BP Dev-Chat summary : November 9, 2022

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary November 2
• In attendance: @dcavins @espellcaste @johnjamesjacoby @im4th
• Slack archive.

Unfortunately @vibethemes wasn’t able to join the meeting to share with us his progress about the BP Standalone Theme he’s been working on. We adapted our agenda to talk about 11.0.0-beta1 and 11.0.0 changes needing docs.

11.0.0-beta1 first feedbacks

• An issue was raised into our Support forum topic. We believe this issue is specific to the active WordPress theme as we’re not able to reproduce with one of the WordPress default bundled themes.
• Within the same forum topic, another minor layout improvement was discussed and later fixed in #8761.

11.0.0 changes needing docs

@dcavins & @im4th selected the tickets they will post documentation about in this site.

• @dcavins will deal with #4184 (Activity loop arguments change) & #4075 (xProfile groups loop arguments change)
• @im4th will work on #8679 (restrict BP Assets loading to community areas) & #8687 (Deprecated code loading).
• About this last ticket @johnjamesjacoby suggested to rename the constant to load all deprecated code to BP_LOAD_DEPRECATED. We all agreed it was the right way of naming it. The change has been committed to Trunk version.
• Finally the change about the .webp image format support will be documented by the first of us to have finished documented their tickets.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

• RC: December 1^st, 2022.
• Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor

During this part of the chat, we took the time to help @dcavins to fix PHPUnit testing suite, if like him you had the right idea to use the one we include into the development version of the plugin based on Docker, you can read this discussion to help you restart from scratch!

@johnjamesjacoby shared his intent to improve BuddyPress.org typography especially into the site’s Forum.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen this week on November 23 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.

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

BP Dev-Chat summary : October 5, 2022

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (September 21, 2022)
• In attendance: @dcavins @espellcaste @johnjamesjacoby & @im4th
• Slack archive.

We’ve started the meeting talking about the 17 replies our call for feedbacks got at the time of the meeting. There are great remarks, ideas and suggestions. Many thanks to the contributors who shared their very inspiring thoughts. We value them a lot 😍.

11.0.0 updates

• #8590: Cache improvements. The initial PR made by @nickchomey has been committed. We had a discussion about whether to include the other improvements that were added by a buddyboss-platform team member (This ticket was firslty added as a PR to the buddyboss-platform GitHub repository). The majority of the team thinks as code is open source & GPL compatible, there’s no reason not to enjoy these improvements as long as we properly credit its author and the buddyboss-platform project.
• #8734: we’ve discussed about @dcavins first patch about how to implement a basic “private community” feature. Although the patch is already doing a great job and is a very interesting first approach, @im4th agrees with @johnjamesjacoby : a better one would be to think of it as a community visibility “level”. As announced during the chat, @im4th had a closer look to the patch and started an alternative PR to suggest the introduction of a bp_read cap which led to interesting new feedbacks on the ticket. Don’t hesitate to test it, and contribute to the ticket’s discussion.
• #4184: being able to exclude a list of users from the activity stream is now possible in Core. This commit closed the ticket.
• @im4th reminded the team we had 2 weeks left before the date we initially scheduled 11.0.0 first beta and asked @espellcaste to try to make the list of the tickets he owns for 11.0.0 less bigger (selecting the tickets we absolutely need to include in 11.0.0 and punting others to a next release).

11.0.0 schedule reminder

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

10.5.0 Maintenance release

@im4th announced he will package this maintenance release shortly before WordPress 6.1 is released so that BuddyPress behaves the best way into the next WP Default theme (Twenty Twenty-Three). If he finds the time, he’d like to finish optimizing some CSS rules about it. Don’t hesitate to give him a hand contributing to this ticket.

Open floor

About the BuddyPress.org website @johnjamesjacoby really wants us to feel more comfortable iteratively improving it, and asked the team to think about how we want to contribute to it. @im4th volunteered to give John’s a hand and maybe try to work on the list of submitted tickets about the website. As @dcavins noted, some of their authors are first time contributors and it would be great to include their suggestions. @espellcaste wants to spend more time on developer.buddypress.org along with PHPDoc improvements.

The new & gorgeous BuddyPress theme has a name and a GitHub repository, don’t hesitate to contribute to it.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen tomorrow on October 19 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.

#10-0-0, #11-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat summary : September 21, 2022

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (September 7, 2022)
• In attendance: @dcavins @espellcaste @johnjamesjacoby @dunhakdis @vibethemes @im4th
• Slack archive.

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

BP Dev-Chat summary : September 7, 2022

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (August 17, 2022)
• In attendance: @dcavins @espellcaste @im4th
• Slack archive.

