Looking Into the Future of BuddyPress: Upcoming Features and Improvements

BuddyPress got an upgrade today! Andy Peatling announced earlier this afternoon that a major part of BuddyPress 1.2 was just added to the trunk. Wire, Status, and Activity are merged and threaded comments have been added. You can check it out on http://testbp.org/.

If you’ve been using hacks to accomplish these things, they are no longer needed because the core is adapting these features in small steps. It’s exciting to watch BuddyPress grow and see so many enthusiastic participants in its development. It’s slowly becoming a very robust platform for social networking. Expectations are high, since we’re all used to social networks like Facebook and MySpace which have a large numbers of personnel to support a number of complex features. It’s really quite amazing the progress that BuddyPress has enjoyed with this small, vibrant community.

What new BuddyPress features are coming up in December 2009?

Activity Streams:

• Activity stream threaded commenting.

Blogs:

• A quick blog post form via the theme.

Core:

• Basic privacy controls for user profiles and content contained within an installation
• Inappropriate content flagging

Friends:

• Bulk accept/reject friendship requests

*This list of features is taken directly from the Product Roadmap: http://buddypress.org/about/roadmap/, which is a great resource for keeping track of where BuddyPress is headed.

There are a lot of exciting improvements to look forward to in BuddyPress 1.3. My top picks include widgetizing group pages with the addition of drag and drop content boxes, inline replies to wire messages, easy image posting, and profile-field specific searching.

If you’re a BuddyPress fanatic and you want to keep up with what they call “the bleeding edge version” of BuddyPress via SVN, you can get it here: http://svn.buddypress.org/trunk

Sarah Gooding on Google+

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