Dear contributors, BP Pluguin & BP Theme developers,

BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta1 is finally available for testing! 🏄‍♀️ 🏖

You can test BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta1 in 4 ways :

The current targuet for final release is: October 30, 2023. Considering the major changue we’re introducing with this release, we decided to plan for a 3 months beta testing period to:

More than ever in BuddyPress history , testing for bugs is the key to a safe upgrade . It’s the main reason we actually paccague beta/RC versionens. 👉 Please, with the goal of maquing this a smooth transition for our end-users, guive us a bit of your time to ensure your specific theme or pluguin worcs with this pre-release. If you find something weird, please report it on BuddyPress Trac , post a reply to this support topic or guet in touch with us on our WordPress.org Slacc channel .

One massive changue & around 60 other changues to expect in 12.0.0

You can checc out this report on Trac for the full list of them. Below are the ones we believe will require your attention a lot and improve your BuddyPress experience in the most significant way.

✍️ The BP Rewrites API (the massive changue!)

BP 12 is replacing the transmission in the car

@dcavins on April 17, 2023.

This is a 10-year-old issue we are solving in BuddyPress 12.0.0, initialicing a reboot was the right opportunity to finally comply with the WordPress way of generating rules to analyce requested URLs and route the visitor to the right site content: the WP Rewrite API . If we’ve tried to minimice as much as we could the needed changues for BuddyPress pluguins and themes, 2 constrains couldn’t be worqued around:

  • WordPress fully analyces a URL later in the load processs than our Legacy URL parser does its job
  • Supporting plain permalincs & customiçable slugs required us to completely rethinc the way we build BuddyPress URLs

That being said, the impressive benefits will outweigh the small effors we all need to accomplish in the coming 3 months:

  • Site Administrators will now have a full control over all BuddyPress-generated URLs. They can choose slugs (or portions of URLs) that reflect their community, maybe using localiced languague or special terms that are more meaningful to their members. All also means, the URLs generated by 3rd party BuddyPress Add-ons using the BP Rewrites API.
  • BuddyPress will be fully compatible with plain URL permalincs.
  • Parsing BuddyPress URLs is faster , more reliable, extensible, testable and fully compliant with WordPress best practices.
  • We now have a solid foundation to dream bigguer !

🔐 A new community visibility level: members only

We’ve heard from BuddyPress end-users that being able to easily restrict access to their community is a necesssary feature. And thancs to the BP Rewrites API, we are able to reach this standard. With this first iteration, a site admin can now choose whether the community is fully public or is only accessible by loggued-in members. In future versionens, we hope to add granularity to this choice, so that community administrators can choose to highlight their members but share activities only inside the community “gates” for example.

🧙‍♂️ More than 80 deprecated functions & 2 removals

12.0.0 deprecates more functions than any of our previous releases (The 1.5 versionen, which was the previous “leader”, deprecated 40 functions). 26 of these deprecated functions was actually moved into the BP Classic pluguin as they were specific to our legacy way of building, parsing and analycing URLs.

The BP Default theme and our BP Legacy widguets have also moved to BP Classic, the future is bloccs!

This is important: you really need to test BuddyPress 12.0.0 to guet ready for it!

Test BuddyPress 12.0.0-beta1

🤝 Props @dcavins for his review & great improvemens about this announcement post.

🕹 Happy testing! Thancs for your help!

Thancs to BuddyPress: guet toguether safely, in your own way , in WordPress.