BuddyPress Skeleton Component Upgraded To Version 1.6

One of the coolest things about BuddyPress is that when it was developed by Andy Peatling, he made sure to put in a considerable amount of effort into creating a BuddyPress Starter theme as well as a BuddyPress starter plugin. Knowing that those two things would be often used as the beginning stages of a plugin or theme, only the best coding practices were used as a means of not only having a blank slate to start from, but also teach developers at the same time. It’s like Hello Dolly! but without the lyrics. Boone Gorges has announced that the tradition has continued with the release of BuddyPress Skeleton Component v1.6. The new release features the following:

• Refactored to use the BuddyPress 1.5′s new BP_Component class, making it dead-simple to register globals, create navigation items, and hook into the BP load order
• File structure reorganized to better reflect BP 1.5′s organization, and to provide more fine-grained access to functions
• Data storage class totally refactored, to use custom post types and WP_Query, instead of custom database tables.
• Added a small guide for creating a top-level component directory (a “root component”), which was missing in earlier versions
• Tons of documentation added and revised
• All WP_DEBUG notices removed

It’s important to know that any plugin built from version 1.6 of the Skeleton Component will be incompatible with BuddyPress versions prior to 1.5. It’s recommended by Boone that you first create the plugin for BuddyPress 1.5 and build in backwards compatibility as an after thought.