Word of what to expect from BuddyPress 1.7 has been trickling in, and while it’s not quite here yet there’s a lot to get excited about. Brand new users should pay attention, but longtime users may be the most excited by what’s on the way.

At last month’s WordPress NYC Meetup the lead developer of the BuddyPress project, Boone Gorges, led the group in a presentation showing off what can be expected in the next major version of the popular social plugin. Let’s take a look.

BuddyPress themes? How about all the themes?

The biggest leap forward for the BuddyPress project may end up being the headline improvement in 1.7: theme independence. Currently in order to take advantage of BuddyPress properly you have a few options:

1. use the BuddyPress default theme as it is or modify it,
2. search for a BuddyPress theme (which is likely a modified version of the BuddyPress default theme already), and
3. take the time to add the necessary BuddyPress files to the theme you’re already using, possibly using the BuddyPress Template Pack.

Anyone who has gone down that third road can attest to the often frustrating experience that follows. Even sticking with number two, the reality is that a shocking number of theme developers have resisted making BuddyPress themes at all. This is at least in part due to the additional template files and styles that are necessary to properly integrate with the plugin.

On this topic I tend to share BuddyPress Lead Developer Boone Gorges’ sentiment when he says, “I never found BuddyPress theme development that frustrating. The thing that I’ve heard countless times is ‘ugh, there are so many files, it’s so confusing. I’m just a theme developer, I’m not a plugin developer.’ I’ve heard it, and I’m annoyed by it.” He continues, “But it’s fine. It is more complicated than a WordPress theme, and the reason it’s more complicated than a WordPress themes is because there are lots of different kinds of content.”

“‘There are so many files, it’s so confusing.’ I’ve heard it, and I’m annoyed by it.”

Suffice it to say this level of complexity will no longer be an excuse theme developers can use. With BuddyPress 1.7 any properly constructed theme (in other words it passes the most basic tests of WordPress theme sanity) will work with BuddyPress. Take a second and read that sentence again.

Every WordPress theme will become a BuddyPress theme after 1.7.

“The way that we make this work is It feels like magic when you use it,” Gorges said. “It is kind of like magic, like voodoo magic. The kind that you probably don’t want to know too much about.”

How does this happen exactly? BuddyPress 1.7 will utilize output buffering and a few included styles to bring a default uniform template into otherwise standard WordPress theme pages. While this shouldn’t relieve a theme developer from taking BuddyPress into account, it will provide a nice jumpstart to building full featured support into themes. Best of all, for users this means any WordPress theme on the market should soon double as a BuddyPress theme without any work at all.

Of course this doesn’t mean themes previously built with the added templates or manual BuddyPress support will stop working. This convenience is entirely backwards compatible with earlier themes.

Freelancer and BuddyPress developer David Bisset and I discussed precisely this during WPCandy Podcast #36 if you’re interested in a bit more discussion on the topic.

Bid the installation wizard farewell

For the last few releases of BuddyPress, the first-time activation of the plugin would prompt an installation wizard. A few steps were necessary before BuddyPress would fully activate. For instance the plugin asks that “pretty permalinks” be enabled and lists the enabled and disabled components.

Referring to this process in particular, Gorges said, “If you are just somebody who’s looking to set up your club for people who knit sweaters with dogs on them, and you’re asked about pretty permalinks, you’re just like ‘What?’ And then you go just use Ning or something.”

The installation wizard prompts user to set up pages and tweak permalink settings, among others. The BuddyPress team have determined these are too confusing, and are removing the wizard entirely from 1.7.

Despite the wizard having good intentions, in order to improve the BuddyPress experience the team axed it in the new version. Beginning with 1.7 BuddyPress will automatically set itself up for you when it activates.

In addition only the profiles and activity streams will now be on by default. This, Gorges explained, is to provide a coherent experience that isn’t overwhelming and delivers what most users will most benefit from right off the bat. BuddyPress Project Lead John James Jacoby (or JJJ for short) has often shared the sentiment that using all of BuddyPress is a step in the wrong direction. In many cases only a slice of what’s available in the plugin is worth putting to use.