BP Attachments / Activity block editor update

• @im4th has started working on templating to display single media on the front-end.
• He also made it possible to share media using the Activity Block Editor when the BP Attachements plugin is active. This means block developers could soon enjoy a new playground to express themselves.
• The BP Attachments Admin UI now includes an “Edit Item” view. See the screenshot below.

11.0.0 updates

• @im4th shared he was hesitant about #8052. Now the blog post title is directly included into the corresponding activity type’s content, we don’t need to use a blog meta to retrieve it inside the activity action string anymore.
• @dcavins suggested to request a feedback from @rayisme who worked on this part and should be the best of us to know whether it’s safe or not to make this move in 11.0.0.

11.0.0 schedule reminder

• First beta: October 19, 2022.
• Release: December 14, 2022.

Open floor

@im4th started discussing about the drop on the active installations stat we observed on the BuddyPress WP.org plugin’s page as it went down from 200k to 100k 😱. Thanks to @johnjamesjacoby we were able to get more precise numbers about this decrease and it turns out we’re around 190/195k active installs. But the trend since year 2017 is concerning as it’s 📉 not to mention the fact there are less and less contributors to the project 😭. We’ve discussed about the possible reasons for these bad results:

• lack of cool front-end things added to the plugin recently,
• hesitancy to install a big plugin like BuddyPress for a single feature,
• lack of privacy tools, of a media component,
• growth of the use of things like Teams and Slack,
• BuddyBoss’s commercial aggressivity (eg: Google Adwords) or their slick-looking theme attractivity,
• etc..

As the BP Attachments add-on should be available around the 11.0.0 release date, the first action we took was to open a ticket about including a basic private community feature into our next major release.

After some more discussions with @espellcaste we came to the conclusion we need more data from users. A new survey was suggested as well as asking the WordPress Marketing Team for help. We finally thought about posting into our support forum this simple question “what is the most important feature that BuddyPress is missing?“. We decided to test this last idea as soon as we have a text to explain why we are questionning ourselves about it. If you believe you have answers to share with us, don’t hesitate to comment this post 🙏.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on September 21 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. If you have specific points you want to discuss about, don’t hesitate to share them in comments.

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

BP Dev-Chat Summary : June 8, 2022 & June 22 BP Dev-Chat agenda

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (June 8, 2022)
• In attendance: @dcavins @johnjamesjacoby @im4th
• Slack archive.

Features for BuddyPress next major release (11.0.0)

The BP Attachments React based UI

• @im4th shared a GitHub link to an issue summarizing what is/will be inside the BP Attachments feature informing the delete action was still missing. Since this chat, he included this action to the React based UI. As you can see in the above screenshot, one of the goal is to be able to create folders to organize user generated media.
• @im4th & @johnjamesjacoby agreed it was ok to bump WordPress required version to 5.7 in BuddyPress 11.0.0, see #8709.
• As we lost ourselves into endless conversations about using PHPCS, @im4th said he would like to see a first patch added to #7228. He thinks this patch should include a GitHub action so that GitHub PR submitted to our repository could be checked against the PHPCS rules we choose to observe.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen today on June 22 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. Here’s our agenda :

• A new strategy for a Block based activity post form.
• BP Attachments & Media in 11.0.0
• Let’s work on things we can use for BuddyPress.org: a new bundled BP Theme (as a replacement to BP Default?)
• Let’s work on removing our dependency to jQuery.
• BP Rewrites 1.3.0: bbPress forward compatibility!

Let’s try to be a lot of BuddyPress contributors to join this chat 🙏🤝

#11-0-0, #agenda, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Summary : February 2, 2022.

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (January 5, 2022)
• In attendance: @johnjamesjacoby @rekmla @im4th
• Slack archive.

Unfortunately, not many of us could join the meeting. Points about 10.0 first feedbacks, 10.1.0 release schedule and the documentation effort were not really discussed.

10.1.0

@im4th shared his concern about the regression we introduced about the custom xProfile field options sort order, it’s now fixed. See #8623.

10.1.0 schedule

• 10.1.0 stable: TBD 🎯

Documentation improvements

@im4th simply shared this message: “if you’re interested in contributing to the BuddyPress documentation, don’t hesitate to ping me. We’d like to improve the BP codex and we’ll need help“

Open floor

@rekmla shared feedbacks about the 10.0.0 Site Membership request feature.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on February 16 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. The agenda will be the same as it was for this chat 😉

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Summary : January 5, 2022.

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (December 22, 2021)
• In attendance: @vapvarun @dcavins @johnjamesjacoby @im4th
• Slack archive.

