There are hundreds of plugins for BuddyPress. The plugins shown here are the essential enhancements to make BP fly like a proper social network should.
- RS BuddyPress Activity Refresh plugin for live activity stream updates.
- BuddyPress Block Activity Stream Updates to get rid of those activity updates that don’t really belong in the activity stream such.
- BuddyPress Live Notification for Facebook like notification popups. This plugin works on some sites but not others, depends on you not having plugin conflicts.
- BP Labs is coded by the BuddyPress developers. It adds features to BP sites that are not yet released into the BP core project.
- BuddyMenu BuddyLinks adds shortcodes and widgets for BuddyPress dynamic menu links to be placed anywhere within a site e.g link to a specific member’s profile or link to a specific place within the site.
- BuddyPress Extended Friendship Requests lets users send a message when they send friend requests.
- Buddypress Xprofile Custom Fields Type adds to the profile field types that can be created e.g Date of Birth, Email and Website.
- Spam Link Plugin for BuddyPress puts a ‘spammer’ link button below updates in the activity stream. Spam is a big problem for social networks. This button is very useful.
- Invite Anyone lets users invite friends to friends from their email accounts to join a site.
- Welcome Pack is vital to the user experience. Create welcome emails, follow up emails, redirects on first login, redirects on subsequent logins and many other experience improvements.
- WordPress Social Login lets users login to a site using their social media accounts such as Facebook, G+ and Twitter. 26 services can be configured. WP Social Login is free. It pulls in social media profile data and lets users import contacts (though contact importation is a stepping stone feature to this plugins future so don’t expect the data to be legitimately useful for a while yet.
- BuddyPlug adds a BuddyPress tab to the WordPress plugin installer. There it lists a few useful BP plugins. Most BP plugins are missing from the list but let’s hope the plugin lists more in the future.
- BuddyPress Media adds media uploads and media galleries.
- Facebook Invite Friends Button. Let users invite their FB friends to your WordPress site with the click of a button.
- Snapshot. Sites break and heavy traffic sites need to be mirrored. Snapshot isn’t free but it is the best and most cost effective non free backup plugin I’ve found.
There can be no definitive guide to BuddyPress plugins. Every site is different. All social networks are unique and designed to suit a niche; if they weren’t, no one would make more of them and BuddyPress wouldn’t exist.
What are your favorite BuddyPress plugins?
wpDiscuz