Running a community website is no easy task. But thanks to some amazing plugins, managing your site has now become easier. One such prominent plugin is BuddyPress. 🤩
Though BuddyPress provides some basic features to your site, it doesn’t come with all the features you need to take your community website to the next level. 😞
That’s why we have come up with this list of must-have BuddyPress plugins for your WordPress site – to help you add more features and make your community website better. And the best part about it?
All of them are free with some offering optional upgrades to unlock more features. Well, without wasting much of your time, let’s dive into the list. 😀
rtMedia
Do you feel that your online community is boring without images, music videos? rtMedia can help you with that.
rtMedia is the best all-in-one media management plugin for WordPress and BuddyPress. Using rtMedia, you can allow users to upload multimedia files to your BuddyPress website, create feature-rich social networking/video sharing websites, and manage the media files uploaded to your website. 🖼️🎵📹
Apart from adding a host of media management and social networking features, rtMedia also comes with a lightbox for opening and playing media files on your website.
BuddyPress Registration Options
Are you tired of getting your inbox filled with email notifications from your online community only to find that it was just spam? 😫
BuddyPress Registration Option allows you to block unwanted users and malicious bots from spamming your website. Apart from flooding your inbox, constant spamming can reduce your website’s performance for legitimate users and can affect the user’s experience on your site. 👎
There are also chances for you to get your website penalized by search engines for hosting spammy content (it includes links, sadly).
To prevent all this from happening, you can review your new members manually before giving them access to your website using this simple plugin.
BuddyPress Compliments
A community website is active and vibrant only because of its engaging and interactive members. And one way people can interact with each other without actually having to send personal messages is through compliments. 👌
BuddyPress Compliments allow your community members to send compliments to each other on your site. It can be a simple appreciation, a thank you note, or a profile rating on the scale of 1 to 10.
You can also customize the complimentary messages available to users on your site. You can make the compliments private to the user receiving them or make it visible to all users on your site.
WooCommerce BuddyPress Integration
If you are planning to sell anything on your community website or you already have an online eCommerce store, you would have definitely heard about WooCommerce. 🛒
It is an eCommerce framework for WordPress and adds a host of features like product pages, shopping cart, inventory management and more to your WordPress site. But, it doesn’t integrate well with BuddyPress profiles.
WooCommerce BuddyPress Integration solves this problem by syncing your customer data with BuddyPress profiles. This allows you to view their order history and product downloads directly from their profiles. No need to switch between WooCommerce and BuddyPress each time. 🔄
BuddyPress Global Search
When was the last time you searched for something on your community site? Were you able to find what you needed? Wouldn’t it be easier if you had an option to perform a global search on your site? 🔍
BuddyPress Global Search provides community members with the much needed global search option. They can search for blog posts, site members, forums, groups, activities, messages, and even custom post types. It is really helpful when they don’t know where to find something or you are too lazy to open each section and perform a search. 😛
BuddyPress Edit Activity
People make mistakes. All the time. That’s why you need to give them an option to edit their posts once they have shared it on your site. But unfortunately, BuddyPress doesn’t allow users to edit their updates and comments once they are published. 🙅♂️
But, by using the BuddyPress Edit Activity plugin, you can allow them to make changes to their content even after publishing them. You can also set a time limit up to which they can edit their updates and activity replies. ⏱️
BuddyPress Default Cover Photo
Is your community website looking dull because of people feeling lazy to upload a custom cover photo? Encourage them to set one by uploading a default cover photo for all BuddyPress profiles. Let each profile stand out from the rest.
iFlyChat
Do you want to allow your site members to chat in real-time? iFlyChat is a live chat plugin for WordPress designed with community and social networking sites in mind. Apart from private chats, you can also enable group chats and chat rooms on your site to make it more sociable. 💬
BuddyPress Group Email Subscription
With BuddyPress Group Email Subscription, your site members can choose to receive daily email digests, weekly summary email, or more from your site. This is a good way to allow people to keep themselves updated on the daily/weekly happenings on your community website. 📥
It can also help you keep them hooked to your online community and make them feel more at home.
Wordfence Security – Firewall & Malware Scan
To keep your community website up and running smoothly, you must ensure that it is always updated and has proper security measures in place.
Updating themes, plugins, and WordPress core files are pretty straightforward. But, staying updated of all the latest security threats is not. Detecting intrusions and patching your site for vulnerabilities can be a big headache.
Using Wordfence Security, you can keep your WordPress site secure by protecting it from viruses, blocking malicious traffic, thwarting brute force attacks, finding potential security vulnerabilities, and more. 🛡️
Conclusion
We have limited the number of must-have plugins to only those that are really needed and can enhance your site. There might be other good BuddyPress plugins which we may have missed. If you feel any other BuddyPress plugin deserves a mention in this list, let us know in the comments section below.
With that said, do check out rtAmazon S3 – our premium WordPress plugin for offloading WordPress & BuddyPress media files to Amazon S3 and Transcoder – our freemium WordPress plugin for transcoding audio and video files uploaded to your website. 🙂
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