What's New in 1.1.6

Documents come to Spaces and profiles, the media lightbox is rebuilt, and pinning, announcements, notifications and privacy all get sharper. On the Pro side a plan can now bill monthly or annually, members can change their own plan, and memberships can be sold through WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro.

Note: BuddyNext free and BuddyNext Pro are released together. If you run both, update them at the same time so they stay in step.

Files come to Spaces and profiles

A community accumulates documents - a group’s handbook, a member’s portfolio, a shared template - and until now BuddyNext had nowhere to keep them.

• Every space gets a Files tab: its own document drive that members can browse, search, preview and download.
• Every member gets a Files tab on their profile, showing their own documents inside BuddyNext’s own interface.
• Documents open in a clean built-in reader. A PDF renders as a readable single column instead of the browser’s embedded viewer, and office and text files render inline.
• Share a document with specific members at a chosen permission, or with anyone through a link, from its page in the Files tab.
• Attach a document to a post from the composer - it shows as a document card in the feed.

On a site whose document storage is read-only, the attach control is simply hidden rather than failing when used.

The media lightbox, rebuilt

Opening a photo now gives you a focused viewer with icon-only actions and an overflow menu, fullscreen, edit, and save-to-collection. A comment you make on a photo in the lightbox appears in the post’s own comment thread, and the comment count stays accurate - the photo and the post are the same conversation, not two.

Profile fields you arrange

Two changes hand the profile layout to you.

• Choose which fields appear in the profile header, and in what order, from the field editor.
• Change a field’s type in place - for example a text location into an interactive map - without losing what members already entered.

Pricing that fits how people pay (Pro)

Membership pricing was one plan, one interval. Now it flexes.

• Monthly or annual on the same plan. Members pick the cadence at checkout, see a savings badge on the annual option, and proration and renewal follow the interval they chose.
• Members switch cadence themselves between monthly and annual, no support ticket.
• Upgrade and downgrade. A member previews what a plan change is worth in days and applies it, without ever holding two plans or none for a moment.
• A membership-pricing block renders a full, option-driven pricing landing page.

Sell memberships through the store you already run (Pro)

WooCommerce and Paid Memberships Pro can now grant BuddyNext plans through self-registering bridges. If you already take payment through one of those, a purchase there gives the member their community plan, and holders are reconciled when a product or level is remapped. A membership plan can also be linked to Learnomy courses and to a Space, so buying the plan opens the course and the group behind it.

Spaces and members, polished

• Per-space brand colour, set by the space owner.
• Filter the members directory by member type with chips, matching how Spaces already works.
• Announcements replace pinning inside a space. Post pinning is now profile-only; to feature a post in a space, use an Announcement. Dismissing an announcement now sticks after a reload, announcements notify members in the background, and a whole batch of join requests can be decided in one action.
• Notifications collapse repeats of the same event and show an accurate count.
• A gated space names the required plan in its join-refusal message, so a member knows exactly what to buy.

Privacy and security

• Only-me media stays private. A media item’s privacy now follows its post, so “Only me” is never published publicly.
• A private or secret space created through the API is saved with that privacy instead of defaulting to public.
• Inbound access-webhook calls must carry a replay-proof, timestamped signature by default. A site still sending the older body-only signature can re-enable it while it migrates its callers.
• Closed a post-login open redirect and a route that ignored profile privacy, and the link-preview fetcher now re-checks its SSRF guard on every redirect hop.

Other fixes

• Members can attach photos to a post again - the image picker no longer fails silently, and photo tiles reserve their space instead of flashing as blank cards.
• A document upload no longer announces itself as “shared a photo” in the feed.
• A members-only post in a space now shows on its hashtag page to members of that space, and a post set to “Connections” is visible to the author’s connections on their profile.
• Reported posts stay out of the reporter’s feed, and moderation-queue counts, suspensions, appeals and report labels are corrected.
• The admin Activity screen now browses, searches, filters, edits and deletes community activity with the standard paged control.
• An admin can mark a member’s email as verified from the member editor, for when a verification email never arrives.
• A confirmation dialog opened from the media lightbox is clickable again.

For developers

• New [buddynext_search] shortcode and a search-bar helper for themes.
• New filters buddynext_profile_hero_fields (which fields show in the profile header) and buddynext_can_view_explore (gate the Explore feed).
• A schema-authority gate means a table cannot be defined in two places.
• The end-to-end journey harness resolves the site and its test users from the local install instead of a hardcoded host.