BP Docs-Chat Summary April 24, 2024

• See previous BP Docs-Chat Summary April 10, 2024
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th @vapvarun @emaralive
• Slack Archive

BP Documentation tracker status.

Between April 10 & April 24, we haven’t progressed much about documentation. We were very busy working on the 12.4.1 security release and on the 14.0.0 tickets.

• PR created : 0
• PR reviewed : 0
• PR converted : 0

The need to prioritize Documentation tasks

Following up our previous discussions about our various Multisite configs…

@vapvarun shared with us the great work he’s been doing into this area to prepare a documentation resource about it. He made 4 videos to explain the 4 possible BP Multisite configs:

BP Activated at the Network level, community area on main site of the network

BP only activated on one of the site of the network.

BP Activated at the Network level, community area on a secondary site of the Network

BP Multiblog config 🧗‍♂️

@im4th shared his feelings about all these set-ups : as we’re a short contributor team, we need to prioritize what we document according to the “popularity” of the set-up (in terms of number of people using it). Let’s pick the 2 or 3 most used configs and concentrate on their documentations.

@vapvarun picked the 3 first configs to work on a PR he has since submitted 💪 . He also plans to work on pushing PRs about these 2 other migrate tasks:

• Language & translations
• Label, message and link customizations

Documentation pages to use in BP Admin Screen help tabs

@emaralive has been referencing all BP Admin Screens needing a documentation link into this GH discussion. We decided to share migrate tasks about these documentation pages this way:

• Group Types screen: @vapvarun is in charge
• BP Emails & BP Email tokens: @im4th is in charge (both have been migrated since)
• Including a documentation link to the BP Signups Admin screen: @emaralive is in charge (Patch has been committed since).
• BP Invitations Admin screens: @dcavins will look into it.

Open Floor

@emaralive made a very interesting “map” of all Admin places where BuddyPress is adding pages.

@vapvarun introduced Pooja Sahgal to the team, she will regularly contribute to BP Forums, welcome on board 😍.

Next Docs-Chat

It will happen on May 15, 2024 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. (We decided to postpone meetings by a week to fully test BuddyPress 12.4.1 & prepare a 12.5 minor release).

#docs-chat, #documentation, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Agenda May 2, 2024

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on May 2 at 19:00 UTC (today!) in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

• Needed follow-up to 12.4.1 Security Release.
  • Build a new maintenance release (12.5.0) to fix some too conservative or wrong escapes (asap!).
  • Make 14.0.0 and following BP versions include a WPCS Security Escape check for each grunt commit or PR submission.
• 14.0.0 ticket updates
• Open floor

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

PS: this meeting as well as next week one are exceptionally happening on a Thursday (due to the fact May 1^st and May 8^th are days off in 🇫🇷).

#14-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat

BP Dev-Chat Summary April 17, 2024

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary April 3 (2024)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th @emaralive @espellcaste @vapvarun
• Slack archive

🧰 BuddyPress 14.0.0

We first talked about ticket #8728 (allowing group mods/admins to delete corresponding group activities):

• @emaralive did a great job reviewing existing group roles capabilities. We now have a clear understanding of these.
• He also worked on fixing the filter callback so that it actually do what it was built for: allowing group mods/admins to delete corresponding activities.
• @espellcaste has prepared unit tests about it.
• The last point we needed to take a decision about was to introduce a global community setting to let the site’s Administrator to allow/disallow group mods/admins to delete activity as well as a « per group » basis setting to let the group creator to allow/disallow this delegation for their group. We all agreed it will be a nice addition. So next steps about this ticket is to build the corresponding UIs (BP Settings Admin screen + Group’s create/manage/admin screens).
• As this summary is being written very late, @emaralive has updated the patch on the ticket 4 days ago and suggests we don’t need a group setting: promoting members to mods or admins seems sufficient.

We then talked about the Activity Block Editor (see ticket #8319):

« Videmo » of the BP Activity Block Editor Add-on

• It’s still a work in progress that needs improvements such as being able to use this editor to comment an activity (@emaralive noted it), making sure using the paragraph block’s alignment button actually aligns the posted activity.
• It replaces the current Activity WP Admin screen with a specific Activity stream using this editor to post, edit & comment existing activities.
• Goal is to first publish it as « feature as a plugin » on WordPress Plugin directory, see how people welcome/use it before eventually merging it into the BP Activity component.

