BuddyPress plugin developers have been busy bees in the past few months. Most of these plugins offer small, helpful features that would be well-suited to nearly every BuddyPress community. Not all are hosted in the WordPress repository, so grab a cup of coffee and check out all the latest from the BuddyPress ninjas.
BP Custom Background For User Profile
This plugin was created by Brajesh Singh of BuddyDev.com. It gives your BuddyPress site members custom background images for their profile pages. A user can upload a new image and set it as his profile background image.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Default Data
This plugin enables you to test BuddyPress on your own hosting and instantly add lots of users, messages, friends connections, groups, topics, and activity items. The best part is that it also comes with a “Clear BuddyPress” button to truncate all the tables when you’re finished testing.
Download Plugin
BP Community Activity on Profile
This plugin shows all the community activity on a user’s profile. It also adds a sub nav in user activity titled “All Activity” so that a logged in user can click on it to see what is happening across the network.
Download Plugin
BP Auto Login On Activation Plugin
This is another plugin from Brajesh at BuddyDev. It changes the default behavior of BuddyPress so that when a user activates his account, he’ll be logged in. Once the user is logged in, it will redirect him to his profile.
Download Plugin
Custom Admin Bar
The new Custom Admin Bar plugin will work with any BuddyPress theme that supports the WordPress admin bar. It allows you to customize your admin bar with your own logo and select important links that you want to highlight. Easily re-order the drop-down links via drag-and-drop. It even works with multisite!
Download Plugin
BP Username Changer
Make it possible for your users to change their usernames. The plugin first checks to see if the username is already reserved and then allows the user to input a new username in the settings.
Download Plugin
YD BuddyPress Feed Syndication
This plugin lets you syndicate external RSS feeds into your site’s BuddyPress activity feed. It enables each BuddyPress user to select as many external RSS feeds as he wants. Those feeds will be aggregated (mixed) into their activity feed automatically, with a title, an excerpt and a link to the original post.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Message Privacy Plugin
This plugin lets each user control who can message him. It offers several options: a user can opt to receive messages from everyone, friends only or even specify a custom list of users from whom he want to receive messages. He can also create a custom list for other users who can send him a message, as well as a blacklist of users who will never be able to send him a message.
Download Plugin
BP Labs
We’ve featured BP Labs several times on wpmu.org. It offers three unofficial BuddyPress experiments: @mentions autosuggest, Quick Admin, and Activity Stream Spam. Install this plugin if you want to try out some of these new features while they’re in process.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Group Suggest Widget
Help your BuddyPress members find groups to join by installing this new plugin. It suggests groups to a user based on his friends’ group memberships.
Download Plugin
BuddyPress Simple Google Map
The BuddyPress Simple Google Map plugin uses the static Google map API to add the maps to groups. It also includes a widget to showcase the map in the sidebar.
Download Plugin
BP Export Users
This really should be a core BuddyPress feature. It’s on the roadmap, but in the meantime you can use this plugin to export all user data from WordPress and BuddyPress to CSV.
Great list, I already use the auto activate plugin (with a tweak to direct to a welcome page as it skips the avatar upload and added security questions at sign up) and username changer – both Brajesh Singh’s plugins.
There are a couple on your list I’ve not seen before and am keen to try out.
Emily
Great list Sarah, thanks for the update. I like how bp and this blog are developing. Keep up the good work.
Hey.. I would like to see a plugin where in a user can import all his friends list of facebook to the buddypress site..
This would help a lot to expand the buddypress site..
What would the best combo of plugins for a social news site like ireport or digg? Nice work on the list.
Hi Sarah – another one for your list.
I just came across this plugin U Buddypress Forum Editor – which gives you a visual editor for forums with an admin panel that let’s you choose what people can use. I was using Mark-it-up before which was a bit confusing to users that don’t know code, but U Buddypress Forum Editor is a must-have for buddypress.
- Emily
@karan you should try invite Anyone which you can integrate with cloud sponge to do that really well – but it isn’t free
The BP Private Message Privacy plugin is a premium plugin, unfortunately :(
Thanks for this. I’m just setting up my first BP site and needed some recommendations.
Just want to say a huge thanks to Sarah. I am setting up my 1st BP site & have used so many tips, articles & info from Sarah I’ve lost count!
All of it super useful and made an enormous difference to my site.
Thanks a lot Sarah!
Glad you’re finding the tutorials to be useful! Thanks for letting me know! :)
Hey Sarah,
Nice list. It is really useful especially that custom admin bar plugin. I believe it will help to improve the website branding.
I’ve found another plugin which allow users to share multimedia files on BuddyPress site.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/buddypress-media/
While you are writing this post, the plugin was not developed. But it deserves to be placed in your list.