Development for version 1.2 of BuddyPress is beginning to wind down and we’re looking at a feature freeze at the end of this month. I’d expect the new version to be released some time at the end of January after a period of beta testing. We’ve got a host of new features to look forward to in this new version and I’d like to give you a glimpse of a few of them.

One of the biggest changes is the activity stream. There has been a lot of focus on making the activity stream far more interactive in 1.2, and to do this we have merged together some of the features in previous versions of BuddyPress. Instead of having to post messages on a group or profile wire, or posting a separate status update, you can now post messages directly to the site wide stream, your profile stream, or a group activity stream. This stops fragmentation of the interface and brings content posting into one unified input box.

One of the benefits of this interactive activity stream is that we can now provide the ability for other members to post direct replies to your updates. In 1.2 the activity stream includes the ability for threaded commenting. This allows for full conversations to take place around activities and makes the activity stream that much more of a two way process.

Another major update in 1.2 is the introduction of a new default theme. We’ve worked hard to produce a theme that will help both end users and developers. The new theme offers a more usable and unified interface with far more personal customization than the previous default. The theme also greatly simplifies the HTML, CSS and Javascript that powers it, allowing for greater ease of customization. If you’re fully invested in the previous default, don’t worry, this theme is not going anywhere and has already been updated to support the new features in 1.2. The new default simply provides a fresh alternative.

If you’re itching to start trying out some of the features in the new version, you can head on over to the BuddyPress Test Drive. The test drive runs the latest development version of BuddyPress and represents the state of the newest version as it currently stands. If you’d like to start working with the development version you can always check out the latest version from our svn code repository. However, remember that until the final version is released code is subject to change.

I hope everyone has a wonderful festive season and an even better new year celebration. 2010 is going to be an exciting year for BuddyPress, I’m looking forward to sharing it with you.

For the next version of BuddyPress there has been a fair amount of re-factoring work done. We’ve listened to your feedback from version 1.0 and made a number of internal changes that are going to make your lives as plugin developers and theme designers easier.

One of the biggest changes in BuddyPress 1.1 will be the way themes are built.

In version 1.0 BuddyPress required two themes to function. The first theme was a “WordPress home” theme that handled the blog and front page of your site. It was essentially a standard WordPress theme. The second was a “BuddyPress member” theme that would handle the display of pages generated by BuddyPress. There were many reasons for handling themes this way, but as time passed it was evident theming in this fashion was hurting the majority to help the minority.

In BuddyPress 1.1 there will be one single theme to handle everything. BuddyPress will ship with a theme framework that acts as a parent theme. The default theme will be a child theme based on this framework and contains only images and css. Building a new BuddyPress theme will be as simple as creating a child theme based on the framework. If you’re not familiar with child themes a quick google search will bring up lots of useful information.

This approach brings big benefits. When building a new theme you don’t need to re-create every template file. You can override specific template files where needed. Most importantly though, your theme will update automatically with the latest functionality when the framework theme is updated.

If you’ve already created a BuddyPress theme using the old system don’t worry, these themes will continue to work for at least the next couple of versions. You should find it fairly simple to convert your themes to the new system. The old default themes only took a few hours to convert over.

Using the framework theme is of course, just an option. You can still go ahead and create your own frameworks or mashups with a completely unique style or structure. As with WordPress themes, the possibilities are infinite.

If you’d like to get started with the new framework, I’d recommend running the trunk version of BuddyPress. The best way is to fetch this via Subversion, or you can download a zip of the current snapshot using the link at the bottom of this Trac browser page.

BuddyPress 1.1 is on track for a September release.