Some complementary explanations about the 9.2.0 release

@im4th started the meeting saying some words about this minor version which was released on January 3rd. The download spike (~39K downloads) was reached on January 4th. He apologized about the fact he took the decision quite in a rush without discussing about it during a dev-chat. He explained he wanted to have the BP Search Block released in the WordPress.org directory the soonest so that he could focus on the BP Rewrites feature as a plugin for the coming 15 days. 9.2.0 is including a change needed by the BP Search Block (activity search redirection support).

About BP Rewrites, @johnjamesjacoby wants to dive deeper into the plugin. @im4th said it was ok to delay its release after BuddyPress 10.0.0, if needed, as it’s a BP plugin. He also shared his opinion about a BP Core potential merge.

I believe it needs to stay an add-on for at least 2 major BuddyPress releases, there are too many plugins we need to make sure they still behave right before thinking about merging it into BP Core.

imath

Finishing the 10.0.0 Hello BuddyPress screen

If you’ve started testing the RC1 release (if not, do it now!), you already saw it has been finished (See #8605). During the chat, we’ve decided about the 10.0.0 features we want to highlight into this screen:

• Site membership requests
• Richer logging activities
• Improved BuddyPress Administration experience
• The BuddyPress Add-ons tab added to the “Add new” Plugin Administration screen.
• The fact we’ve made sure to be compatible with Twenty Twenty-Two (and full site editing more globally)
• Inside the “under the hood section”: the performance improvements brought by @oztaser (#8296, #8591 & #8426), the Avatar Recycle view as well as BP Signups improvements (#8540).

We also decided to release RC1 as soon as we could (it happened 2 days later) as we already postponed twice our schedule.

Last 10.0.0 schedule

• 10.0.0-RC: January 7, 2022 🏁 ✅
• 10.0.0 stable: January 17, 2022 🎯

Open floor

@dcavins has been using the 10.0.0-beta2 release on some decent traffic sites and it seems to be working well 💪 😎

@vapvarun brought up to our attention this support forum topic. Our discussion about it lead to an important decision for our next major release : if ! is_buddypress() no more BP Template Pack CSS/JS. @imath also wishes we use a more modular approach for our JavaScript assets as well as less/no dependency to jQuery.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on January 19 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. We should be able to check the first feedbacks about 10.0.0 😉

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Summary : December 8, 2021.

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (December 1st, 2021)
• In attendance: @dcavins @vapvarun @johnjamesjacoby @im4th
• Slack archive.

10.0.0 Progress

Updates about featured tickets

#8582 Add site membership requests

@dcavins fixed the multisite issues about the feature, @im4th confirmed the fixes made the feature works as expected on the WordPress multisite config. @dcavins decided to add complementary explanations about how the feature deals with multisite registration options. He committed the code yesterday and BuddyPress 10.0.0 is now offering a Site Membership Request feature 🙌. Congratulations to @dcavins 💪.

#8451 Extending no content activities with images and call of actions

@vapvarun brought some nice improvements about how we load activity types template part and also added some new layouts for “no-content” activities. @im4th still had to finish the Avatar Recycle UI so that users can reuse a previously uploaded avatar or permanently delete a previously uploaded avatar.

#8148 Extend WordPress Plugins screen to allow Admins to easily install features as a plugin

@johnjamesjacoby added the BP Beta Tester plugin to the BuddyPress WP.org user favorites so that we have a first BuddyPress Add-on into the new WP Admin “Add New” plugin screen. The ticket is now closed and we’ll soon be able to publish new add-ons like the BP Rewrites plugin to the WordPress.org Plugin directory. Here’s a preview of this new screen:

Other tickets needing attention

• @vapvarun will have a look to #7540 to try to have it fixed before the 10.0.0 stable release.

10.0.0 schedule

We’re adding the very final touches to the first 10.0.0 beta release… get ready for it!

• 10.0.0-beta1: in a few of hours 👈
• 10.0.0 stable: January 5, 2022 🎯

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen next week on December 15 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress.

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Summary : November 17, 2021.

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (November 3, 2021)
• In attendance: @dcavins @vapvarun @johnjamesjacoby @im4th
• Slack archive.

10.0.0 Progress

The first thing we’ve discussed about was the scheduled date for the first beta release of BuddyPress 10.0.0. @im4th shared his concern about the fact he would not be able to test/review the latest improvements brought to the site request membership feature #8582 by @dcavins as well as the “no-content” activities patch @vapvarun was about to add to the ticket (#8451) before November 20 (beta1 initial scheduled date). He requested to use 2 more weeks before releasing beta1. Although @vapvarun was in favor of only adding 1 week, @im4th argued he was prefering to delay by 2 weeks once instead of by 1 week twice. @dcavins also thinks a 2 weeks delay is good and should help us to fix some other tickets.

