While the Tavern is definitely back in business, there is one specific goal I have in mind that I would like to accomplish. That goal is changing the content direction of the site so that it’s not created by one person, all the time. There are so many smart WordPress people throughout the overall community and I would like to personally extend an invitation to share your knowledge here on WPTavern.com. Whether it’s bbPress, BuddyPress, GlotPress, a theme review, plugin review, or an interesting set of questions you would like to pose to the WordPress community, please consider WPTavern as an avenue for publishing. I’ll give you a few reasons why.
The first is that WPTavern has a world-wide audience. Having articles linked within the Dashboard is not only a big responsibility, but it has opened the flood gates to the different types of people accessing the content presented on this site from across the world. Through referrer links, I’ve been able to discover so many different websites thanks to people clinking the links from within their dashboard. WPTavern.com is like a giant megaphone that when used correctly, becomes a wonderful thing.
In the near future, WPTavern will become an authoritative website. It’s not about publishing 100 articles a day, but publishing content that is interesting and, providing research/back story to that content. I like to think of WPTavern as an ongoing diary as to what is happening within the world of WordPress. However I’m opening up this diary/platform to the community. There will be caveats of course such as all content passes before me before it’s published. Guest authors will receive a Contributor level account to make things easier for the author to manage their posts.
If you look around, you’ll notice that there are no ads on this site. WPTavern.com is not about generating revenue. It’s about becoming the second largest WordPress community of users and enthusiasts on the web. Of course, the first is WordPress.org itself but the long-term goal for this site is to become an alternative community with an integral bridge to the WordPress project. WordPress.org is not right for everyone whether it be the attitude of people, the atmosphere, or any number of reasons which is why having another place to go is beneficial. In the early days of WPTavern, this website was on pace to become one of the largest parts of the WordPress community with a bustling commenting section, an active forum, and all sorts of different interactions taking place that at times, influenced some of the decisions that were made with the core of WordPress.
There were plenty of times in the past where members of the WPTavern community tried to nominate me to become some sort of WordPress.org community liaison or an employee of Automattic. With the relaunch of WPTavern, I am now in the position at least with this domain to become that community liaison. In the near future, this site will be sporting a new design, bbPress and finally, run BuddyPress. A tavern is a place where people gather to talk and have a good time which is exactly the kind of atmosphere I’ll be promoting here.
If you’re interested in contributing an article to this site, please get in touch with me via the contact form or through twitter @WPTavern.
It was announced earlier today that that BuddyPress 1.5.5 is now available for download. This is considered a maintenance release which addresses 14 issues, some of which are security related. Congrats to the team and I hope you had a blast at WordCamp Netherlands Paul Gibbs.
John James Jacoby of BuddyPress.org has announced that the BuddyPress Codex has received a much needed refresh. Here is the kicker, the BuddyPress Codex is powered by a WordPress installation where all registered users are an editor. Users can share information as in a traditional wiki but everything is housed on individual pages. Interestingly enough, this very idea was proposed a couple of times during the past few years for the WordPress Codex but it never gained much traction.
Head on over to the NEW BuddyPress Codex and check it out. It will be interesting to see how this approach scales.
Shortly after the release of WordPress 3.3, BuddyPress 1.5.2 was released and is simply a compatibility release intended to fix some cosmetic issues with the new WP 3.3 toolbar. If you experience any issues with WordPress 3.3 and BuddyPress 1.5.2, you should participate in the following support thread on the official BuddyPress forum. ∞
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.
In this pre-recorded edition of WordPress Weekly, I get you caught up with the news that made the headlines this week. While I didn’t have time to go in-depth on any particular topic, this episode features two interviews. One with Tom McFarlin talking about the lessons he’s learned through commercial plugin development and the other with Scott Kingsley Clark who discusses why he decided to use Kickstarter to fund the development of Pods 2.0. While you enjoy the show, I’ll be prepping the yard and such for the party tomorrow.
One year ago on September 17th, my would be father-in-law passed away from prostate cancer. Fellas, if you’re over 30 or 40, better keep an eye on that thing as it’s taking men out left and right.
1.2.6 Release – Many of the tickets left for 1.2.6 have patches. Ticket 2587 appears to be the only blocker dealing with the ability to hide multiple child-level comments. The feeling is that 1.2.6 is really close but a firm date can not be given.
When JJJ entered the chat about a half hour after it started, he mentioned that 1.2.6 needs to be pushed out ASAP. It’s likely that we’ll see it released by the end of this week.
