Daily Tip: Automatically Sign Users Out of WordPress or BuddyPress After Inactivity

Want to make sure that your users get logged out after a period of inactivity on your site? Install the new Inactivity Auto Sign Out Plugin. It works with both WordPress and BuddyPress and is composed of a single PHP file. You can easily edit it to change the inactivity time period to suit the needs of your site, as well as a redirect URL for auto log out.

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This Just In: New Google XML Sitemap Plugin Supports WordPress Multisite

A new plugin is on the scene that will be of great interest to any WordPress Multisite owner: Google XML Sitemaps with Multisite Support. It is a modified version of Google XML Sitemaps, written by the same developer. Basically, this plugin creates a sitemap for each of your sites and links it in robots.txt.

Why do I need an XML Sitemap?

This is one of the basics of SEO. A sitemap helps search engines like Google, Bing, Yahoo and Ask.com to better index your blog. Search engines are better able to crawl through your site with a structured sitemap of where your content leads. This plugin supports all kinds of WordPress-generated pages as well as custom URLs. Whenever you create a new post, it will notify major search engines to come crawl your new content.

Here’s what Google has to say about the importance of having an XML Sitemap:

Creating and submitting a Sitemap helps make sure that Google knows about all the pages on your site, including URLs that may not be discoverable by Google’s normal crawling process.

Why Sitemaps are Critical for WordPress Sites

Due to the ease of creating and updating content on a WordPress site, you will have regular changes that may not be indexed without a well-structured sitemap.

Google makes it clear what kind of sites will benefit from including an XML sitemap:

Sitemaps are particularly helpful if:

• Your site has dynamic content.
• Your site has pages that aren’t easily discovered by Googlebot during the crawl process—for example, pages featuring rich AJAX or images.
• Your site is new and has few links to it. (Googlebot crawls the web by following links from one page to another, so if your site isn’t well linked, it may be hard for us to discover it.)
• Your site has a large archive of content pages that are not well linked to each other, or are not linked at all.

This is one free SEO tool that you cannot do without. There’s no excuse now that you can install one single plugin to create sitemaps for your entire network of WordPress sites.

If you’re looking for an all-in-one Sitemaps and complete SEO package for WordPress Multisite, then check out our Sitemaps and SEO – WordPress Multisite Style. Not only does it create sitemaps for all of your sites, but it also adds dynamic keyword and description tags based on post or page content to every post and page on every site. If you’re serious about Multisite SEO, then you don’t want to pass up this all-inclusive tool. It’s specially tailored to put Multisite networks on the grid with Google.

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Daily Tip: BuddyPress Sitewide Activity Widget Updated with Many New Features

Oftentimes users will ask in the forums about how to show BuddyPress sitewide activity in the sidebar of the site. This is handy for showing activity as it’s happening without the user having to return to the activity tab.

Brajesh Singh created a BuddyPress Sitewide Activity Widget for this purpose and has recently updated it to include many new features that BuddyPress enthusiasts are sure to appreciate:

• Posting from widget
• Activity list can be restricted to logged in users activity when a user is logged in
• Blog admins can use the widget on their blog and It will show blog admins activity only.
• Show/hide avatar
• Show/hide feed link
• Show/hide the activity filters tab(the links that appear at the top and allows to filter the activity).
• Include only specific components activity in the sitewide activity widget(e.g include only profile/blog activities).
• Exclude only specific components activity from the sitewide activity widget(e.g exclude group activities from the activity list).
• Localization support

The plugin is in the WordPress repository but hasn’t been updated there yet. The best place to get it is on Brajesh’s site: BuddyDev.com

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8 WordPress PayPal Plugins for Receiving Payments and Donations

Today I’ll be featuring PayPal plugins that have been recently updated for WordPress. These plugins will allow you to easily take donations, implement a simple shopping cart, sell downloadable content, or work with foreign currencies. There are times when you don’t need a fully robust shopping cart and are only interested in selling a few items or receiving donations. In this case it’s better to keep your WordPress site lightweight with a simpler option. We’ve selected just a few that do exactly that.

WordPress PayPal Donation Plugin

This plugin enables you to recieve donations in multiple currencies in one click. It can be used in the sidebar, posts and pages. WordPress PayPal Donations Plugin uses IPN to ensure the values are correct. You can also elect to display your total donations to date.

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Easyfileshop

Easyfileshop enables you to sell files as downloads. It creates a fully customizable PayPal checkout button for you. The files are stored inside a secure access protected folder on your server. After the payment is verified the buyer receives a customizable email with a personal download link.

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Senzoo Donation Widget

The Senzoo widget makes it simple to add a donation form with growl-type notification that includes PayPal, Amazon FPS and Google Checkout on your WordPress site. Visit senzoo.net for a quick demonstration.

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Multi Currency PayPal Donations

This plugin allows you to route different currencies to specific paypal accounts, in order to avoid high fees for cross border transactions. Even if you don’t have multiple paypal accounts this is still a great plugin for accepting donations.

