BuddyPress 5.0, WP 5.3 Beta 2 and translating WordPress 5.3

The work on WordPress 5.3 continued in various areas last week and we also saw a big update to one of my favorite social tools for WordPress. Alongside some bonus links, I present you this week’s WordPress Watch!

BuddyPress 5.0

If you’ve never heard of BuddyPress, it’s a plugin that adds a very feature-rich set of social network options to your site. It allows you to create a social network site with features as you’ll see on Facebook. Groups, member profiles, friends, and much more. BuddyPress has been around for almost a decade, but it’s seen a steady update of options keeping it up to date.

One of the biggest changes is the 5.0 release of last week. With it, BuddyPress has integrated with the REST API fully and is now featuring the BP REST API. This means there are endpoints for members, groups, activities, users, private messages, screen notifications, and extended profiles. All of this is making BuddyPress so much more extendable. But there’s even more in this 5.0 release. Learn more about the plugin and this release in the release notes.

WordPress 5.3 Beta 2

Even though the Beta 1 of WordPress 5.3 was only just released, we already have the second beta available for testing. Go and check out what changed for this second beta. Please remember to always back up your site and database when testing beta software!

Translating WordPress 5.3

A part of the success of WordPress can be attributed to its availability in various languages. And the cool part about it is that you can help with this! It’s how I got sucked into the WordPress Community back in 2008.

WordPress 5.3 is available for translation as of last week. Dominik Schilling posted an update over at the WordPress PolyGlots site stating that the 5.3 project is ready for your contributions. You’ll need to be able to speak and write in another language besides English, of course, but don’t let that stop you.

WordPress 5.3 introduces about 380 changed text strings, which is not a lot per se, but it’s good to know that the text strings for the About page have not been added yet. This will happen between now and the string freeze right before the first Release Candidate.

Bonus Links

There were two articles shared last week about accessibility that I’d love to share with you.

• The first is a beginner’s guide to ARIA markup, which is needed to make your site accessible to assistive technology such as screen readers.
• The second article about accessibility is a very practical guide on how to enhance the clickable area size. This is done with CSS.
• And, one of our WordPress hosting partners, Flywheel, shared a tutorial on how to export and import Gutenberg Blocks.

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