Want to celebrate in style? WPMU.org had a colourful infographic to go with the release of 3.1.

Fancy discovering more about the music behind WordPress? 3.1 is code named Reinhardt after Django Reinhardt and WPMU.org provides the music with Daily Tip: Jam Out with WordPress 3.1′s Namesake, Django Reinhardt.

Creating a custom functions plugin for end users by Justin Tadlock is an interesting method of adding custom code to a theme or even themes.

Linking to all image sizes in WordPress also from Justin Tadlock shows how you can do similar to sites like Flickr and show links for all image sizes. A useful trick for image based sites.

Killer hacks to enhance WordPress editor does what it says on the tin by Cats who Code.

Improving WordPress Privacy is a different look at what you can do to keep that site you are working on under wraps by Roget Johansson at 456 Berea Street.

Learn How to Add a Custom Background Image to BuddyPress Avatars with Sarah over at wpmu.org. Don’t forget our own tutorial a while back about this for ways to do it using pure CSS in Fancy up your avatars with some CSS.

Move over robots.txt enter humans.txt. It’s an interesting initiative and something for all who run a website to consider.

reset.css has a new version. We use Eric Meyer’s reset CSS like most do now and the new version has some important updates. We will look to include this in new themes and review about fitting onto old ones.

9 useful google chrome extensions looks at what goodies await the web designer looking to use Chrome.

A key one for those validating their code CSS Validator to report vendor-specific extensions as warnings, not errors.

Every week last year we brought you links from around the web on a Friday and we’re going to carry that on.

Jeff Sayre has some interesting thoughts in ‘The HyperWeb: It’s All About Connections’

Boone Gorges looks into how he built the Group Announcements feature on the CUNY Academic Commons. ‘Group Announcements tab in BuddyPress is a great read and insight.

Sarah over at wpmu.org looks at ‘How to Write a WordPress Plugin: 12 Essential Guides and Resources’

Siobhan has really sparked off conversation around her informative post ‘Why You Should Never Search For Free WordPress Themes in Google or Anywhere Else’

Last up for today we have some eye candy links for you from Bp Inspire:

esse community

Operation HQ

Design moo

We’d like to take this time to say thank you to everyone involved in the 12 days event and those wish them a Merry Christmas. We’d also like to wish our readers and users a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

We will have more blog posts in 2011 when we’re back after a holiday break.

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress is a little post by myself titled Back to basics – apply design principles to your theme.

Tomorrow is the last post in our festive series featuring posts from around the community so don’t forget to check back for the last one.

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress comes from James Goodbrad. Supporting WordPress: Common Tales from the Trenches brings a different take on things from the view of someone that daily supports WordPress.

We’ve got 2 days left of our 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress we’re running with wpmu.org so be sure to check back for more.

Today’s 12 Days of WordPress and BuddyPress is brought to us by Stas Sușcov and let’s meet him in his words:

I’m the WordPress Romanian Localization Team driver, Ubuntu Website Team WordPress hacker/maintainer and WordCamp Bucharest speaker. I was also a Google Summer of Code 2010 student for BuddyPress, which resulted in BuddyPress Courseware component. My blog.

I remember last summer, when I just start playing with BuddyPress, and how much fun it was. Challenges were overwhelming, even so, now I would hardly do it other way. So this is a post about how to get started writing code for BuddyPress (be that core patches or plugins). and how to not get stuck at early stages.

From my experience, the community is everything, but that’s not enough when you decide to contribute to a project. There are interesting aspects that can scare a newcomer, like:

• Conceptual aspects and application design
• Quality of documentation
• Codebase quality and used technologies
• Availability of examples (existing contribution)

Let’s take it one by one.

BuddyPress is still WordPress.

I met a couple of WordPress contributors, that got scared about BuddyPress, thinking of it as something totally new and different. Ok, this is wrong, at least at first view.

BuddyPress was never a pilot project for WordPress, it started as a bunch of hacks (plugins), and evolved into what it is now thanks to it’s community and contributions. The guys that contributed and do it now, were WordPress developers initially!

The main differences between WordPress are the hook names, and some API extensions (here to mention the URL mapping, groups and profiles addons like xprofile). All of it, along with WordPress functionalities(post types and options API) should be enough for you to write applications of any complexity level. So If you think you need to alter the database for you plugin, rethink the adopted design/concept for it, because it’s wrong (I’m almost 110% sure).

From my experience (and I was one of the early adopters of this workflow when writing BuddyPress apps), I found post types along with it’s metas data structure, as almost perfect for the most common tasks you will need for a plugin! To convince you, here are some of the reasons you should consider, that come bulk with such a strategy: caching, database optimization from the very beginning, no need to alter database if your plugin grows. So be smart, and plan your plugin carefully.

In the end, writing a BuddyPress plugin, will just make you a more hacker than you already are :)

Whatever you decide to write for WordPress/BuddyPress, document it!

