During the most recent BuddyPress development meeting, contributors decided to focus the upcoming 12.0 release on merging the BP Rewrites feature plugin into core. This plugin is the result of a ten-year-old effort to migrate BuddyPress’ custom URI parser to use WordPress’ Rewrite API.
One year ago, BP Rewrites went into beta. It’s not certain how the change will interact with different plugins, so BP developers recommended it be tested for at least two major BuddyPress core releases before considering a merge. Early testers uncovered many incompatibilities and conflicts with various BuddyPress features.
In order to move forward confidently with support for users who may experience plugin conflicts, BP Rewrites’ maintainers have decided to create a new plugin that will provide backward compatibility. This new plugin will be called BP Classic and will also contain BuddyPress’ legacy widgets, a change that BuddyPress core developer Mathieu Viet said “will be our first move towards progressively rebooting BuddyPress.” BP 9.0.0 (released July 2021) gave users the ability to transform legacy widgets into a block with two clicks. Moving these widgets out into BP Classic will be a significant step towards their eventual retirement.
The BP Attachments Add-on, a new component for managing BuddyPress attachments, is ready to move into beta testing. Viet has updated the plugin’s README file to include the features it will launch with in the plugin on WordPress.org:
- Front-end and back-end Media library for all your members
- Administrators can moderate Members media from the back-end Media library
- Members can upload public or private media into their personal Media Library as well as organize them creating file directories, photo albums, movie or music playlists
- User media blocks for all your site’s content contributors
- Members can upload and attach public media to their activity updates (Needs the BP Activity component to be active)
- Members can upload and attach private media to their private messages (Needs the BP Messages component to be active)
- All members public media can be browsed from the Community Media directory.
- (beta) A new avatar Upload UI
Future versions of the feature plugin will include a new cover image upload UI, and the ability to share media with friends and between group members.
BuddyPress contributors anticipate bumping the required WordPress version to 5.8 in the 12.0 release. Beta 1 is planned for April 15, with the official release landing May 31.