BuddyPress is a plugin that lets you create your own social network on top of the very popular WordPress platform. You can extend functionalities via BuddyPress to provide social networking features such as discussion forums for your visitors, private messaging and a whole lot more. Check out this post to get a beginner’s look at how get started on BuddyPress.
It’s a great tool for beginners, but its social and networking features may not be enough for many of us as we may have specific needs and wants for our respective websites. This brings the need for plugins, which can extend the functionality of BuddyPress such as for deeper user engagement or helping to turn your content viral.
Below are some must-have plugins for BuddyPress, which can help to improve your website’s networking features. Most of these plugins are fully compatible with newer versions of WordPress and BuddyPress.
Recommended Reading: Beginner’s Guide To BuddyPress – Tips And Resources
1. WangGuard
WangGuard protects from registrations by sploggers and spam users by collecting and storing data on websites it operates on into a centralized database. With every new registration, it checkes the new user’s dara in the database to clear it of suspicions, and protect the site from fake or spam registration.
2. WordPress Social Login
WordPress Social Login lets your visitors login and comment on your networking website using any of their accounts from 28 social networks and services. It also allow users to access the site via restrictions and filters. The plugin improves user interaction on your website and allows visitors to easily become members.
3. SeoPress
As the name suggests, SeoPress is a plugin to optimize your BuddyPress-powered social networking website for search engines. It even supports optimizing your posts or pages for Facebook. There are optimization options for page types and even special tags for easy configuration.
4. BuddyPress Social
BuddyPress Social brings social engagement features to your networking website. BuddyPress Social adds sharing buttons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and email to all your social community’s activities. This makes it easier for users to share the site’s content through other social networks, hence helping to share and promote your website.
5. BuddyPress Activity Plus
BuddyPress Activity Plus allows users to easily attach and embed pictures, videos, and links directly from the activity stream. It gives your site the same power and ease as Facebook, when it comes to uploading and sharing pictures and videos.
6. BuddyStream
BuddyStream gives you and your network users the option of adding and synchronizing their activity streams from other social networks on your networking website. BuddyStream supports integration with multiple social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Soundcloud and Last.fm. You can get user statistics and filtering options using the plugin’s admin panel.
7. BuddyPress Activity Privacy
BuddyPress Activity Privacy allows your network users to choose a privacy level for their activity posts. This improves privacy of their activities and status posts. BuddyPress Activity Privacy adds the ability for various privacy levels for instance anyone, logged-in users, friends, admins only, and group members.
8. Membership
Membership lets you provide your content in two divisions – free content for all visitors and premium content for those who are members. It is easy to set up and operate and you get to determine what falls under premium content. You can control access to nearly all content on your social website such as, downloads, pages, posts, comments, galleries, and any other content via shortcodes.
9. Achievements
Achievements allows you to gamify your social network with challenges, badges, and points. which can do wonders when it comes to encouraging user participation. Achievements is capable of tracking user progress when installed with any standard WordPress theme. Users can get points and badges for doing any task from simply signing up to joining groups.
10. Quick Chat
Quick Chat is a self-hosted chat solution for your social network. It provides support for private chats, chat rooms, avatars, user lists and smilies among other things. On top of that, it has various chat capabilities such as limiting the message size, banning participants using their IP address, and letting registered users reserve chat names and plenty more.
11. BuddyPress Groups Extras
BuddyPress Groups Extras enhances the group functionality of BuddyPress. It lets you add default extra content (pages) for groups for any purpose, such as descriptions, group rules, FAQs, wikis, events, etc. It also lets you add custom fields using various types with options such as radios, checkboxes, and dropdowns amongst others.
12. BuddyPress Avatar Bubble
BuddyPress Avatar Bubble lets you show hover cards on user avatars. BuddyPress Avatar Bubble shows a bubble of user’s information, when the avatar is moused over or clicked by someone. Site admin can control what information is shown about the user on the hover bubbles.
13. BuddyPress Groupblog
BuddyPress Groupblog allows your site’s users to have a blog for each group. Group members are automatically added as the blog members, with roles as given by the group administrator. Not only does it help with user engagement, but your site gets more content too.
14. BuddyPress Links
BuddyPress Links give your members the ability to easily share links and rich content like images and videos. Publicly shared links are shown in a central directory, where users can filter, vote, and comment on the links. BuddyPress Links offers admins with options to manage links, link categories, and widgets. Users can create and manage links, add links to categories, upload image avatars (thumbnails) for links, vote and comment on other’s links.
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though a larger screen is recommended. Those with 5+ inch handsets should be able to get by okay, though a tablet is preferable.
