Secure Invites For WPMU Makes BuddyPress Community-Building a Snap

The latest release of Secure Invites For WordPress MU is fully BuddyPress compatible and packed with features to help you expand your community.

Perhaps the best new feature in this release is the incorporation of a rewards system for invitations. Implement this on your site and start letting your users amass points for invitations. This is a great way to boost your site’s member base and also to foster a little friendly competition between your users. You can even set up a pyramid rewards system for your users, granting points to multiple users for one single action. Here is how the plugin’s developer, Chris Taylor, describes it:

Each time somebody (Person A) invites a friend (Person B), and Person B signs up, Person A is awarded 5 points. If Person B invites someone (Person C) and they sign up, Person A is awarded 2 points. And if Person C invites someone (Person D) and they sign up, Person A is awarded 1 point (and, of course, Person B is awarded 2 points). Using this pyramid-like system you can see who is inviting not just the most people, but the best kind of people.

This could be an impressive tool for implementing a sales force through your site or for building a street team. It would be really neat to see this combined with the Achievements Plugin for Buddypress. With higher levels of achievements through automatic point-awards, your users could gain access to special badges, user features and much more.

Features of Secure Invites for WPMU:

• Restrict the ability to invite people to users who have been registered only for a certain number of days or more
• View the number of invites sent and resulting signups per month
• View the users who have sent the most invites, and the number of resulting signups
• Browse all invitations sent (auto paginated)
• Change the default email text
• Set after how many days an invitation will expire
• Works with different locations of signup page (default: /wp-signup.php)
• Set the message to show if someone tries to sign up with no valid invitation
• Turn off security on signup form, allowing anyone to sign up (this does not affect the ability to invite people)

Some other nice updated features include bulk invitation deletion for admins, automatic BuddyPress theme integration, new signup and invitation presets, and even the ability to promote, limit or block specific users’ invitations.

How to Set Up Secure Invites For WPMU

The plugin is really quite easy to set up. Just install it and then look under Site Admin >> Invites for the settings. If you want to use it with BuddyPres, you’ll need to select “Custom Settings” as shown below:

After you select custom settings, a range of more specific settings will slide out under the menu. You can restrict the number of invites available to your users, how long the user has to have been a member before he can invite others, secure the signup or keep it open, limit the number of days the invitation will be open, and customize the messages and invitation email. At the very bottom you will see a group of checkboxes for assigning the BuddyPress settings:

Here you can configure where you want the form to appear on your site. Once you save the settings the form should appear in the areas where you assigned it. Adding template tags for the plugin is completely optional but contains extra parameters that you can use to further customize the display of the invitation form. This plugin has a lot of possibilities and can be easily customized to compliment nearly any BuddyPress installation. Many thanks to Chris Taylor for making this plugin compatible with BuddyPress. Please contact him if you have any questions or feedback.

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