New Groupblog Plugin

My and my collegue needed to extend the group functionality using the wpmu blogs. They needed to integrate closer.

We created a ”Groupblog” plugin which adds an extra form to the Group Admin Settings page. There the admin has a check box to enable the group blog followed by a drop down to select which group to associate with the group.

Various templates can be implemented, currently we have two. One displays the latest blog posts on the Group home page along side the wire and forum activity. The second one is a template that links from a new menu item in the optionsbar named ’Blog’.

Each template uses basic wp template tags within the wp post loop to contruct whatever output from your blog you’d like to show on your group.

It is a basic concept on which could be build on extensively. Also since it is our very first plugin, the code could potentially be better. We followed the skeleton component guidelines and it seems to work fine at the moment.

Future things we’d like to implement is blog registration along side the group creation. Much like how the user signup offers to sign up a blog. This could be useful especially when disabling user blog and only allow groups to have blogs. Or when you only allow one blog per user at signup.

Is there any need for this functionality from the BP community? And if so, please realize it is early stage and could use help from more veteran developers to optimize and enhance the code.