شماره مقاله :

به نام خداوند بخشاینده و مهربان

Over the past few weeks we’ve released 3 bug fix versions of BuddyPress; more than we’ve released for the entire beginning of the year. What I noticed is that when development was slow, so were our support forums and so was the general buzz about the project. Since we’ve started patching bugs and cranking out bug fix releases again, things are picking back up which totally rocks.

I think this is a great example of how activity breeds activity, and it reminded me that social networks and niche communities are as susceptible to becoming stagnant as normal WordPress blogs can be. Most of us have probably had a great idea for a website, spent the $10 on the domain name, installed WordPress, made a fancy theme, posted 3 updates and then for whatever reason, just lost interest in it.

The same thing is totally possible with your social network, and when development slowed down here on the BuddyPress project in the past few months, the community felt that impact and over time there was some concern about what the future of BuddyPress was going to be.

Let me tell you that “the state of the word is strong.” – MM

We’ve recently added some really fancy functionality to BuddyPress.org that integrates any plugin in the WordPress repository that is tagged ‘buddypress’ and gives it a public discussion group. It passes over a plugins’ information like ratings and statistics, gives it its own dedicated support forum where you can assign administrators and moderators, and comes with a built in donate link so people can drop a few bucks in your pocket to show their appreciation. If you’re a plugin author, be sure to check it out!

In the coming months we have a lot of exciting things planned that will revitalize the BuddyPress.org website and help solidify BuddyPress as the ultimate social networking solution for your WordPress powered site. We’re looking at adding more core contributors, more forum moderators, redesigning the site with a completely custom template, improving the codex, and diving head first into some new features for 1.3.

For everyone that was worried about BuddyPress, you can breathe a sigh of relief. For everyone else, thanks for hanging out and staying interested while things were slow. We’re full steam ahead and you can count on seeing much more activity in our community in the coming weeks!

Brad asks:

What’s the optimal way to store large amounts of meta data for a taxonomy without creating a custom table in WordPress?

WordPress has meta tables for the site (options table), posts, comments and users. It lacks a table for meta data about taxonomies (categories, tags, custom taxonomies). Solutions for this aren’t going to be simple, but I can think of a solution that doesn’t create extra tables. You could create a “shadow” entry in the posts table for each term, using a custom post type (say, “taxonomy-meta”). Then, just attach meta key/value pairs to that post entry.

As for linking the post proxy entry to its corresponding term, you could use the taxonomy system to place that term within that taxonomy, but it would probably be much faster to appropriate one of the existing fields, since this is a one-to-one relationship. I’d probably use post_name and make it something like taxonomy-meta-term-{$term_id}. That way, it’d be fairly straightforward to grab the proxy object that corresponded to a particular term.

I’d create four API functions. One backend function to get the post ID of the proxy object corresponding to a particular term. A backend function to create a proxy object for a term if it doesn’t exist. And then one to update taxonomy meta, and one to get taxonomy meta.

It sounds complicated, but it shouldn’t be more than 30-40 lines of code. And your API would be simple. Share the code if you end up doing this!

“K. K.” asks:

Can you explain how to become a core WordPress developer like you?

WordPress is a meritocracy, so to get the “props” you have to show your worth and put in the time. Start by lurking in Trac and seeing how we develop. Observe the weekly WordPress meetings in #wordpress-dev on Freenode. Then, when you feel confident, start submitting patches to Trac on tickets that need them. Or test the patches that are up there. Follow the tickets and respond to feedback. People who consistently provide quality patches and who seem to “get” the WordPress principles (e.g. options are bad, keep core light, target the 80% need, etc) will rise fairly quickly in prominence.

Ted asks:

Are there any plans to incorporate Facebook connect or any of the other 3rd-party authentication mechanisms into WordPress? If not, are there any FB connect plugins you’d recommend — ideally ones that work for both WP and BuddyPress?

Facebook Connect