BuddyPress specific areas. @im4th sees potential issues with Legacy widgets about the first patch he added to the ticket. @dcavins suggested to include a constant to still load these everywhere as some BP plugins might still expect this kind of availability. @im4th agreed we need to think more about it. If you have opinions about it, please add comments to the ticket. We’ll try to be the more conservative possible about it.
#7614: group members count issues. This ticket was reopened after a bug was raised about the changes we introduced in 10.0.0. @im4th asked @dcavins to have a look at it. He believes we might need a new repare tool in case this count is out of sync.
#8693: site membership issue on Multisite configs. @dcavins has a plan about it 💪
Progress on roadmap
During June 22’s dev-chat, we discussed about this roadmap for our next couple of major releases. Here’s how we’re progressing about it.
After exploring potential impacts about our will to remove our dependency to jQuery, @im4th thinks the best approach is to build a new template pack to make this happen. It would be like an evolution of BP Nouveau. He already thought about the name of this new template pack: « BP reNouveau » (FYI: nouveau is the French for new and renouveau is the French for renewal). The idea is to keep all Nouveau look and feel (CSS), avoid code/template duplication by using it as a fallback and focus on using modern JavaScript along with the BP REST API instead of Ajax calls. @im4th secretly hopes reNouveau will be part of the 11.0.0 release.
Attachments / User generated media: it’s 11.0.0 dev cycle main top feature. It’s being developed from our BP Attachments GitHub repository and will be released as a feature as a plugin. After discussing with @dcavins, @im4th thinks v1 should only focus on the Members component. Groups support needs more time to find the best approach about it. So far @im4th has chosen « the media shared in a group belongs to it » approach but doesn’t feel comfortable about it as media should probably always belong to the member who shared it. Problem is: what happens when a member leaves a group? If you have ideas about it, don’t hesitate to share them adding a comment to this GH issue.
11.0.0 initial schedule reminder
First beta: October 19, 2022.
Release: December 14, 2022.
Next Dev-Chat
It will happen on July 20 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.
A new maintenance release of the BuddyPress add-on giving you the power to control every BuddyPress generated URL is now ready for download. Please upgrade.
BP Dev Updates 