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.
While we briefly talked about this during episode 70 of WordPress Weekly with Andy Peatling, today during the early part of the WordPress developer chat, Jane Wells passed on a link to http://profiles.wordpress.org which is the first public instance of BuddyPress in action on the WordPress.org domain. Let’s take a look at Mark Jaquith’s profile since he is a core committer and very active across the project.
Mark Jaquith Is A Very Active Man!
This profile page shows the plugins that user has created, the topics they have created in the WordPress.org forum, their replies to forum threads, ideas they have created, ideas they have replied to, their activity on Trac, plugin trac activity, and BuddyPress trac. That is what I found listed on Mark’s profile page but I’ve seen others listed as well on other profiles such as WPMU topics, WPMU Trac, bbPress Trac, etc. All of the Trac activity contains links to specific changesets as well as tickets along with a short description of the ticket. Pretty awesome to say the least!
The profile editing page gives users the chance to enter their job title, website URL etc. It covers most of what you would see in typical web profiles. However, you can also define how you use WordPress either for Personal use or Business. You can also select the option to be added to the WordPress Consultants list. This is interesting in that potential clients will have the ability to see just how active those consultants are within the WordPress project/community. Definitely worthy of a selling point for most clients.
Easy Way To Track Activity Of WordPress Consultants
Since BuddyPress is in action, we can also manage friends or friend requests. This is all part of the BuddyPress project so if anyone has used that software before, none of these features should come as any surprise.
Logging In For The First Time:
If you have a WordPress.org forum user account, that same information can be used to log into the Profiles website. Only when you log into the site for the first time -will- a site wide profile be created for your account. If you don’t login, no profile will be created for you.
This is exciting stuff! I’m already playing around with my profile and going around adding people as friends. Definitely get on board and help test out this install of BuddyPress. However, if you come across any problems, I’m not sure who to contact so I would just post a new thread in the WordPress.org support forums.
*Update*
I just spoke with Andy Peatling and he says that the friends feature is going to be turned off on profiles for now and that it’s not supposed to be there. So no friendships for us!
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?
Andy Peatling announced on Twitter today that he had completely rewritten the forums component for bbPress alleviating what he says are integration nightmares. One of the biggest advancements for the component is no longer needing an existing bbPress install to function. bbPress is now included as an external which can be setup in one click for new installations which is pretty darn cool in my book. If you already have an existing bbPress install, you can point the component to the bbPress bb-config file.
Also of note are the forum management tools in this new component:
Added complete forum management for group mods and admins (sticky/delete/close/edit) and edit/delete for group members on their own posts. Make sure you update your theme with the new template files in the /groups/ directory to get access to these features.
However, the “use existing install” option needs some testing so if you use BuddyPress, lend Andy a hand. Also expect some changes down the line with how it functions based on testing feedback.
Possible Growing Pains?
This new component reminds me of WordPress MU and WordPress. WordPress getting developed as the main project and WordPress MU just building on top of it. That’s what I see with BuddyPress and bbPress although I don’t think the component is getting any additional bbPress love that’s not there by default.
While this component now makes it as easy as possible to have forums as part of your BuddyPress powered site, I foresee many more bbPress users in the future which in turn should lead to more bugs being discovered, more patches being written, and of course, more feedback for Sam. bbPress ought to benefit from this ease of integration but one thing I’m concerned about regarding both projects is the development resources behind each one. Sam Bauers develops bbPress, Andy Peatling develops BuddyPress. That’s it in terms of paid developers. The rest comes from any contributions the community makes towards those projects. I wonder what will happen if BuddyPress becomes as big as I think it will and at the same time, brings bbPress along for the ride? Will they be able to handle their respective eco systems? It’s a problem I’m sure they would like to have but I’m interested in knowing how much more development resources will be pushed to these two if things go well.
Perhaps my point of view is wrong but when I look at how development is taking place for the BuddyPress project and how certain things are being accomplished, I can’t help but think that the BuddyPress project is proving to be a test bed for the way development might happen for the WordPress project in the future. For example, the project roadmap for BuddyPress was recently published online but before it was finalized, users had the chance to vote and rank on items that they felt were important enough to see in earlier versions versus other features. Jane Wells starting with WordPress 2.7 has used PollDaddy to conduct similar surveys in order to measure what the overall community felt should be included in the next release.
Another example is that BuddyPress has the unique ability to use the latest and greatest build of the software right on the site which is accessible to anyone who wants to register an account. You can actually test drive the software as it’s being developed. If any bugs are discovered on the site, they go right into trac or are reported to Andy. I’m not sure how far WordPress.org is going to take this concept, but I can certainly see the opportunity of using BuddyPress features such as the profiles and group blogging on the WordPress.org domain or subdomain with a WordPress bleeding edge install. With all of the activity and blogging taking place within this centralized community, it could be possible to increase the testing environment strictly for the WordPress.org software with any bugs being discovered sent straight to trac. Although, I’m not sure how smart of an idea it is to base your centralized community around bleeding edge software.
Group Development. Thanks to the ability of groups through BuddyPress, Andy Peatling is able to get developers or those interested in creating certain features centralize around one location for feedback, reviews, discussions, etc.
Group creation is now open on this site, why not pick a feature you’d be interested in working on and create a group for it? By doing this you’ll encourage other BuddyPress developers to join in, discuss the feature and give feedback. I’ll be more than happy to take a look at plugins that add roadmap features and consider them for inclusion in the core of BuddyPress. You may even end up as a core committer.
I think it would be cool to see the same kind of workflow make it to WordPress.org but I believe some of this already occurs through trac and other means. However, if WordPress.org were to do something similar to BuddyPress, it would open up the discussion, involvement, and contribution level to a much wider audience in terms of more user level feedback and not entirely developer centric.
Final Thoughts:
Do you think I’ve been able to establish any connections between the two projects or do you think this is all pie in the sky? I know they are both separate projects but I wonder how cool it would be if some of the development processes that Andy is able to accomplish would make it to WordPress.org.
With the release of BuddyPress 1.0, BuddyDress.com has released an updated version of their FaceBuddy theme which strangely enough, looks just like Facebook. This theme is very CSS dependent meaning little to no images. One nice thing about this particular theme is that BuddyDress provides the PSD file to customize the background image with your own logo or text.
If you really want to have your own Facebook look alike, head on over and grab the theme. It’s free.
*Updated July 6th, 2010*
As has been pointed out by a commenter, this theme appears to no longer be available. Even when browsing the BuddyPress website and performing a search for the Facebook theme, the results point to the same link, BuddyPress Social which is part of their Premium theme selection.
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.
Community member andrea_r published this in the Tavern forum and I thought it was notable to mention here on the site. In one of the more recent changesets for BuddyPress, Andy Peatling made a few changes that I think the overall community will appreciate.
It’s not fair just having my name on the plugin as so many people have put their hard earned time into it.
Even though BuddyPress was initially Andy’s project, it’s nice to see him give a permanent nod back to the community.
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 