We finally talked about other tickets progress:

• #8976 Adding custom xProfile fields to registration REST API endpoint: @espellcaste has made great progress about it and should have it fixed soon.
• #9129 Automated tests with cache services: @espellcaste informed us we’d need a specific GitHub Action to reach this goal as it doesn’t seem possible to use the WordPress env package.
• #6123 has been fixed, 14.0.0 won’t create users during a regular WP user registration, see this developer note for additional information.

14.0.0 schedule reminder

• June 3: 14.0.0-beta1.
• July 8: 14.0.0.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen today Thursday May 2, 2024 at 19:00 UTC (exceptionaly as yesterday was a day off) in #BuddyPress.

#14-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat, #summary

BuddyPress 12.4.1 Security Release

Please upgrade asap.

BuddyPress 12.4.1 Security Release

🚨🙏

#12-4-1, #release, #security

BP Docs-Chat Agenda April 24, 2024

Hi!

Our next documentation meeting will happen on April 24 at 19:00 UTC (today) in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

• BP Documentation tracker status.
• Let’s prioritize documentation for WP Admin Help Tabs.
• Open floor.

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss, please share them in the comments area of this post.

#agenda, #docs-chat

Signups are becoming members only after validating their accounts

BuddyPress is using the $wpdb->signups table to manage signups since 2.0.0. This table which is only available into the WordPress Multisite DB schema is generated by BuddyPress on regular WordPress installs.

For 10 years we’ve been carrying on creating users to preserve backwards compatibility with 3^rd party plugins relying on our “prehistorical” way of dealing with signups on regular WordPress configs, today we are finally deprecating this behavior to improve BuddyPress consistency and fix this 9 years old issue.

If you are still playing with the activation_key user meta and the {$wpdb->users}.user_status (which we used to set to 2 to mark a user as a signup), please update your code so that you now fully enjoy our BP Signups API.

In 14.0.0, we are throwing deprecation notices if you use the BP “prehistorical” way to deal with signups, but please note we will completely remove this code in 15.0.0.

#14-0-0, #developers

BP Dev-Chat Agenda April 17, 2024

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on April 17 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

• What about Group role caps? See #8728.
• Progress about the BP Activity Block Editor. See #8319.
• Other 14.0.0 ticket updates
• Open floor

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

🚀 💫

#14-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat

BP Dev-Chat Summary April 3, 2024

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary March 20 (2024)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th @emaralive @espellcaste @vapvarun
• Slack archive

🧰 BuddyPress 14.0.0

Although we planned to share the progress we achieved about 14.0.0 tickets, just after @vapvarun informed he will work on #9097 (Member type assignment), we focused our attention on Group roles (#8728: making sure the group’s moderator role can better assist the group’s administrators).

Let’s clarify what can do each advanced role of a Group

If #8728 is about letting group moderators delete group activities, we extended the discussion to group admins and a particular group admin : the group creator.

• The bug: it looks like this filter callback is not doing the job it should. Group moderators according to this code should be able to delete group activities.
• @im4th’s concern: deleting someone else content is a serious move. He personally thinks instead of deleting the activity, all group roles should only be able to remove the activity from the group or spam it. He also hardly understands why an activity could be deleted as it’s possible to spam & kick a group member. He asked to check what happens to activities a group member shared within the group once they are marked as spammer or kicked out of the group.
• BP Team’s majority is thinking group moderators and admins should be able to delete group activities and understands why sometime we might need to delete one off topic activity instead of spamming the group member.
• @emaralive suggested to leave site admins then group admins choose about whether group activities can be moderated:
  • Site owner determines whether group activities can be moderated.
  • Group creator/admins determine whether group mods can moderate group activities.
• When Akismet is active, activities can be marked as spams. @vapvarun suggested to use the activity spam flag to allow moderation within a group. He then quicky checked if group admins or moderators can use this feature: it turned out only Site Admins can use it!
• Finally, @im4th suggested the following steps to clarify the situation:
  • Test widely what a mod can do in a group (eg: can he ban/kick/spam a user, delete an activity etc..)
  • Test widely what a group admin can do
  • Test widely what a group creator can do
  • Understand why the `bp_groups_filter_activity_user_can_delete` filter is not doing what it should.
• @emaralive who is assigned on the ticket agreed & will investigate 🕵️‍♂️.

