If I had to say one thing about Utrecht, it’s that I was more worried about being hit by a cyclist than a car! The weather was fantastic, and the colours of the light illuminated the old, compact buildings in a friendly glow. The Dom Tower dominated the skyline, and doubled-up as a handy landmark for me (my hotel was next to it).

If you live on the other side of the Atlantic, and were thinking about a WordCamp holiday into Europe next year, look no further: WordCamp Netherlands has you covered.

There are tons of photos of the WordCamp around the interwebs, and all the talks were recorded on video, so I’m looking forward to reliving the event through them. Here’s a teaser (I’m in green at about 11 seconds):

I was invited by the event’s organisers to talk about BuddyPress, so I shared information about the new 1.6 version of BuddyPress, and the core team’s ideas for future versions. My presentation’s slides are on slideshare, and the video of it should be up online in the next couple of weeks.

One of the most exciting things for me was to meet Bowe Frankema, Peter Hofman, and Stas Sușcov, all long-term BuddyPress contributors / developers / designers. With those three and Tammie, and myself, we had the most BuddyPress that I’ve ever seen at a single conference. Very cool.

I am presenting about BuddyPress in 2012, and there are also two other sessions – Tammie Lister’s and Bowe Frankema’s – covering BuddyPress, which is really great. I am in Utrecht a couple of days before the WordCamp, so I’m hoping to catch up with the likes of Tammie, Bowe, Peter Hofman, and Stas Sușcov, to have a chat about BuddyPress.

Tickets are still available for the event, and the line up is awesome. Go check it out.

Download from WordPress.org

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.

I gave a talk introducing BuddyPress 1.5, which was released the day before. I think it went pretty well, and I’ve embedded my slides and a YouTube recording of yours truly below.

The Telegraph‘s hosting the next meetup on October 20th, so why not come and say hi?