It turns out that many users would enable every BuddyPress component when faced with this step in the installation process.

Last year Gorges, JJJ, and Paul Gibbs joined me on the Roundtable Podcast to discuss topics such as BuddyPress complexity in a bit more detail.

Of course despite BuddyPress setting defaults for users, all the important options are still present and changeable. It’s just that you will only have to deal with them if you go looking for them first.

Above: BuddyPress Lead Developer Boone Gorges previews the upcoming version 1.7 at a WordPress Meetup in New York City.

Meet BP_User_Query

The details behind the addition of the BP_User_Query to version 1.7 are more for developers than anyone, but the thing to know is this: with 1.7 many of the requests that include members (read: pretty much all of them) are much, much faster.

Regarding the improvements Gorges said, “When you load a members directory, and you have 100,00 users on your site, your page load time might go from five seconds down to half a second because of the optimizations that have happened here.” He continued, “It gets even better when you start doing complicated queries like search or a funky kind of sort. Those have even more dramatic speed increases.”

The BP_User_Query can be found in the bp-core-classes.php file.

Now, what about those details? Well one of the longstanding issues with BuddyPress has been that it’s sort of a resource hog. BuddyPress would execute joins on tables that, if you have more than few thousand users, could slow a site down real quick. That’s the exciting part about BP_User_Query. It gives developers a much quicker way to load up users within BuddyPress. It also allows for querying among multiple databases, which is a major factor in enterprise situations.

Gorges insists that these queries are backwards compatible with soon-to-be-old ways of querying, at least for “99.9% of sites.” There may be a few cases where a developer’s query might not work after the changeover. For those, however, there will be a way to force the use of legacy queries.

Group management akin to post and page screens

In order to make group management easier — particularly in situations where hundreds or even thousands of groups exist — BuddyPress 1.7 will also bring group administration within the WordPress dashboard. The management screens themselves are a lot like what you would expect from WordPress posts, pages, or custom post types. Exactly like them, actually.

These new screens will allow admins to take bulk actions on groups just the way you would to manage any other type of thing within WordPress. Modifying group settings on a singular basis can happen from the dashboard as well.

Not all big and flashy

Along with the major updates and changes will be a handful of smaller changes that should really appeal to those who have used BuddyPress for a while. Complete bbPress integration was completed with bbPress 2.3 (which is currently in beta) so that now, when installing BuddyPress forums, in reality the bbPress plugin is installed. It’s also now an option within BuddyPress core to limit certain blogs from being recorded within activity logs, for those cases where an administrative or housekeeping blog is kept that isn’t for public consumption.

BuddyPress 1.7 will also include an “admin only” visibility level for profile fields. Gorges, during his presentation embedded above, gave the example that an admin might want to include a profile field like phone number, referer, or where the user heard about the site — all of which isn’t exactly information the world needs to see. Soon those fields’ contents can be restricted to administrators only.

Sounds great. So when can we have it?

As for exactly when this next major version will launch, there is no specific date. The plan, according to the BuddyPress team, is to get a beta out in the next week or two, with the final release following a few rounds of betas. Obviously any number of timeline-affecting issues can come up during that time.

If you are running a BuddyPress site of any sort, it probably wouldn’t hurt to start testing the 1.7 development version that you can find on the BuddyPress trac. After all, the more people who run it through the ringer the fewer issues will end up in the final release.

The post BuddyPress 1.7: Theme independence, BP_User_Query, and what else to expect appeared first on WPCandy.

In this episode of our podcast David Bisset was kind enough to join me to discuss his upcoming event WordCamp Miami, BuddyPress, and other noteworthy WordPress news of the week. David even gets greedy and offers up somewhere around 3 or 4 WordPress picks for the week. Honestly, I lost count.

