What’s New In BuddyPress 1.8

In case you missed it, the first beta of BuddyPress 1.8 was released this week. BuddyPress 1.7 introduced theme compatiblity and a host of other exciting features. Although 1.8 has had a shorter release cycle, it’s still packed with some very cool new features and improvements.

Here’s a little bit of what you can expect from BuddyPress 1.8:

BP_Group_Extension Rewritten

Many BuddyPress plugins interface with the groups component. The BP_Group_Extension has been rewritten to make it faster for plugins that depend on it. The new changes will make writing group extension plugins much easier than before.

Improvements to Group Administration Panels

BuddyPress 1.8 adds pagination support to “Manage Members” panel in the dashboard.

Template Hierarchy

BuddyPress 1.8 introduces a new template hierarchy layer for top-level templates. This hierarchy more closely matches WordPress’s template hierarchy. Theming BuddyPress will now be more natural for those who are already familiar with theming WordPress.

Ability to Disable @mentions

This release includes a filter that will let you easily disable @mentions. Just add this line to your bp-custom.php file:

{code type=php}
add_filter( ‘bp_activity_do_mentions’, ‘__return_false’ );

RSS feeds for activity streams

RSS feeds have been revamped to better follow best practices for feed construction.

Want to help test BuddyPress 1.8-beta1? It’s not ready to be used in a production environment yet, but your testing can help to get it there sooner. Download the zip file from WordPress.org and take it for a spin.

Tags:

• buddypress
• releases