New 10.0.0 schedule

• 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ december 3, 2021 👈
• 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

Updates about featured tickets

• #8451 Extending no content activities with images and call to actions: @vapvarun announced he was about to submit a first patch about the feature.
• #8582 Add site membership requests: we think we should use a new action link instead of links into a new WP List Table column to open the modal. @im4th will try to build an inline-edit feature using the BP REST API and we’ll be able to replace the modal link with the inline-edit one if it’s ready before first beta. @dcavins will also try to avoid adding an upgrade routine to edit the existing $wpdb->base_prefix . 'signups' table rows and use instead a new meta to differentiate site membership requests from signups. The last touch about the feature will be to update the list of BP Emails so that it includes the ones needed by the feature.
• #8594 Legacy Widgets: next step before deprecation: @vapvarun shared his concern about it considering the number of downloads of the Classic Widget editor plugin. After checking the ticket’s patch and the plugin’s code, @im4th reassured @vapvarun telling him the legacy widgets would still be available for people using this plugin. He’ll do some more tests to be 100% sure about it.

Open floor

@im4th thinks we shouldn’t include more BP Blocks into BP Core and that we should start using standalone blocks and publish them into the WordPress.org Blocks directory (which is actually using the plugins directory). @dcavins thinks it’s an interesting idea. @vapvarun is not convinced (yet 😁) about it especially when considering these blocks are increasing the number of active plugins on sites. He thinks a Blocks collection plugin would be better. If you have an opinion about it, we’d be happy to read it as a comment of this post 😉.

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on December 1st at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. In the meantime we’d be happy to get your help about these tickets: please contribute to BuddyPress 🙏

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary

BP Dev-Chat Summary : November 3, 2021.

• See previously BP Dev Chat summary (October 6, 2021)
• In attendance: @dcavins @vapvarun @johnjamesjacoby @espellcaste @im4th
• Slack archive.

10.0.0 Progress

#8451 Extending no content activities with images and call to actions

Preview of a richer “no content” activity about a group who has just changed its Group profile photo.

@vapvarun will soon share a patch about it on the ticket’s page. He decided to take the base64 encoded road to store previous profile photo/cover image inside an Activity meta.

@im4th & @dcavins suggested to include a way to avoid such activity types to be generated too often when a user changes these images multiple times in a short amount of time.

Writing the above lines, I believe the last activity should overwrite the previous ones. A 1 hour delay was suggested during the dev-chat.

#8582 Add site membership requests

@dcavins updated the patch attached to the ticket to remove all references to data stored inside the Users table. He also added a way to preview all signup/membership request information using a modal window.

A modal window to preview signup/membership request information

The modal window choice was debated with @im4th & @johnjamesjacoby. First concern is a11y: we need to check keyboard navigation to make sure everything’s fine with it. Second concern is the clumsiness of it into the WP Administration (old JS libraries, Ajax, etc..). @dcavins thought about an alternative way to reach the same result (be able to preview information) using a dynamic row like what’s included into the « inline edit » feature of the WP List Table class. @im4th believes it’s a nice idea and could be even more interesting if information could be edited from there. We might need to customize the feature for our need which can be too long for the remaining time we have until first 10.0.0 beta. @dcavins will give the modal window another thoughts before deciding whether to keep it or not.

Please help us progress about the site membership requests feature testing the last patch attached to this ticket: #8582.

#8588 use the “site-health” look & feel for BP Admin tabs

Next BP Admin Settings/Tools screens look & feel!

@im4th asked for some feedbacks about it. @dcavins thinks it should be committed. @espellcaste thinks this is the kind of change regular BP users will enjoy. @im4th also shared a preview of the new BP Rewrites admin screen using these revamped Admin tabs. This improvement has since been committed, a developer note will soon be published to explain the changes introduced about adding custom tabs in 10.0.0.

Other interesting updates

• #8597: @espellcaste just added a patch about allowing Messages/Recipients pagination in the box template.
• #8553: @espellcaste also plans to add new patches to improve our PHP Documentation
• BP REST API #428 : @espellcaste asked for a review about updating @wordpress/env.
• WP Graphql BuddyPress #88: @espellcaste opened a PR to add support to the Messages component.

10.0.0 schedule

• 10.0.0-beta 1: ~ november 20, 2021,
• 10.0.0 stable: ~ december 24, 2021 🎄

Next Dev-Chat

It will happen on November 17 at 19:30 UTC in #BuddyPress. We’ll be 3 days away from first beta release 😅. If you have specific points you want to discuss about during this next meeting, please share them into the comments area of this post.

#10-0-0, #dev-chat, #summary