You can follow David on Twitter, visit his website (and hire him!) and of course register/sponsor/adore WordCamp Miami in April.

Show notes and download links are after the jump.

Show Notes

• 0:00 – 18:15 WordCamp Miami
• 18:15 – 36:30 BuddyPress.org guest post, bbPress beta, and Achievements 3
• 36:30 – 45:51 Ryan’s pick is Edit Flow, David’s picks are PostStat.us and a recent discussion there, and the BPMail newsletter

David also recommended this video overviewing the upcoming BuddyPress 1.7.

• MP3 file (22 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes
• Audio RSS Feed

The post WPCandy Podcast 36: Sticker Furniture with David Bisset appeared first on WPCandy.

Version 1.6.2 of BuddyPress is now available, and fixes a couple of compatibility issues with WordPress 3.5. John James Jacoby says that if you are running BuddyPress 1.5 or 1.6 and also upgrading to WordPress 3.5 (who isn’t?) this one should be a safe and painless upgrade.

11 tickets were closed for this release, which you can read through on the BuddyPress Trac.

Speaking of WordPress 3.5, we should be seeing that release in the next hour or two. Who’s excited?

The post BuddyPress 1.6.2 released, brings compatibility for WordPress 3.5 appeared first on WPCandy.

I’m happy to present episode number two of the WPCandy Roundtable Podcast, this time with the BuddyPress Core Team of John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, and Paul Gibbs. They spoke for just over an hour about issues of interest to them within the BuddyPress community, and where things are going in the near future.

This episode is sponsored by the upcoming WordPress service Raft.io and the Typecase plugin by UpThemes.

• MP3 file (41.8 MB)
• Subscribe on iTunes (coming soon!)
• Audio RSS Feed

The gentleman also wanted me to say that if there were further questions you had about BuddyPress after listening, you’re welcome to leave them here and they will stop by and have a look at them.

The post WPCandy Roundtable #2: JJJ, Boone Gorges, Paul Gibbs on BuddyPress appeared first on WPCandy.

This week’s WPCandy Roundtable will be filled with BuddyPress Core developers: John James Jacoby, Boone Gorges, and Paul Gibbs will be sitting down to chat. If you caught last week’s show with the marketplace theme developers, you’ll know a thing or two about what to expect tomorrow afternoon.

We’ll be streaming the Roundtable on the WPCandy Stream at 2pm EDT (18 UTC) with the chatroom buzzing if you’d like to swing by and get your question answered by the group.

Speaking of questions, if you have one (or a few) that you’d like to see posed to these BuddyPress pros leave it in the comments below. Make ‘em good ones!

The post Have any questions for the BuddyPress Core team? appeared first on WPCandy.

On the BuddyPress blog this week Boone Gorges pointed out that the BuddyPress plugin has crossed the million download mark on the WordPress.org plugin directory (1,004,479 at the time of this writing). BuddyPress’s first stable release was in May of 2009, just under three years ago this month.

BuddyPress can now boast what few plugins can, and joins the short list of plugin titans like Jetpack, Contact Form 7, and All in One SEO Pack. Okay, so it needs a few more downloads to truly rival those numbers, but it’s getting closer.

In any case, I’ll happily echo Boone’s sentiment:

Here’s to the next million!

For the fans of BuddyPress out there (of which there are, it seems, a few) how long ago did you first start messing with BuddyPress? Were you an early adopter? Or, put another way, how many of those million downloads are you responsible for?

The post BuddyPress crosses one million downloads on WordPress.org appeared first on WPCandy.

Believe it or not, I have never — ever — properly interview John James Jacoby, also know as JJJ or J-trip. John is the lead developer on the BuddyPress and bbPress projects, and has been working for Automattic since November 2010. In this interview we talk about the futures of both BuddyPress and bbPress, or “the bbs”, his slew of old jobs, and something called a Faquith.

You’ve been warned.