Be that PHPDoc inline documentation or old school readme.txt, write it down. Writing plugins for BuddyPress is pretty the same as writing them for WordPress. Having a documentation around will help you maintain your codebase along the whole plugin life-cycle which can last years!

Newcomers should know that BuddyPress is still a wild beast, and though guys put efforts into creating both: a solid community and a WordPress level codebase, some parts of code may just miss documentation! Once such a problem strikes you, ask for help, and the help will come, just head on to forums or codex.

Code is poetry, at any age or experience.

Don’t forget this! Both WordPress and BuddyPress are using imperative and sometimes object-oriented programming. This made a couple of my friends to criticize it badly, but that should not be a reason for you to do the same!

BuddyPress is a complex system! For it’s main components like groups and messages, the code is written as classes, which is great, mainly because if you want to modify some component workflow, all you need to do is extend the base class and overwrite the method you don’t like. But heading on with the OOP way everywhere is wrong. Usually users don’t do such complex things, and forcing them to adopt such a workflow, will just drive the contributions away. Not to mention the template tags, which are bare functions that hook into something and allows you making a paragraph out of a list a snap!

So blaming BuddyPress for coding styles it’s wrong, mainly because being flexible for developers (of any level), sometimes it’s more important than being flexible to end-users! With some help, BuddyPress contributions can come from young programmers to experienced developers, and patches are always welcome!

So how do I start.

Good examples are always a good start for any coding you plan. BuddyPress developers took this seriously, and put efforts into helping newcomers understand the plugins workflow and adapt easily.

On codex, there’s a dedicated page for how to write a component. It’s a bunch of code that gave me a real boost when I wrote my first plugin (basically a small modification of the skeleton component), and you should also check it if you want to write something quickly!

More experienced developers, can write their code independently of that. The approach is the same, and it’s up to you. Remember, we’re very-very flexible in terms of code, and the hooks are your best friend!

Final thoughts

I really hope this article will help newcomers cover some of the unusual questions they could ever stumble upon and didn’t know where to get answers. If you didn’t observe, every thought I wanted to explain, more or less brought me to the community. Also, I just wanted to remind everyone that my experience with BuddyPress as part of the community was really special. I was taught and helped a lot, and the people I met here that did all the above are just awesome!

So I hope to see you soon, contributing to BuddyPress.

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress comes from Jerome Degl’innocenti.  So who is Jerome?

My name is Jerome Degl’innocenti and I am a web designer employed by Fresh Egg (a web design and SEO company) living in Eastbourne, England.  Part of my role as a web designer puts me in charge of all WordPress and BuddyPress developments.   I regularly write any WordPress tips on PimpMyWordPress.com but my addiction for WordPress and BuddyPress goes beyond my day job hence BPinspire.com!

Since day one I have been a massive fan of BuddyPresss and I am always on the lookout for any outstanding new sites.  It is for this reason that a year ago I decided to create BPinspire.com, so that people could share any exciting BuddyPress developments.

As the New Year fast approaches, I would like to pause for a moment and look back at 2010.  This year has certainly turned out to be a fantastic BuddyPress vintage; in fact BPinspire is rapidly moving towards the 100 mark in regards to BuddyPress sites added to the showcase gallery.

It has been hard to shortlist only 20 high-quality BuddyPress sites.  The sites featured below are not in any specific order but all have something special.  They have each created a strong community, demonstrate excellent custom development and are rich in design creativity.

With the increase in popularity of BuddyPress, I am certain that next year will be full of remarkable new websites.  I would like to take this opportunity to thank all the BuddyPress development team for all their hard work and the generosity of the BuddyPress community for sharing all their great tips.

Have a fantastic Christmas everybody and a happy New Year.

Club Belote http://clubbelote.com/

Plazza http://plazaa.de/

Kev Jumba http://www.kevjumba.com/

Virgin Media Pioneers http://www.virginmediapioneers.com/

h Mag http://www.h-mag.com/

OOizit http://www.ooizit.com/

Irrational Games http://irrationalgames.com/

Cuny Academic Commons http://commons.gc.cuny.edu/

Tufts Roundtable Commons http://www.trcommons.org/

Ride Oregon http://rideoregonride.com/

Tasty Kitchen http://thepioneerwoman.com/tasty-kitchen/

Better Codes http://bettercodes.org/

BP Tricks http://bp-tricks.com/

Operation HQ http://www.operationhq.co.nz/

Bitsy http://bitsythis.com/

Wijmo http://wijmo.com/

Gameful http://gameful.org/

Inksie http://inksie.com/

Solo Practice University http://solopracticeuniversity.com/

SpyTunes http://spytunes.com/

Today’s 12 days of WordPress and BuddyPress comes from Jeffrey Pearce. Post Formats, Tumblog, and Content Separation can be found over at wpmu.org.

Don’t forget to check every day for a new 12 days post.