BuddyPress Welcome Pack 3.0 Released to the World!

by Siobhan McKeown October 4^th, 2011 1 Response

Paul Gibbs, BuddyPress core developer and all-round-awesome-guy, has released BuddyPress Welcome Pack 3.0.

Welcome Pack is a BuddyPress plugin which lets you automatically send a new user a friend or a group invitation. You can also send them a Welcome Message or redirect them to a start page.

The latest release includes the following:

new admin page design
new email customization options
easy-to-theme HTML templates

The welcome emails were design by our own fabulous Tammie Lister!

You can check out the preview video that Paul put together:

Welcome Pack 3.0 Preview from Paul Gibbs on Vimeo.

BP Plugins, BuddyPress

Build Your Own BuddyPress Plugin with the Newly Updated BuddyPress Skeleton Component

by Sarah Gooding September 30^th, 2011 4 Responses

There’s good news for BuddyPress plugin developers this week! The BuddyPress Skeleton Component has been revamped and updated to be compatible with BuddyPress 1.5.
What is the BuddyPress Skeleton Component?
The skeleton component is the bare bones of a basic BuddyPress component, packaged as a plugin. Although it’s listed as a plugin in the WordPress repository, it doesn’t have any specific function on its own. The skeleton component is more of a tool for getting you started on creating your own component. It makes it easy for you to get your component:

Registering activity stream items
Posting notifications
Setting up widgets
Adding AJAX functionality

BP Plugins, BP Themes, BuddyPress

BuddyPress 1.5 Released: What You Need to Know Before You Upgrade

by Sarah Gooding September 21^st, 2011 11 Responses

BuddyPress 1.5, dubbed “Lombardi”, is finally here, after hundreds of bug fixes and many exciting new features. If you’re even a casual BuddyPress user, I guarantee you that you’re going to love the latest release.

The most notable new features of BuddyPress 1.5 include:

A completely reworked Default theme – one you may actually want to use!
A brand-new installation and update wizard
Integration with the WordPress navigation menus and Admin Bar – no more BuddyBar – hooray!
A rewritten interface for managing profile fields

The New BuddyPress Default Theme is a million times better than ever before!

BP Plugins, BuddyPress, Plugins, WPMU DEV

Post Voting Plugin Now Includes More Multisite Options and BuddyPress Integration

by Sarah Gooding September 15^th, 2011 6 Responses

After an extended beta period we have now released our completely re-written Post Voting plugin. We received a number of feature requests that we were able to work into this new version and are excited deliver more options based on user feedback.

New Features and Improvements include:

New Network Admin option for disabling Site Admin changes.
Added option for disabling voting for post types.
Now includes an appearance option for preventing negative votes.
Timeframe argument for posts to site popular widget.
Voted timeframe option to site popular and network popular widgets.
Support for theme style overrides.
BuddyPress integration

BP Plugins, BuddyPress, WPMU DEV

BuddyPress Activity Plus 1.2 Released with Integration for Group Documents

by Sarah Gooding September 15^th, 2011 5 Responses

BuddyPress Activity Plus is a popular, highly-rated plugin on wordpress.org with nearly 12,000 downloads. It’s an absolute must-have plugin for any BuddyPress community, making the activity stream much more interactive by adding a user-friendly interface for posting multimedia updates.

Based on user feedback, we’ve updated the plugin to include a few more enhancements and features:

Improvement: Clearer display of cancel button vs. old ‘X’ icon
Enhancement: Progress indicator for file uploads
Enhancement: Integration with the Group Documents – When the Group Documents plugin is installed, a new document icon appears allowing for document uploads to be attached to groups

BP Plugins, BuddyPress

Show Your BuddyPress Members on a Google Map with Avatars

by Sarah Gooding September 12^th, 2011 9 Responses

BP Member Avatar Map is a brand new plugin that gives you the ability to map your users’ locations on your BuddyPress site, adding a quick view of where community members can be found. It’s a nice looking map that will show on the members directory page:

How does BP Member Avatar Map work?
The plugin takes the Location field and requests the latitude and longitude from the Open Street Map Nominatim geolocation service.

BP Plugins, BuddyPress

Assign Automatic Friends to New Users on Your BuddyPress Site

by Sarah Gooding September 7^th, 2011 1 Response

Nobody likes to sign up to a new social network and feel like they have zero friends. The new BuddyPress Automatic Friends plugins makes your new users feel a little more at home upon signing up to your community. It automatically creates and accepts friendships for specified users upon new user registration.

You can easily set the new automatic connections in the plugin’s options panel:

BP Plugins, BP Themes, BuddyPress, Tutorials

BuddyPress 1.5 Resources: Tutorials, Videos and Info to Help You Get Ready

by Sarah Gooding August 31^st, 2011 16 Responses

BuddyPress 1.5 Beta 3 was released yesterday with many bugs squashed in Beta 2 and is now 99% complete. A full release is due out any day now and we’re here to help you get up to speed with all of the new features.

What’s New in BuddyPress 1.5
This is an excellent video from John James Jacoby’s presentation at WordCamp San Francisco. He reviews the development process for BuddyPress throughout the past year and a half and offers an introduction to what’s coming with the 1.5 release.

BuddyPress Overview from Boone Gorges

BP Plugins, BuddyPress

Create, Edit, and Delete BuddyPress Groups with Drag and Drop

by Sarah Gooding August 28^th, 2011 2 Responses

BP Group Organizer is a new plugin that makes it easy to administrate and organize BuddyPress groups within the WordPress dashboard. It’s based on the WordPress Menu editor, allowing you to quickly move groups around with the drag and drop interface. It also integrates smoothly with the BP Group Hierarchy plugin, so that you can easily arrange groups within the hierarchy you’ve created.

BuddyPress sites with active groups will find many advantages to using the BP Group Organizer plugin:

Easily create groups in one step
Edit multiple groups and group properties without waiting for page reloads
Quickly delete unwanted groups in a flash

BP Plugins, BuddyPress

BuddyPress Photos+Tags Plugin Gives Your Community Friend Tagging in Photos, Just Like Facebook

by Sarah Gooding August 25^th, 2011 9 Responses

Hot off of development, BuddyPress Photos+tags is a great new plugin that hooks up your BuddyPress community with the same photo-tagging feature enjoyed by more than 750 million happy Facebook users.

After you install this plugin, users can tag their friends and drive more friendly traffic to your community. As a member is tagged, it will show up in the activity stream and he will also receive a notification. This is a very organic way to boost your traffic and gives your users another way to interact with each other.