Andy Peatling announced on September 30th that version 1.1 of BuddyPress was available to the public. This new version contains a bunch of core improvements along with new features. One of the new features that I think is huge, especially for those who want easier bbPress integration revolves around the new forum component. This component was rewritten from the ground up to eliminate the difficulties that were involved with bbPress integration prior to 1.1. Some other additions worth mentioning:
Completely re-written theme handling. One theme now controls all of your installation. No hidden HTML, everything is in the template ready for you to skin.
Easily create themes that are upgraded automatically when BuddyPress is updated.
Total site admin control of all content within an installation. Edit user’s profiles, update avatars, mark users as spammers, manage all groups, delete site activity entries.
Activity streams everywhere. Activity streams can be filtered allowing for feature specific activity streams or adding an activity stream to your custom plugin.
In this first Tuesday edition of WordPress Weekly, we sat down with Andy Peatling of BuddyPress fame to discuss what exactly is going on related to the project. Personally, I feel as if this is one of the best episodes of WordPress Weekly I’ve ever produced. We asked Andy about the BuddyPress theme framework or framework theme, how he is handling the community development of the project, what could be in store for WordPress.org using bits and pieces of the BuddyPress software and much more. If you’re even slightly interested in BuddyPress, I think you’ll love all the information presented in this episode.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios would like to announce the launch of their new project, WPClassroom.com! WPClassroom.com is dedicated to providing high quality professional WordPress training using the most powerful online training software powered by Cisco WebEx. Reserve your seat today at WPClassroom.com! By the way, use the coupon code wptavern when sigining up and that will take off $5.00 on the first class on September 9th.
Interview Bio:
His title at Automattic is Social Engineer. Andy Lives in Vancouver, BC were he likes to hop between coding and designing, sometimes mixing the two together and making his code look “pretty.” He has been tinkering with WordPress for a number of years both in theme design and plugin development. Last but not least, Andy is the lead developer of BuddyPress, a project that aims to bring the social to WordPress.
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Have You Enjoyed Your Stay At The Tavern So Far?
Out of a total of 56 votes, 42 of you said yes, 12 of you voted that you practically live on the Tavern website while only 2 people said they did not enjoy their stay.
Jeff – PluginsPodcast – The Plugins Podcast hosted by Angelo Mandato of the BluBrry PowerPress plugin aims to cover one WordPress plugin each week with occasional interviews of plugin developers as well as with heavy plugin users. Normal episodes are about 10-15 minutes in mp3 format.
David – Easy Admin Color Schemes – Helps to provide differentiations between different admin panels for different blogs so that you don’t publish a post on the incorrect blog.
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
In a recent interview, Matt was asked if he were to start another project, along the same lines as WordPress but had nothing to do with blogging, what would it be?
WordPress Trivia Answer:
Synchronization, or some sort of contextual text analysis for grammar and spell-checking. Maybe something with anti-spam again like Akismet.
This Weeks Trivia Question
October 31st, 2005. What is the exact number of spams caught at that time by Akismet according to the Live Spam Zeitgeist.
Announcements:
On Tuesday September 8th, we’ll be interviewing Jonathan Davis of the Shopp plugin. The interview won’t be so much about the plugin itself but rather, the trials and tribulations of running a business based around WordPress.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Tuesday, September 8th, 2009 8P.M. EST
It’s a bit short notice I know, but I’ve been dealing with things behind the scenes. At any rate, to kick off our new Tuesday recording schedule, we’ll be interviewing Andy Peatling, lead developer of BuddyPress. The last time we had Andy on the show was December 19th, 2008. As I’ve written about here on WPTavern.com there has been plenty of changes taking place within the BuddyPress project, specifically with themes. While I’ve got a few questions myself, I know there are readers of the site who are interested in BuddyPress. Just place your question in the comments and I’ll get Andy to answer it.
Over on the BuddyPress Development blog, Andy Peatling has announced that the project will now have a new theme architecture. The big change between the old way of doing themes versus the new way is that starting with BuddyPress 1.1, there will only be one theme that handles everything instead of a Home/Member theme. Also, those two words ‘Theme Framework‘ pop up again as BuddyPress will ship with its own.
BuddyPress will ship with a theme framework that acts as a parent theme. The default theme will be a child theme based on this framework and contain only images and css. Building a new BuddyPress theme will be as simple as creating a child theme based on the framework.
According to Andy, this approach with themes provides many benefits such as removing the need to recreate every template file for a new theme, receive new functionality when the parent theme is upgraded, etc. While themes that were created on the old system will continue to work for at least the next few versions, converting those themes to the new system shouldn’t be that hard. It’s important to note though that using the Framework is just an option and is not necessary.
BuddyPress 1.1 is on track for a September release.
Has this verified the importance or benefits using a Theme Framework? Theme authors, are you happy to see BuddyPress ship with it’s own framework?
There are a couple hundred posts that were published yesterday announcing the release of BuddyPress 1.0 so you should be aware of it by now. I wanted to pass along my sincere congratulations to Andy Peatling and the community he has generated around the project. BuddyPress appears to be the hottest thing since sliced bread and with Andy confirming that at some point down the line when a few architectural changes are applied to WordPress that there will be a version released for the stand alone version of WordPress, the future of BuddyPress is looking bright.
When you consider that BuddyPress will likely play a large role in this unified activity system that Matt proposed on a recent episode of WordPress Weekly to showcase a users contributions to the WordPress project, its Facebook in a box capabilities, the ground up architecture, the ingredients are there for the project to be a bright star in Automattic’s arsenal of projects.
By the way, pretty cool to see community member Brad Williams mentioned in the release post as one of the patch contributors to the 1.0 codebase. Nice job Brad.
Andy Peatling announced on September 30th that version 1.1 of BuddyPress was available to the public. This new version contains a bunch of core improvements along with new features. One of the new features that I think is huge, especially for those who want easier bbPress integration revolves around the new forum component. This component was rewritten from the ground up to eliminate the difficulties that were involved with bbPress integration prior to 1.1. Some other additions worth mentioning:
In this first Tuesday edition of WordPress Weekly, we sat down with Andy Peatling of 
