A look into the future of the Blog Peoria Network
As I have announced previously, I am waiting for the fine folks at Buddy Press to complete work on a series of plugins and updates that will add social network functionality to Wordpress MultiUser sites like this one. I have even signed up for a free blog here to give it a test. Basically, it’s a way to create user profiles, add friends, sent messages back and forth, etc. I can see many ways in which this would be a usefull application when running a site for citizen journalists, which is what Blog Peoria was originally designed to be.
“Some updates on the release status of BuddyPress:
- The target is to release beta versions of all the available plugins on Dec 15.
- From then, there will be a feature freeze and there will be a period of bug fixing to stabilize the plugins ready for a 1.0 release.
- Each component will be released as an individual 1.0. There will be no “BuddyPress 1.0″. BuddyPress is a collection of official component plugins, each adding a new feature with its own roadmap. However, there will always be a zip file available with the current versions of official component plugins to download in one package.
- As soon as all major issues have been resolved, 1.0 versions of each official component plugin will be released. As it’s around Christmas time (most people will be too busy eating turkey to test) I’m not attaching a final date. Each component will be released ASAP after its beta one by one, when ready. By doing this you won’t have to wait for all components to reach release quality before any are made available.
- The photo gallery and status update components will not be available along with the first release of available official components. These will be a priority after the first release and can be added to any installation at a later date. There just wasn’t enough time to fit these in.
So what’s left to do before Dec 12?
- Filtering of friends and groups lists to show “Recently Active Friends”, “Recently Added Friends” etc. In groups “Groups I’ve Created”, “Groups Recently Updated”, “Groups Recently Joined”, etc.
- Finish the members directory as well as adding blog and group directories, accessible via “domain.com/groups/“, “domain.com/members/“. “domain.com/blogs/“.
- bbPress forums for groups.
- Private messaging autocomplete on friend names.
- RSS Feeds for activity streams.
Not long to go now, thank you all for helping to test and your contributions. I’m really excited to see what people will do with release quality components. Rock on!”
To view the group wire: http://testbp.org/groups/buddypress-testers-614548248/wire
To view the group home: http://testbp.org/groups/buddypress-testers-614548248
To view Andy Peatling’s profile page: http://testbp.org/members/andy


