I have renamed BuddyPress Trac’s…

I have renamed BuddyPress Trac’s “Future Release” milestone to “Awaiting Contributions”, because realistically that’s what any of those tickets need in order for them to get done. I have also created an “Up Next” milestone, to try to solve the problem of contributors perpetually adding “interesting” tickets into the next major release’s milestone, without perhaps committing to work on them (I’ve been guilty of this myself on numerous occasions!).

Back in 2016, I published some ideas to try to improve milestone/workflow management. Some small improvements came out of that good discussion.

With the milestone renamed, the workflow for tickets is now, in this order of progression:

1) Awaiting Review: all new tickets start here, awaiting an initial response and triage.
2) Under Consideration: is where new tickets are placed, while we evaluate them and gather further feedback and comment.
3) Awaiting Contributions: is where accepted tickets are placed. They should have consensus and enough detail for someone new to the project to understand and work on.
4) Up Next: is a new milestone, that will contain interesting tickets that contributors have expressed in working on within the next two releases (e.g. half a year, or so).
5) Number major/minor releases: these milestones track tickets that a contributor has committed to working on for that release.

Tickets will be demoted backwards into “Awaiting Contributions” if for some reason they are moved to a more active milestone but never completed.

I hope this makes sense; we’re very limited by the ticket organisation/planning tools we have in Trac, but once we get used to this, I think it will give everyone a better understanding of what will probably be happening in the next half-year’s worth of BuddyPress releases.

I am aware that renaming “Future Release” has not solved any problems associated with that “graveyard” milestone; I have an upcoming discussion post with some ideas for improvements.

Happy to hear feedback; easy to rename or adjust course if that’s what our consensus is.

#3-0, #trac, #workflow

Legacy Forums support will be…

Legacy Forums support will be removed with BuddyPress #3.0, due for release next year.
If your site is still using Legacy Forums, you will need to migrate to bbPress 2. Backwards compatibility will be ceased.
The last planned BuddyPress release that will support Legacy Forums is #2.9.3.

“Legacy Forums” is what we call the bundled version of bbPress 1 that has shipped with BuddyPress for over nine years. In fact, bundled or not, bbPress 1 only runs on WordPress versions older than 4.7, because a conflict between something called BackPress, which is nested inside bbPress 1, and the WP_Taxonomy class introduced in WordPress 4.7. So: if you’re using bbPress 1 today, you must be using an old version of WordPress, otherwise your site is broken.

This withdrawal of support is something that has been discussed for the last four years (see tickets 5351, 7502), and we feel now is the time. We will be including compatibility fixes for Legacy Forums with the upcoming BuddyPress 2.9.3 (date tbc) to help assist with any sites that are about to migrate to bbPress 2.

The removal of Legacy Forums from trunk will happen very soon.

BuddyPress 3.0 Dev Cycle

Paul Gibbs is Release Lead for BP 3.0

Paul (twitter) is a BuddyPress Lead Developer, Senior WordPress Engineer at Human Made, master of memes extraordinaire, and lives in the UK. His latest project is WordHat, a Behat extension. When not working, Paul enjoys playing video and board games, and luxury travel. You can also find him at byotos.com and at github.com.

Following are a few of his plans for this dev cycle.

Nouveau Template Pack

The items listed below need to be resolved before we ship bp-nouveau and BP 3.0:
1. Review all the superglobals and JSON handlers and nonces, for security.
2. Review all i18n strings.
3. Review of custom SQL.

BuddyPress.org Redesign

Paul is also reviving the development of the site’s redesign. If you’d like to participate, get in contact with Paul on our Slack. The current code is at https://gitlab.com/paulgibbs/bporg and there’s a staging site at http://dev-bporg.pantheonsite.io

Dev Chats

In lieu of the weekly dev chats in Slack, Paul would be using this site for async contribution updates and explore other avenues for developer chats like video hangouts, etc. Expect an announcement soon.

Schedule of Release

BP 3.0 is expected to be released early in the first quarter of 2018. We won’t be following the 3- to 4-month scheduling as in the past BuddyPress releases. BP 3.0 will be a focused release, specifically introducing the new Nouveau template pack along with other bug fixes and enhancements along the way.

BuddyPress Case Studies

Thanks to all who have shared their BuddyPress use cases with the community! The list of published articles this year are available in the BuddyPress Codex for your reference. If you’re interested in sharing your own BuddyPress use case, fill up this form and we’ll get back to you ASAP.

#3-0, #dev-chat