Who Wears the Pants in Your BuddyPress Groups? New Plugin Gives You the Power To Promote, Demote and Block Users With Ease

A plugin for managing BuddyPress groups is hot off the press! Check out BP Group Management by Boone Gorges, a prolific BuddyPress plugin developer. He also released another plugin this week that imports blog comments and posts that have not been inserted into the activity stream. This is necessary if you’re installing BuddyPress into an existing blog that has already been active. You can download BP Import Blog Activity at the WordPress plugin repository. The BP Group Management plugin is currently available for download from Boone Gorge’s site.

BP Group Management Features at a Glance

(as listed by the developer)

• Lists all the groups in a single place for easy scanning and deletion
• Allows the admin to add users directly to groups, bypassing the need for invitations
• Displays a list of all members of a site for adding to the group, instead of just the admin’s friends

One thing I noticed when I installed this plugin is that it is packaged two folders deep, so if you get an error about it not having a valid header, just move the plugin files up one folder and delete the extra one. After you activate the plugin, you will see ‘Group Management’ added to your BuddyPress menu. Click on it and it will show you an index of all of the groups in your BuddyPress installation, as well as the group ID, date created and the number of members for each. This can be particularly handy if you need to quickly gather the ID’s of some groups you’d like to feature.

Click on ‘edit’ under one of the groups. This is where all the good stuff can be found. Here you will have the options to quickly add members to groups, kick and ban a member, promote a member to moderator, or demote a member.

This is a serious time-saver if you have an active BuddyPress groups community and need to be able to designate additional moderators or block repeat offenders from joining and abusing groups. It only takes a little bit of poison to start making a community stink, so make sure you can nip that kind of thing in the bud by giving yourself the ability to manage your groups. Even if you simply want to be able to monitor your groups more easily and manage them from one screen in the backend, this is a great tool for you. Since it requires no configuration, grab the plugin today and start fine-tuning your community’s groups.

Sarah Gooding on Google+