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Not every user is the same! The reasons people become members of social networks are as varied as the members themselves. Users interact with your site in different ways and it’s important to be able to categorize them.
Multiple user types can expand the types of social networks that you are able to build with BuddyPress. In this tutorial we’ll cover how to build multiple user account types into your registration process.
1. Install and activate the Buddypress User Account Types plugin.
BuddyPress Twitter is a very cool new plugin that will help you get your community members and groups connected via Twitter. Once you set up the profile field in the BuddyPress settings your members and groups will be able to enter their Twitter usernames.
Here’s what the follow button looks like on the BuddyPress member profiles:
Below is an example of the follow button on group profiles:
Are you experienced with BuddyPress? This is another interesting question that came up during our WordPress Q & A last week.
Submitted by a WPMU reader named Kris:
We are running WordPress MU and BuddyPress as one blog setup, but the site seems to be quite slow.
Would it make it faster if we had a two separate installations? One for our WordPress blog (with all the content etc..), and another installation for users to access Buddypress. A single login would need to work across both of these sites.
This past week I posted a quick tutorial for how to add some basic privacy to BuddyPress profile data, based on some code I came across in the forums. I was excited to find that plugin developer modemlooper turned this idea into a quick plugin! He added in the option for each individual user to select if they would like their profile hidden from non-friends or public by default.
A few weeks ago Themeforest announced that they are officially accepting BuddyPress themes. We promised to keep you abreast of all the latest offerings in the BuddyPress theme market. Huddle is the latest theme on the scene. It is a WordPress theme that boasts both BuddyPress and bbPress compatibility, 6 Custom Page Templates, and 9 Custom Widgets.
View the Live Demo and browse through the community pages to see the unique treatment of your standard BuddyPress functionality.
Privacy controls are critical to any successful social network. Right now there are roughly zero plugin options for adding privacy to BuddyPress 1.5+. Some basic privacy controls are in discussion for future versions of BuddyPress, but there aren’t any usable options yet. Here’s a trick that may tide you over in the meantime.
Restrict User Profiles Based on Friendship
This is a hack that I drudged up from the BuddyPress forums, a solution originally proposed by our very own Richie_KS. It basically checks to see if users are friends before displaying a profile. Here’s how to use it:
This weekend BuddyPress developer imath launched a beta plugin for BuddyPress that allows users to share any web page directly to a BuddyPress site.
You’ve seen and used bookmarklets for services such as Delicious, Diaspora and Pinterest. This one behaves very similarly, except it’s for posting to your particular BuddyPress site.
Prolific BuddyPress plugin author etivite has just released a plugin that automatically creates a group for administrators and moderators.
BuddyPress Group for Community Admins and Mods creates a private group where all current group administrators and moderators can interact. Once you have this group in place, you can send out announcements to your community support staff. You can even give them a forum of their own to maintain community standards or just to blow off some steam.
Last week I wrote an illustrated guide to installing and setting up BuddyPress 1.5+. I touched briefly on setting up forums but promised a more in-depth look. There are basically two types of forums made to work seamlessly with BuddyPress. Let’s take a look at the differences between the two.
Group Forums vs. Sitewide Forums for BuddyPress
When you set up BuddyPress, you’ll be presented with the option to add forums to your community. You can set up forums for groups or enable forums sitewide. You also have the option to use an existing bbPress installation.
What are Group Forums?
Restricting group creation is something that many, if not most, BuddyPress sites want to have in place right away. Depending on how many options you need, there are a couple of solutions.
The first and the easiest way is to restrict group creation to site admins only. This is actually built into BuddyPress since version 1.5. You can find it under the BuddyPress » Settings menu:
Simply toggle it on or off. If you need more options than restricting group creation to admin only, then you’ll want to check out the BuddyPress Restrict Group Creation plugin by Rich Fuller.