See the various listening options below, or have a listen straight away (The interview is approximately one hour long.):

Download audio file (WPCandy-Interviews-002-John-James-Jacoby.mp3)

I don’t have time codes for you this week, but I can tell you we discussed:

• BuddyPress 1.6
• The new BuddyPress (and bbPress) Codex
• When/if BuddyPress could go 100% to custom post types
• The Automattic Social Team
• BuddyPress on WordPress.org and BuddyPress.org
• John’s choice plugins for BuddyPress (mentioned BP-Media and Privacy)
• John’s choice bbPress plugins, included attachments and threaded replies and Javascript quotes
• John’s old jobs, which included a shoe store and DJ at a roller rink
• Right near the end, I mentioned he looks like Mike Krahulik, and we discussed Faquiths (like this one, sort of)

You can subscribe to WPCandy Interviews on iTunes, or directly via the RSS feed. Or you can download the MP3 file directly.

The post Community Interview with John James Jacoby on BuddyPress, bbPress, and social appeared first on WPCandy.

Last weekend, when everyone else was taking a break, John James Jacoby took the time out to refresh the BuddyPress Codex along with creating the new bbPress Codex too. Both are running on WordPress.

In the announcement made on the BuddyPress.org blog Jacoby said:

You may not know it but we’ve had a codex here at BuddyPress.org since the early days. It’s mostly made life really difficult and forced everyone into the forums or to other sites for help. Today, I’m really happy to report that the core team has spent some time this weekend to finally refresh the BuddyPress Codex.

No official announcement was posted on the bbPress blog, but it was mentioned on Twitter.

To get yourself started contributing to the codexes, it’s simply a matter of going to the respective /wp-admin/ like you would on your own WordPress site, and start writing and tweaking because users are editors by default. All you need are your WordPress.org login details.

All of the activity is logged using the BuddyPress Activity component, allowing you to show the community what you have contributed. For example:

Currently it’s only active on the BuddyPress Codex, but John James Jacoby informs me it will also be made active on the bbPress Codex within the next few days.

So what do you think? I like them, even more that they’re both run with WordPress. What if the WordPress Codex used the same setup?

The post BuddyPress and bbPress Codexes see big updates appeared first on WPCandy.

BuddyPress 1.5.3 is now available as a fix for those running WordPress 3.3+—which should be all of you, you silly goofs. The list of changes in this version is relatively small. To name a few: an unused forum template was removed from the BuddyPress default theme, deprecated function warnings and PHP notices were cleared, and a toolbar-specific avatar issue was fixed as well. For the full list of changes, see the full 1.5.3 changelog. Glance at that if you need to, but really you should just go get yourself updated.

And in case you’re wondering, the confetti behind the logo above is there to celebrate compatibility. You have to enjoy the small victories, right?

Update: Not long after 1.5.3 was released came 1.5.3.1 that fixed a more serious bug with the way settings are saved. So, go update for that too.

The post BuddyPress 1.5.3 brings fixes for WordPress 3.3+ appeared first on WPCandy.

Achievements, a BuddyPress plugin authored by Paul Gibbs, takes user loyalty to the next level. Gibbs announced he is rewriting the entire Achievement plugin from the ground up, and as part of that process he’s taking this opportunity to switch from his SVN version management over to GitHub. Achievements is currently in version 2.0 and Gibbs is focusing on version 3.0 in 2012.

The Achievements plugin already has a number of great user loyalty features such as a user logging in, writing a message to the activity stream, and a user creating a forum topic—all of which are rewardable actions.

Why are this plugin and Gibbs’ development efforts important to both the WordPress and BuddyPress communities? Because it’s bringing the core of WordPress and the social layer of BuddyPress to the next competitive level, making able to compete with big sites like Facebook and Friendster.

One feature I could see being added is the ability to reward users for playing a game, just like the big guys do. With a user loyalty plugin added on top of this WordPress social layer, what do you think you might be able to achieve with this kind of power?

The post Paul Gibbs begins work to unlock Achievements plugin level 3.0 appeared first on WPCandy.