BuddyPress 2.9 Adds Ability to Safely Edit A Group’s Permalink

BuddyPress 2.9 ‘La Lombarda’ named after a restaurant established in 1922 in the UK, is available for download. This release contains a handful of small improvements.

BuddyPress legacy templates now have Aria labels that improves accessibility to layouts. Group invites are no longer sent to users that have already received one. Uploading profile images on mobile devices is easier and has better support for files with non ASCII characters.

Earlier this year, I highlighted how BuddyPress didn’t create a redirect when a Group’s slug was changed. According to John James Jacoby, BuddyPress lead developer, groups did not have a canonical redirection, or keep track of their slug history.

Perhaps the most noteworthy improvement in this release is the ability to safely edit a Group’s Slug from the Dashboard and have it automatically redirect.

This improvement was eight years in the making and allows users to change a Group’s slug without breaking existing links.

Other changes in 2.9 include:

Email links to private message threads now re-direct logged out users to the login screen, logged in users are directed to the message thread.

A new template tag named bp_group_link()

An order_by parameter for activity queries.

For a full list of changes in this release, check out BuddyPress 2.9’s Codex page. If you encounter any issues, you’re encouraged to report them in the BuddyPress support forum. Forty-five people contributed to BuddyPress 2.9.