Feedbacks about 4.4.0 Security & Maintenance release
4.4.0 has been released on July 23rd and has been downloaded more than 30,000 times since then. No specific feedbacks were posted on our support forums about it. Weโll keep an eye on how it evolves in the coming days but it looks like it went smoothly.
BP REST API
Documentation site
@johnjamesjacoby is assigned to the Meta Trac ticket which goal is to prepare existing developer.buddypress.org to house the BP REST API documentation.
@espellcaste shared his worries about the time remaining until 5.0.0 release. I think itโs still doable and if weโre short, we will be able to use our ยซ test drive ยป as a fallback. Weโll only have to buy a domain name more meaningful.
As discussed during the previous dev-chat, Iโve started writing the documentation into the ยซ WordPress Handbook ยป format copy-pasting parts of the Restsplain generated documentation. Hereโs a first page for the Components endpoint.
The interesting benefit about doing so is the fact itโs a good way to review the BP REST API. If members of the team want to participate to this effort, they just need to ping @im4th to get admin access to the site.
Code improvements
To illustrate the benefit described in the above paragraph, Iโve (I am @im4th ๐) shared this pull request (#196) about improving the consistency of the Componentโs endpoint PUT method arguments description/documentation. @espellcaste will look into it and check the other endpoints about the subject.
@espellcaste also worked on adding hooks to the prepare_links() methods when needed and to items collection query parameters. He will also look into this issue to try to understand why a notice error is thrown when removing the avatar original file.
Finally, although @dcavins couldnโt attend our dev-chat, heโs been hardly working on adapting the BP REST API (197) to go along with the new Invitation API (#6210) heโs been building for BuddyPress. I will look into it more deeply asap. My very first feedback would be to rebase the pull request as there is one merge conflict (probably due to the hooks recently added by @espellcaste)
5.0.0 milestoneโs tickets
At the end of the previous topic, @im4th informed he would probably open a new ticket to improve the bp.apiRequest : the dataType argument should default to json, doing so it will save some time to plugin developers using it in the future as REST replies are in JSON.
We did a quick review of the โnewโ tickets having patches, in particular @boonebgorges and @im4th talked about #8013 to decide about the name of the additional key to use for the exporter item names displayed to regular users. @im4th agreed with @boonebgorges it was best to bp prefix the name.
@espellcaste decided to move #7018 to next release to concentrate on the last BP REST API tasks.
About the list of patches I mentioned into the July 10thโs dev-chat summary. Iโve decided to commit the three crossed out ones (the first 3, if you prefer) below and leave some more time to the BP Legacy Twenty Nineteen companion stylesheet.
About this last ticket, it would be great to have some feedbacks about it as Iโm unsure I made the right CSS decisions about it.
BuddyPress & the Gutenberg project
As requested by @espellcaste into this comment of the dev-chat agenda we kept some time to discuss about this topic or more precisely about the first ideas we have to benefit from the Gutenberg project (Phase 1 โ editor & Phase 2 โ widgets).
The first very important thing @im4th wanted to highlight is:
BuddyPress Blocks will be easier to create by us or plugin developers thanks to the BP REST API: I think itโs a very important point, because the Gutenberg project mainly use REST.
Iโve been thinking about this since the dev-chat and I think we really need to have this ticket fixed for 5.0.0 release : #8116 BP Blocks category.
Then we had difficulties to understand each others and I think thatโs because the Block Editor is often called Gutenberg ๐.
Theme Compat API โvsโ Block API
@boonebgorges shared very important points comparing the Block API to our Theme compatibility API.
Gutenberg does something similar to what our theme compat does. It provides a way to place dynamic content in the โcontentโ area of a theme template.
Retrospectively, I would add that the Gutenberg team is working on a โJSON templatingโ feature, but Iโm unsure it will be overridable : I think โoverridabilityโ is a great feature of our Theme Compat API.
What does the BuddyPress community want/need ?
@espellcaste think itโs important we get our community members expectations about this topic.
another thing I think would be important is to see what the community wantโฆ try to get the info somehowโฆ. specially from bp theme authorsโฆ
A lot of things could be improved but that doesnโt mean it will have the most impactโฆ
I think heโs 100% right, so instead of dropping the ideas we talked about during the dev-chat, I guess we need to organize them a little and let you give us your opinions about it. It would help us a lot to decide what will be our next steps into this area. So stay tuned! Weโll soon be back to you ๐ค.
Next dev-chat
It will happen onย August 7th at 19:00 UTCย inย #BuddyPressย slack channel. We will have 1 week left beforeย 5.0.0 first betaย so letโs get our last tasks done during the next 2 weeks ๐ช.
#4-4-0, #5-0-0