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PayPal Booking Framework

This plugin, while still in Beta, is one to check out if you’re looking for event registration. It has been built to support courses and classes bookings. Payments are done via PayPal IPN. It sends the registrant to your PayPal payment page for online collection of event fees. Events are sorted by date and a short code is provided to display a single event on a page.

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Enhanced PayPal Shortcodes

This plugin allows you to easily embed a fully functional PayPal buy now, subscribe or hosted button using shortcodes. It supports Wishlist Member and provides integration with iDev Affiliate and JRox JAM.

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Are PayPal

This plugin is used to monetize WordPress blog content with PayPal. It is designed to sell your knowledge by restricting content to be shown only to users who have payed to view your blog. Googlebots will still be able to index your content so that searchers will find your site, but they won’t be able to see unless they’ve paid.

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WordPress Simple PayPal Shopping Cart

If you need a simple shopping cart with PayPal for taking payments, then this may be the plugin for you. It places an ‘Add to Cart’ button on any posts or pages. It also allows you to add and display the shopping cart on any post or page or sidebar. You can also integrate it with NextGen gallery images to make your products more compelling.

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My Chatbox: A New Micro-Blogging Service Built On BuddyPress

Anton Koekemoer is a professional blogger, developer, web technology consultant and a marketing strategist with an emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies. We recently noticed My Chatbox, a newly-created micro-blogging community that Anton built on the WordPress and BuddyPress platforms, and asked for the opportunity to interview him about the service.

Please tell us a little bit about My Chatbox and what inspired you to create your own micro-blogging service.

After launching a couple of other BuddyPress social networks, I realised that it is such a big framework with so many options on the front end that members sometimes gets overwhelmed with all the features that the framework offers.

I already had the idea of creating a scaled down micro blogging network and was looking at other options until I read a blog post on WPMU.org on How to build a Mini Twitter Site with BuddyPress and decided to give BuddyPress another go – and it works. Thanks Sarah!

What kind of user is attracted to an independent micro-blogging service?

The whole idea of My Chatbox is quite simple – anyone can create their own Chatbox (micro blog) for themselves or for their business regarding any topic or niche. Using the flexibility of BuddyPress, Chatboxes (micro blogs) can have multiple administrators and moderators to control the top level content on the micro blogs so you can have multiple micro blog contributors. Have a look at this Chatbox for an example – http://mychatbox.me/chatboxes/tech-ed-africa-2010-durban/

No one except for the admins and moderators can post top level content on the Chatbox, but it all depends on how the Chatbox was setup (public or private) and then members can reply to content on the Chatbox and become “members” of the micro blog.

Why did you select 200 characters for the limit on user posts and how were you able to implement that?

I decided to use 180 characters, but later increased it to 200 characters to give more room to express oneself and maybe include a YouTube video or a Flickr image on your update.
Any micro blog posting, status update or activity reply on My Chatbox, is limited to 200 characters to keep the modern rule of micro blogging – “keep it short and sweet”. The remaining characters are displayed on the text area where members add content. Micro blog descriptions are also limited to 200 characters.

How does My Chatbox handle the geo-location for user updates?

If a member registers the normal way without using Facebook or Twitter, they have to complete a couple of profile fields. These includes an “About me” field together with a location field “City, Country” that is used to pin point their location on a Google map displayed on their profiles. Similar to BuddyPress.org without Gpress.

Members can also edit their profile to include other social media channels they belong to and this is then displayed with icons on their member header with links to those channels.

Please explain the idea of creating your own niche “Chatboxes” focused on topics for more in-depth micro-blogging conversations.

Same Idea as above where you can have multiple contributors to a Chatbox . To give you an example – If you own a record store, you can create your Chatbox (XYZ Records) and let all your employees contribute to the Chatbox focused on your products or services. Other members can reply, but only you and your employees can add top level content to the Chatbox.

What plugins are necessary for powering your MyChatbox.me and did you have to create any custom functionality not currently available?

The site uses a couple of popular BuddyPress plugins including the BuddyPress Oembed plugin so that members can share content from other popular social networks such as videos and images.
Other plugins included is a modified activity stream hashtags plugin as well as a modified Group tags plugin that is used for tagging the micro blogs – still needs a little bit of work. The micro blog tags are also limited to 55 characters.

I am also using the BuddyPress followers plugin and disabled friend connections so that you can only follow members.

What functionality do you plan to add to MyChatbox in the future?

Lots of custom modifications have been done to the theme and custom plugins were developed for all the functionality.

There is quite a couple of future plans for My Chatbox and one is to create a mobile compatible theme as everything is steering towards mobile.

My Chatbox is far from 100% complete (will it ever be the way technology is growing?) so if anyone wants to help contribute to My Chatbox, contact me or register on My Chatbox and create your own Micro Blog.

Thanks to all the BuddyPress plugin contributors.

Contact Anton Koekemoer on Twitter @antonrsa or at http://www.antonkoekemoer.com.

