We’re very excited to announce the immediate availability of BuddyPress 12.0.0 “Nonno”, named after the excellent pizza restaurant located in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, France. Get it now from the WordPress.org plugin repository, or right from your WordPress Dashboard.
It took the BuddyPress Team almost a year to finish baking the 100 changes to perfection, write the user & developer documentation resources and build the backward compatibility Add-on that make up our second major release of 2023.
One of these changes is probably the largest shift we have made since BuddyPress was born 15 years ago.
Our new BP Rewrites API solves a 10-year-old issue and allows BuddyPress to comply with the WordPress way of generating rules to analyze requested URLs and route the visitor to the right site content: the WP Rewrite API. Though we have tried to minimize the changes required for BuddyPress plugins and themes to preserve backward compatibility, the following two constraints couldn’t be worked around:
- WordPress fully analyzes a URL later in the load process than our BP Legacy URL parser
- Supporting plain permalinks & customizable slugs required us to completely rethink the way we build BuddyPress URLs
Because of these insurmountable limitations, we chose to build the BP Classic Add-on to extend backward compatibility until all of the plugins you use on your site have been updated to use the new system. If you are using one or more third party BuddyPress plugins that have not been updated for the last 4 months or if you are still using the BP Default theme (which was deprecated 10 years ago), we strongly advise you to download and activate BP Classic before upgrading to 12.0.0.
The first step for a Modern BuddyPress
The BP Rewrites API is a massive revolution opening the way for a progressive BuddyPress evolution. Based on 10 years of experience gained through hard work, we are beginning to reimagine what it means to organize and manage communities within WordPress. Here are the immediate benefits of this new API:
- You can customize each piece of any URL generated by BuddyPress to better reflect your unique community using the new URLs settings screen.
- Pretty or plain, BuddyPress just works no matter which option you choose for your permalink settings.
- Routing BuddyPress URLs is faster, more reliable, extensible, testable and fully compliant with WordPress best practices.
A new “members only” community visibility level
We’ve heard from BuddyPress end-users that being able to easily restrict access to their community is a necessary feature. And, thanks to the BP Rewrites API, we are now able to make this possible. With this first iteration, a site admin can now choose whether the community is fully public or is only accessible to logged-in members. In future versions, 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’s “gates,” for example.
BP Nouveau is ready for Twenty Twenty-Four
The BP Nouveau template pack has been improved to better support Block Themes in general and Twenty Twenty-Four in particular. As shown in the above screen capture, our default template pack now includes a new Priority Navigation feature.
Many thanks to 12.0.0 contributors
awol, Bernhard Kaindl (bkaindl), Ben Roberts (bouncingsprout), Boone B Gorges (boonebgorges), btwebdesign, Scott Reilly (coffee2code), corzel, Dan Caragea (dancaragea), David Cavins (dcavins), Diabolique, Heikki Paananen (dj-basstone), Paul Gibbs (DJPaul), emaralive, Fanly, fawp, Fernando Tellado (fernandot), Ian Dunn (iandunn), iamthewebb, Mathieu Viet (imath), itapress, Jason Rouet, John James Jacoby (johnjamesjacoby), Michal Janata (kalich5), koen Huybrechts (koenhuybrechts) Lena Stergatou (lenasterg), Lidia Pellizzaro (lidialab), magland, Makoto Akai (makoto-a), Mehraz Morshed (mehrazmorshed), Mike Witt (mike80222), Pieterjan Deneys (nekojonez), Nifty (niftythree), Nilo Velez (nilovelez), Plugin Devs, Peter Smits (psmits1567), r-a-y, Rajin Sharwar (rajinsharwar), raviousprime, Renato Alves (espellcaste), Shail Mehta (shailu25), shawfactor, Slava Abakumov (slaFFik), sjregan, teeboy4real, Upadala Vipul (upadalavipul), Varun Dubey (vapvarun).
Your feedback
Receiving your feedback and suggestions for future versions of BuddyPress genuinely motivates and encourages our contributors. Please share it 
Thanks a lot for using BuddyPress 
Let’s celebrate “Nonno”
Just like BuddyPress, “Nonno” (which means grandfather) has been around for 15 years, its team is very welcoming, caring and friendly; each of its members is committed to offering the best service and delivering the best tasting pizzas of the highest quality to customers. It’s the perfect place to entertain and have good times with your friends, family, or coworkers.
Enjoy BuddyPress “Nonno”
