Have you checked out the BuddyPress codex lately? It’s sporting a completely refreshed design and the content has been updated and expanded. For the longest time, one of the biggest complaints about BuddyPress was the lack of documentation. Earlier this year, BuddyPress developers @hnla and @mercime conducted a survey to find out how the community would like to see the codex improved. The results indicated that people prefer to learn BuddyPress through written tutorials, followed by code reference and user guides. All three of those methods combined made up 79% of the documentation preferences for those surveyed.
The codex improvement initiative has organized contributor efforts to deliver on what the community felt was lacking. Contributors submitted more than 15 new articles over the past few months, with several still in draft stage and another dozen in process and on the way. You can now find everything from “How to Get Started” to BuddyPress Plugin Development tutorials. Many of these are fantastically in-depth guides and tutorials. Props go out to an especially-prolific group of contributors that includes @imath, @shanebp, @dcavins and @chouf1.
Refreshed Codex Design
In addition to all the awesome new content, the codex has a refreshed design, thanks in large part to Noel Tock, who led the design efforts. The WordCamp London contributor day helped to spur on more visual updates to the codex, including a new header color, re-designed sidebar, fancy author credits section and typography improvements.
The BuddyPress community is made up of some seriously dedicated contributors who have volunteered many hours of their free time to contribute to the 1.9 release and codex improvements. Many thanks to @hnla and @mercime for spearheading this initiative to get more contributions to the codex. These improvements should help to lessen the support load in the forums. The new tutorial will also help designers and developers to build awesome new extensions for BuddyPress in the future.
If you want to join in the efforts to add more valuable content to the codex, check out the most recent submissions document to find a requested article and claim it. In the course of all their hard work, BuddyPress codex contributors have identified a song that resonates with their theme of “gettin’ it done.” Now, isn’t this a team you’d like to join?
Sarah Gooding also contributed a well-written and useful new article on using and customizing avatars: http://codex.buddypress.org/getting-started/guides/customizing-buddypress-avatars/
Thanks, Sarah!