14.0.0 schedule reminder

• June 3: 14.0.0-beta1.
• July 8: 14.0.0.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on Wednesday April 17, 2024 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#14-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat April 3, 2024

Hi!

Our next development meeting will happen on April 3 at 19:00 UTC (today) in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda:

• 14.0.0 ticket updates
• Open floor

If you have specific/additional points you need to discuss about, please share them into the comments area of this post.

🌱☘️

#14-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat

BP Dev-Chat Summary March 20, 2024

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary March 4 (2024)
• In attendance: @dcavins @im4th @emaralive @espellcaste @vapvarun
• Slack archive

📦 12.4.0 minor release

During the chat we discussed about the opportunity to build this maintenance release a bit before WordPress 6.5. @emaralive volunteered to test the last unfixed ticket of the milestone (See #9086). At the end of our chat @vapvarun brought #9096 to the discussion. The Last activity repair tool has become obsolete and we forgot to remove it from the available BP tools. Site Admins who used it so far experienced a very annoying effect: after the last activity item are removed they are not generated back. Result is the Members directory can have no active users displayed. We’ve explained why this tool was added in BuddyPress 2.0 and came to the conclusion it should now be removed to prevent the issue about « vanishing » Active Members. We evaluated we couldn’t wait for a major release like we’re used to do for such a change and decided to fix it into this maintenance release. 12.4.0 was released on March 25.

🧰 BuddyPress 14.0.0

Thanks to #9086 patch, @dcavins transitioned to a ticket slated to the 14.0.0 milestone: #9063. The goal of this ticket is to be able to have BP directory pages as children of another one. Instead of doing this @im4th’s plan is to only use the WP rewrite rules improving the BP Rewrites API to make support custom root prefix (eg: replace / by /community/ for instance.

The Site Wide Notices debate

In short, @im4th opened this ticket #9098 to explain why he thinks this feature should become a Core feature instead of being dependent of the BP Messages component.

• At the beginning of the debate, moving it to the BP Notifications component (probably to improve consistency) seemed a better option.
• @im4th’s concern was not satisfied with this scenario as it’s still an optional component: using Site Wide Notices to replace the Admin Notifications workaround we introduced in version 11.4.0 couldn’t be achieved as this component might be not active on some setups. He’d rather wait for the WP Notifications feature as a plugin in this case.
• @espellcaste then suggested to build a new BP Add-on for this Notice feature. In this case we’d still need to use the Admin Notifications workaround to inform Admin Users about the big changes we plan to achieve in BuddyPress future. As @dcavins noted « Yes, the 11.4 workaround was pretty workaroundy. » 😅
• @espellcaste last suggestion reached a consensus: build Site Wide Notices as a Core feature but make sure it integrates well with the Notifications component when active.
• @im4th shared the main goals of this Core change:
  • improve the Site Wide Notices feature right away so that Admin Users can read our important messages but not into the WordPress Admin Notices traffic jam.
  • & let Admin Users still using it to inform all community members at once on the front-end (the current feature).

14.0.0 top features

1. @emaralive suggested #8319: using the Block Editor to write BP Activities. The potential for such an editor for the Activity component is very interesting: for instance BP Attachments is already using « Activity blocks » to post media from the Activity Block Editor (feature as a plugin). We could add Polls, Links etc…
2. @dcavins suggested #1058: being able to export / import BP Data is something we’ve been thinking about for a while and it would be nice to engage into the Data Liberation WordPress project.
3. @emaralive also suggested #9057: being able to deactivate the BP registration workflows. Building it as an optional component is not the road @im4th thinks we should take. Instead it should be a « deactivable » Members feature. @dcavins will look at it starting slowly by only using the WP signups table and stop creating users on regular WordPress sites.
4. @dcavins also suggested #8728: making sure the group’s moderator role can better assist the group’s administrators. @emaralive is working on it and thinks he will fix the ticket during the 14.0.0 development cycle.

Finally we quicky talked about BuddyPress permissions management and realized there’s a lot of possible improvements to bring to this part of the software.

14.0.0 schedule reminder

• June 3: 14.0.0-beta1.
• July 8: 14.0.0.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on Wednesday April 3, 2024 at 19:00 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#12-0-0, #14-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary