In the early days of BuddyPress, the plugin required WPMU in order to run. However, since early 2010, BuddyPress is able to work with both single user WordPress and installations with Multisite enabled.

Simply put, you can run BuddyPress on any kind of WordPress site as long as you meet the minimum requirements.

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The Membership plugin lets you easily provide members-only news, support, tuition, downloads, private communities, videos and more!

Features of Membership 1.0

• User-friendly yet highly advanced drag-and-drop interface for assigning membership levels and subscriptions
• Built in ability to create free or paid subscriptions or any combination of multiple subscriptions
• Easy-to-use shortcodes for allowing users to select subscriptions at registration
• Customize shortcodes directly in the dashboard for use in restricting inline content
• Administration level rules – add rules that run on the administration side of the system, ie. hide menus, favourite actions, dashboard widgets, blog creation and plugins
• Multisite and BuddyPress compatible – install it on one site or make it available network-wide!
• BuddyPress Aware – control the visibility of blogs and groups, control group creation and private messaging access as well as control access to the standard BuddyPress menus
• BuddyPress signup and profile fields – if BuddyPress is detected the plugin will mirror the BP signup form, complete with extra profile fields
• Attractive signup statistics in the dashboard to help you monitor your membership
• Fully integrated with PayPal for single payments or ongoing automatic payments
• Powerful extensible Rule and Gateway APIs
• Unparalleled support for usage and customization, and ongoing development you can depend on

This plugin will turn your site into a money-making machine. It’s completely flexible so that you can build any kind of membership site you can imagine:

You can control access to all areas on your website with unique selections for each membership level:

• Downloads
• Categories
• Pages
• Posts
• Comments
• ‘More’ tags
• Galleries
• BuddyPress groups
• BuddyPress blogs
• And *any content or functionality* (like forums!), via multiple different shortcodes

The Membership Plugin is Flexible and Easy-to-Use

You select what to offer to different membership levels. You know your business. Don’t let some other inflexible plugin limit you in structuring your membership site. Our Membership plugin can be customized through the smooth drag-and-drop interface in unlimited combinations, ranging from free to multiple paid levels, tiered exactly the way you envision it.

Best of all, you can change and rearrange the levels to suit your business as it grows, without having to hire a programmer to wade through messy code anytime you want to make edits or offer a promotion.

Want to run an entire network of membership sites where each has the ability to set its own membership levels? This plugin can do that, and it’s all easily integrated with your chosen payment gateway. Multisite support allows any site in your network to be a membership site. You can even charge for this feature using our Supporter plugin.

Keep track of how well you’re doing with attractive signup statistics right inside your WordPress dashboard:

Fine Tune Your Subscriptions

• Offer free memberships that turn into paid subscriptions after x days
• Finite or indefinite subscriptions
• Serial renewing subscriptions
• Subscriptions that renew every 5, 10, 30, 90 etc. days
• And plenty more…

Highly Extensible Rule and Gateway API

Developers rejoice! You can basically do anything you want with this plugin. Easily integrate it with other plugins and custom solutions to suit your site’s needs. The Membership plugin is full of hooks, actions and filters, used liberally throughout the system. They’ve been added everywhere we thought they could be useful to enable any competent developer to be able to enhance or completely change parts of the plugins functionality and flow.

Want to try our Membership plugin for Free?

Membership comes in a Lite version, available at the WordPress.org repository. Grab your free copy and give it a test drive! Or head on over to our demo site and have a look at the plugin in use there.

No other WordPress Membership plugin can even come close to the level of support and ongoing development that you’ll get with this plugin. With our Upgrades and Support Guarantee you’ll never have a problem using this plugin with the newest versions of WordPress, Multisite and BuddyPress. Get your hands on the Membership plugin today and start building the site you could only dream of before!

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Many users are not aware that each plugin has its own dedicated support area on the WordPress.org forums. However, if you have written a plugin that has external forums or more documentation on another website, you will need to update your plugin to link to its homepage in the main content area.

According to recent news in the WordPress development blog, the plugin pages will no longer link to the developer’s website or plugin homepage. Plugin authors will have to add these links to the main content of the plugin’s page on the repository, as any reference in the sidebar to an external plugin page has determined to be redundant. This is a somewhat controversial change, as many users have relied on these clearly posted links in order to gain more information about a plugin before installing it. Your thoughts are welcome in the comments.

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Why allow users to authenticate with Google?

A quick look at the overall numbers will demonstrate the benefits of including Google login options on your site:

Many Google users are already logged into Google services when they visit your site, so when they see the friendly Google icon, logging in feels convenient. This causes the user to be far more likely to comment and interact with your content.

Depending on what kind of site you have, you may find that your visitors prefer to log in with one 3rd party service over another. This is an important consideration. For example, in general the numbers seem to show that if you’re running a news media site, then Yahoo or Facebook login options might server you better.

