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I’ve just got a new feature to the proof-of-concept stage; a Like button. It works similarly to all social networks’ like buttons. Right now, I’ve hooked it up to appear in the toolbar when you’re reading a blog post. Big thanks to Tammie Lister for contributing the button graphic.

I’m not sure when this new version of BP Labs will be out, but if you’re running BuddyPress 1.6-trunk, you can download BP Labs trunk here, and check it out. I’ve put a gallery of screenshots below.

It’d be really handy to get some feedback on this early version; do you like the idea? Is it implemented in a useful manner? What other features would you consider core to such an implementation?

• Missing admin menu in multisite
• Some links not being correctly replaced into certain emails
• Incorrect default text for the “you’ve been promoted” email.

I’m still tracking a known issue with internationalisation and hope to have that addressed in the next version.

It is a minor update to fix a bug reported by Simon Kartar involving error handling when the welcome messages could not be sent. I have also re-added the i18n .pot file to the package for easier localisation.

This is a minor release to improve compatibility with BuddyPress 1.5 (which is now a requirement). Some of the internals have been updated, and the @mentions autocomplete now works correctly with BP Default 1.5 theme.

When a user registers on your site, Welcome Pack lets you automatically send them a friend or group invitation, a Welcome Message and can redirect them to a Start Page. You can also customise the emails sent by BuddyPress so that they match your site.

In this release, I’ve updated the admin page design, and totally overhauled the email customisation options. Using post types and easy-to-theme HTML templates, Welcome Pack 3.0 is BuddyPress emails done right.

Big thanks to Tammie Lister of Logical Binary for contributing both email templates that are included in the release. If you need awesome design done, you’d do well to talk Tammie.

Be sure to check out the new documentation for Welcome Pack to learn how you can create your own email templates; ever wanted to use short codes, or even WordPress’ Loop to show your recent posts in your emails? Now you can.

After that’s done, BP Labs will probably be next, as I want to continue building on the Akismet integration; I think that will be really popular once word gets around.

Then Achievements.

• Added caching to @mentions autosuggest; it speeds up multiple requests for the same query.
• Added Activity Stream Spam experiment (requires BuddyPress 1.5).

Activity Stream Spam requires BuddyPress 1.5; it won’t do anything on earlier versions of BuddyPress. 1.5 is due out soon, and is itself currently in beta (go test!). The admin backend for un-spamming (or “hamming”) activity items looks like this.

Please note you’ll need to have WordPress’ standard Akismet plugin set up, configured and working. In beta 1, there is no way of manually marking an activity item as spam; Akismet will use its best judgement.

I wanted to get this out as soon as possible so people can (hopefully) test the core functionality, in order for a final release a little while after BuddyPress 1.5 goes out. Let me know in comments any bugs or feedback.

I’ve had time this weekend to get my BP Labs plugin close to another release. The big feature, as previous mentioned, is integrating Akismet into the Activity Stream. It’s going to be a pretty rudimentary implementation in the first release, as I need to think about how the admin UI is best done, and how it should or shouldn’t match WordPress’ comment spam handling. Here’s a screenshot of the admin UI so far, which is what I’ve spent this afternoon on:

Activity Stream spam, admin UI