The Daily Plugin – BuddyPress Plugins To Encourage Engagement

Today we’ve got an interesting mix of new BuddyPress plugins from the WordPress Plugin Repository. I’ve been working on both an intranet version of a BP installation, in addition to the new creation of a multisite BP explosion that is quickly becoming a monster all on its own. Share in the results of my hunt! Here are some cool new BuddyPress plugins that you may be able to use in your own installation. Remember that these are fairly new plugins and should be tested on a staging site before going live. Make plenty of backups, especially with the new 3.6 upgrades.

My Cred is an adaptive points management system that lets you award / charge your users for interacting with your WordPress powered website. It reminds me a lot of CubePoints which has some of the same functionality, but MyCred goes a step further. For me, this was the perfect add-on to encourage people to participate in a community I am building. From unlocking hidden Easter egg content to presenting badges and trophies, MyCred delivers a very nicely integrated solution for participation incentives. In just a few days since implementing, the activity has TRIPLED because there is now a structure in place that encourages posts, responses, photo additions and tweeting and liking the site. There are many other features that I have not had the chance to implement yet, so I can’t wait to see the climb rate from here. Incidentally, this also lets users PAY their way into the incentive rewards as well, so this could be a great conduit for giving people the option to get reward items (maybe an ebook) either by site participation or simply by paying for it.

BBPress User Stats helps to monitor who is most active on your bbPress forums within BuddyPress. It’s always important to monitor your levels of engagement. It’s easy and simple to use. Quite simply it’s a basic participation panel that shows the number of posts and replies from your user base.

Word Replacer can help to curb unwanted language within your BuddyPress streams, comments or bbPress posts and replies. It simply allows you to set up which unmentionable language you’d like to filter and will replace that word or obscenity with a word of your choosing. It can work in the other direction as well, where you can do your “unnecessary censorship” and make non-vulger descriptive words into swear words instead. Beyond acting as a swear filter, this can also replace brand names, products, etc. It can take a specific word and place predetermined links or HTML in its place. It’s only limited as to how you setup the word filter pool. Additional options allow you to select what types of entries that the plugin will be activated on, i.e. Posts, Pages, bbPress entries, etc. You can also control case sensitivity or use it to pick whole or partial words.

BP Search Friends allows an AJAX based search to find other users within the system. It takes into account a few different fields to populate the search data, such as Friend’s Display Name, Friend’s Email or the Friend’s Username. I always had my BuddyPress and bbPress options so that I would be able to private message, but it never gave me a search option to do so. Now with this plugin I have that option.

Hope you get some use out of these BuddyPress and bbPress related plugins. It’s often difficult to find a group that works well together, so I’m happy to provide this quick plugin “kit” to use or try on your next BuddyPress installation.