If you’re not sure how your visitors would prefer to log in, you might consider offering a poll. Based on the results you receive, you’ll be able to select a plugin accordingly. Most general WordPress sites will benefit from following the steps below, to let users authenticate with their Google IDs.

Step 1: Install the FriendConnect Login Plugin and configure it at Settings >> FriendConnect Login

You can download this plugin from the WordPress repository. You’ll need to get a Google Connect Site ID, if you don’t already have one. Paste that into your settings and check the boxes that suite your site’s needs. I recommend not using the plugin’s default CSS, as the wrapper included with it may mess up your theme.

Step 2: Add Buttons to your theme as necessary.

The FriendConnect Login plugin comes with a template tag that you can add wherever you want to place the Google login button:

<?php if (function_exists('gfc_profile')) {gfc_profile();} ?>

Add it to your sidebar.php, comments.php, header.php or wherever you want to show the login button. The FriendConnect Login plugin provides you with a conditional logout snippet as well, that will distinguish user type and generate logout and profile links appropriately. You can find that code in the installation instructions, as well as the dashboard settings.

This plugin’s compatibility with BuddyPress is a bit spotty right now. Yes, it works to authenticate users and create a new account. However, avatars are not carried over and the username created is a very long number, which is problematic in BuddyPress. I wouldn’t recommend this plugin for use with BuddyPress in its current state but if the username issue can get sorted out, it may be a decent addition to your site.

The FriendConnect Login plugin will help you to get more comments and interaction with your blog posts. Plus, you’ll keep the Google junkies happy. Win win.

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Here’s a favorite from Edublogs today…

First up, he/she gets a bit upset with us… and then they come back promising never to splog again :D

Enjoy…

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BuddyPress Private Community allows you to keep all casual visitors from seeing pages associated with your community, as well as widgets that may also give away community information. Users must be logged in to visit the community pages. RSS feeds are also blocked by default. The plugin also includes its own config file that will allow you to tweak the settings for which URLs are viewable by loggged-out visitors and which are not. This plugin is a quick solution for making your BuddyPress community private or simply restricting a few components.

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How does this affect you?
You’ll need to check to make sure your hosting provider is up to date. You may be able to enable PHP 5 via the hosting provider’s control panel or perhaps they can move you to a new server. Worst case scenario is that you would need to change hosts.

If you’re not sure what versions PHP and MySQL your host is running, you can install the Health Check plugin and it will tell you if you’re ready for WordPress 3.2. It’s a good idea to plan ahead so that when the time comes, you’ll be able to upgrade smoothly.

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Now there’s an even easier way to show custom post type archives on your WordPress site: Use a plugin!

Custom Post Type Archives Plugin

Custom Post Type Archives is the plugin with the most features for creating archives for your custom posts. It allows for customization from the WordPress dashboard for permalink structure, title, what templates to include and what post types will have archives.

After installing Custom Post Type Archives, you’ll be able to do the following:

• specify a URL base for custom post archives
• specify which template to include for which custom post type
• specify how titles appear for custom post type archives
• select which custom post types will have archives enabled

Without the plugin, the way WordPress naturally outputs the URL would look something like this:

http://yourblog.com/?post_type=recipes

With the plugin installed you’ll get a prettier URL:

http://yourblog.com/recipes/

The post type can now become a more natural part of your menu. You’ll be able to assign any custom template to your post type archives or a fallback template in case you haven’t created any custom templates.

Extra Functions For Theme Developers:

If you’re a theme developer, then you’ll be glad to know that this plugin also provides you with two highly useful functions:

• is_post_type_archive – Similar to is_category or is_single, it will return true if this page is a custom post type archive or false if it isn’t.
• get_the_post_type_permalink / the_post_type_permalink – This is used to return or echo the permalink for the post type.

RSS feeds for your new custom post type archives are available if you add /feed/ to the end of the archive URL.

Those are a few highlights of the Custom Post Type Archives plugin. It’s the best option for easily customizing your archive URL’s and selecting templates for each. More information can be found at the plugin’s homepage – http://ratvars.com/custom-post-type-archives/

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Here’s an example from the codex of how to use it with the reset shown at the end:

<?php

query_posts('showposts=5');

if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post();
	?><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"><?php the_title() ?></a><br /><?php

endwhile; endif;

wp_reset_query();
?>

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New features include:

• Media Dashboard in Admin Panel where admin has overall media control
• Admin can select number of media to be shown on front-end
• Media owner on single page added
• Media in User Profiles
• Media in Groups
• Media Album support
• Ability to report abuse
• Embed Media Directly while creating post

Follow @medaibp on Twitter to stay up to day with the Kaltura’s BuddyPress Media Component. You can download the latest version at the WordPress.org repository or the plugin’s official homepage.

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