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Written by Sarah Gooding · Filed Under Free Plugins, News, Syndicated, Wordpress 

BuddyPress Moderation Plugin: A Must-Have Community Management Tool

As a BuddyPress admin, you always have the ability to delete users and content. However, if you have a very active community, it can be overwhelming to attempt to police your site for inappropriate content or behavior. Hiring moderators may not be a cost-effective option for your site.

This is where BuddyPress Moderation steps in as a solution to help site owners keep their communities in line. It uses crowdsourcing to manage the task of moderation sitewide by attaching flags to content created within the various components. Francesco Laffi has been working tirelessly on this plugin as part of his Google Summer of Code project and this is the first stable release.

How does BuddyPress Moderation work?

BuddyPress site admins can elect to have the “flag” button placed next to certain content types, including status updates, activity comments, blog posts, blog pages, blog comments, members, groups, forum topics, and forum posts. The admin can set an automatic warning for users whose content has been flagged and automate deletion after a set number of violations.

The moderation queue in the dashboard shows each flagged item, how many flags the user has received, the reporter, order and filters, and actions that can be taken for each.

The moderation panel also has hotkeys built in, similar to the WordPress comments table hotkeys, for quick navigation and management.

Francesco also included documentation with some examples for integrating it with your own content types. After a fair bit of initial testing, I haven’t found any bugs. I can’t think of a site that wouldn’t benefit from adding BuddyPress Moderation, even if it’s only activated on a select few content types. It’s unobtrusive and keeps your BuddyPress community healthy and balanced. Depending on how active your community is, this plugin can keep members from spreading sour vibes and help your community to flourish. BuddyPress Moderation is a must-have tool for community management.

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Daily Tip: Bulk Import Users by Email Address into WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress

Boone Gorges put out a new plugin today called Simple Import Users. It allows you to import users into your WordPress installation by adding a list of email addresses. Accounts are created for each with usernames based on the email address. If you have BuddyPress installed, the welcome email to your users will include a link to the “Edit Profile” screen to help them get going with their accounts. This is a handy plugin for educators wanting to import their students or a business directory, family blog, or any situation where you know all your users’ email addresses. Head over to Boone’s site for more specifics on Simple Import Users.

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Daily Tip: Bulk Import Users by Email Address into WordPress Multisite or BuddyPress

Boone Gorges put out a new plugin today called Simple Import Users. It allows you to import users into your WordPress installation by adding a list of email addresses. Accounts are created for each with usernames based on the email address. If you have BuddyPress installed, the welcome email to your users will include a link to the “Edit Profile” screen to help them get going with their accounts. This is a handy plugin for educators wanting to import their students or a business directory, family blog, or any situation where you know all your users’ email addresses. Head over to Boone’s site for more specifics on Simple Import Users.

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Increase User-Generated Content in WordPress with Front-End Article Submission

Save yourself loads of time and publish more content while you sleep. Sounds too good to be true, doesn’t it? There are actually some smart ways to extend WordPress which will help you get more accomplished on your website without eating up all your time.

Get your community to create content for you and make it easy for them to submit.

You can only crank out so many blog posts per day. Why not allow your active community to start submitting posts, stories or news to you for publication? Sometimes asking users to email articles just doesn’t make it convenient enough for them. Getting users set up with an account and guiding them through the WordPress dashboard can be overwhelming for just a simple news post submission. That’s why the FV Community News plugin was created. It allows you to make a form available for users to create articles, including image upload, and have them post automatically or sent to you for moderation.

You won’t need to worry about spam, because this plugin comes packaged with an optional captcha and Akismet protection. You can also require that users be logged in before they can make submissions. The form is handled via AJAX and you can easily edit the responses and error messages through its dashboard settings. Other notable features include:

FV Community News makes the process of content submission very easy for both you and your user, since you won’t have to deal with support requests from people trying to figure out the WordPress dashboard. The major benefit for the WordPress site owner is that all you have to do is click “approve” for it to publish, instead of having to copy and paste the submission from your email into the dashboard. Use it to receive anonymous tips, articles, reviews, testimonials, or even community galleries.

I tested the plugin and can confirm that it works with WordPress 3.0. FV Community News is an indispensable tool for building a community news site where users are allowed and encouraged to contribute. Spend more time building your community and let your users help to multiply your content.

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BuddyPress News: First Stable Version of BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware Released

Today Stas Su?cov announced the first stable version of his BuddyPress ScholarPress Courseware plugin and the completion of his Google Summer of Code 2010 project.

The plugin now has its own homepage where you can check out a video and documentation. Development on the project continues, so get in touch if you’d like to join the team.

Features of BuddyPress Courseware:

• Class Dashboard
• Courses
• Works for both learning models: European/United States
• Bibliography
• Web API’s integration with WorldCat/ISBNdb
• BibTex Import
• Assignments
• Responses
• Forum integration
• Gradebook
• CSV Import
• Schedules
• Calendar
• Month, Week, Day view
• Integrates with Assignment due dates
• iCal export

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