December 24, 2009 
In writing for WPMU.org this year I’ve had the opportunity to get to know a great number of excellent people in the WPMU / BuddyPress community – developers, innovators, designers, and entrepreneurs. We’ve been happy to feature projects from several passionate contributors to the community and look forward to sharing more news and tips in the new year. I’d like to review some of the major milestones in the WPMU community this year and then invite you to take a short survey to help us strategically focus our content to what will be the most helpful to you in the coming year.
The WPMU community received some earth-shattering news this year that its code would be merging with single user WordPress very soon. We expect that will happen sometime in 2010 when WP 3.0 is released. There is still some level of mystery surrounding the “when and how” of this operation, but we will continue to bring you the latest updates throughout 2010.
The BuddyPress project has grown by leaps and bounds. It went from a handful of plugins at the end of 2008 to its current total of 89 in the BuddyPress plugin repository. We’re expecting version 1.2 to be released sometime near the end of January, which will include a new default theme and a more interactive, streamlined activity stream. If you can’t wait to try it out, check out the trunk version, available from the svn code repository.
Our favorite platform for building became a bit unhinged this year and went without direction for months. bbPress is now coming under new leadership and we hope to see a more unified community in 2010. There were even some erroneous concerns that the project was being abandoned. However, bbPress lives on. The idea of including bbPress as one of the new canonical plugins for WordPress is being tossed around by the WordPress Core Commit Team. The ramifications of this move are anyone’s guess, but we’ll keep you updated.
In order to serve you better I would greatly appreciate feedback from our readers about what kinds of content you’d like to see in the new year. To determine what is the most helpful to you, I’ve put together a few questions. We’ll leave this survey active for a couple weeks and hope to inform you of the results in 2010:
Thank you all for helping with this survey and for being such loyal readers and contributors. Writing for you has been a challenge and also supremely rewarding. We’ve got some really exciting posts coming up, so make sure you’re subscribed. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Sarah Gooding on Google+
I am impatiently waiting for 3.0 tp be released!