Strict Release Cycles – There was some discussion on whether it was time for the BuddyPress project to adhere to a more strict release cycle. In defining strict, I noted that it probably is more about predictability rather than a strict release cycle. The core development team along with contributors will in the future, discuss whether or not if it’s possible to release 2 or 3 major versions a year per the amount of development effort that BuddyPress currently has.
BuddyPress.org – There was a call for volunteers to help clean up the Codex along with filling in the gaps. The BuddyPress.org support forum will soon show topics you’ve participated in.
I put in the suggestion that the moderator team be expanded so that more users have the capabilities to delete spam user accounts as they pollute the activity stream. It looks like in the future, some additions will come to BuddyPress that helps this issue not only for the BuddyPress website, but BuddyPress powered sites in general.
How To Participate:
If you would like to participate in the chat next week, install IRC or an IRC compatible client and connect to the following IRC server.
chat.freenode.net or any random server on the Freenode network and then join this channel at 3:00PM Eastern time on Thursdays. #buddypress-dev.
John James Jacoby who is one of the core developers of BuddyPress has published a post on the BuddyPress development blog that talks about the future of bbPress and BuddyPress as he sees it. In fact, if you didn’t know it by now, John is leading the initiative in turning bbPress into a plugin versus stand-alone software.
Since BuddyPress 1.1, bbPress has come bundled in the package to help make the installation as smooth and easy as possible. Through a little bit of massaging we successfully integrated bbPress into a dedicated forum component to allow for group discussion, and we included a central discussion directory to help put all of these topics in one easy place. All of these ideas were great on paper but have had mixed feedback and results in practice. Making bbPress a standalone plugin will help allow for more customizable installations which is great news for anyone that’s currently using BuddyPress for the forum component, or has been holding off because of the complexity of it all.
Our goal with me giving some attention to the bbPress plugin project is to keep it tightly integrated with BuddyPress, but have them act totally independently or alone if necessary. This means in a future version of BuddyPress, bbPress will no longer come packaged in the download, and both plugins will be aware of each other being activated. When that happens, additional features will be available to you to help create the kind of community that you’d like to have, instead of forcing forums to be tucked away into BuddyPress discussion groups.
John ends the post by saying BuddyPress 1.2.6 is on its way out the door. It will contain a few bug fixes with perhaps an enhancement or two. As for BuddyPress 1.3, it should be shipped before the end of the year while bbPress 1.2 might be ready for testing around September 15th with a ship date of around the same time BuddyPress 1.3 is released.
In this episode of WordPress Weekly, we discussed a number of topics including the headlines of the week such as the release of BuddyPress 1.2.5.2, an A/B testing plugin in the works, WordPress milestones, and the hot story of the week, The Capital P Dangit Filter. I was joined on the show by Dremeda who heads up the awesome site Sucuri.net. Near the end of this episode, I made the announcement that I’ll be taking a summer vacation from producing the show. When I get back, I hope to have some new stuff to play around with and a renewed sense of energy to do the show. It’s not disappearing or anything, just going on a small hiatus. However, I will occasionally upload an interview or two as well as material I obtain from conferences I attend before the end of the year so you shouldn’t unsubscribe from the podcast feed.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is brought to you by, the letter P. It’s the sixteenth letter in the alphabet and sits between the letters O and Q. The ASCII code for capital “P” is 80 and for lowercase “p” is 112; or in binary 01010000 and 01110000, respectively.
While the Tavern is definitely back in business, there is one specific goal I have in mind that I would like to accomplish. That goal is changing the content direction of the site so that it’s not created by one person, all the time. There are so many smart WordPress people throughout the overall community and I would like to personally extend an invitation to share your knowledge here on WPTavern.com. Whether it’s bbPress, BuddyPress, GlotPress, a theme review, plugin review, or an interesting set of questions you would like to pose to the WordPress community, please consider WPTavern as an avenue for publishing. I’ll give you a few reasons why. 
In this pre-recorded edition of WordPress Weekly, I get you caught up with the news that made the headlines this week. While I didn’t have time to go in-depth on any particular topic, this episode features two interviews. One with Tom McFarlin talking about the lessons he’s learned through commercial plugin development and the other with Scott Kingsley Clark who discusses why he decided to use Kickstarter to fund the development of Pods 2.0. While you enjoy the show, I’ll be prepping the yard and such for the party tomorrow.