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BuddyPress 8.0 was just released earlier this month on June 6, but the core development team is gearing up for a short development cycle for 9.0. The release will be specifically targeted at getting BuddyPress core widgets ready for WordPress 5.8’s new block widgets experience. Contributors are aiming to hit the following timeline to ship 9.0 before the next major WordPress release:

  • Beta: July 8.
  • RC: July 12.
  • Final: July 16

BuddyPress entered the world of blocks with the release of version 6.0 in May 2020, allowing users to insert a specific Member or Group into content. Version 7.0, released six months later, introduced blocks for featuring a list of members, a list of groups, and the ability to embed a public activity post. Over the next few weeks, BuddyPress contributors will continue the process of migrating the rest of the BuddyPress component widgets to blocks. These include the following:

  • Blogs Recent Posts Widget: A list of recently published posts from across the network
  • BP Core Login Widget: Shows a Log In form to logged-out visitors, and a Log Out link to those who are logged in
  • BP Core Friends Widget: A dynamic list of recently active, popular, and newest Friends of the displayed member. Widget is only shown when viewing a member profile
  • BP Groups Widget: A dynamic list of recently active, popular, newest, or alphabetical groups
  • BP Core Members Widget: A dynamic list of recently active, popular, and newest members
  • BP Core Recently Active Widget: Profile photos of recently active members
  • BP Core Who’s Online Widget: Profile photos of online users
  • BP Messages Sitewide Notices Widget: Display Sitewide Notices posted by the site administrator

BP Nouveau widgets:

  • BP Latest Activities: Display the latest updates of your community having the types of your choice
  • BP Nouveau Navigation Widget: Displays BuddyPress primary nav in the sidebar of the site. (Must be used as the first widget of the sidebar and only once.)

In addition to building a block for every BuddyPress widget, contributors are aiming to make it possible to transform existing BP widgets into their corresponding BP block.

With the new block widgets screen imminently landing in WordPress, BuddyPress has to make this move forward to keep pace with the progress of the block editor’s march beyond use in the content editor. Otherwise, BuddyPress users would need to disable block widgets with the Classic Widgets plugin in order to maintain access to BuddyPress core widgets.

Contributors are also working on creating a new Follow component, a frequently requested feature which would use the now abandoned BuddyPress Follow plugin as inspiration. The feature will work similar to Twitter following or the Facebook follow button that allows users to see public activity posts for those they are following. The Follow component is being built as a plugin first and will ship with 9.0 if it is ready in time.