Your second, third and fourth requests can be taken care of by making sure the groups are set as Private. That means that they don’t show up in public listings, and their contents are only visible to members of the group.
In order to make sure that people can only be part of a single group, you’ll want to hide the Send Invite screen for all users, or at least for non-admins. You could either do this through CSS, or by modifying/reproducing the functionality defined at bp-groups.php groups_setup_nav().
As for the first question, there are WP plugins that allow you to restrict membership to invited members. A ten-second Google search turned up this: https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-invites/, for example. I imagine that this would work fine for BP as well. The most straightforward way to populate groups would then be for the admin to use a plugin like BP Group Management http://teleogistic.net/code/buddypress/bp-group-management/, which allows admins to place people manually in groups, bypassing the invitation process.
Hello Boone.
Thank you for your kind help. I’m new to BP and i am still trying to understand in depth how it works. About your suggestions there are a few things that do not work exactly as you said (at least for me).
1. Admin has to approve all new sign-ups and make the new Member part of 1 (and only one) Group. Only after this action by the Admin, an activation email is sent to the new Member. As an alternative to this process, a new Member could only sign-up after the Admin sends him an invite to a particular Group.
I need the Admin to review the sign-up request, add the new member to a particular group and then send a confirmation to the new member. With the suggestion you made (wp-invites + bp-group-management) all works well, but the member gains access to the website as soon as he signs-up. When he logs in for the first time he is still not part of a group, because most probably the Admin didn’t have time to do this. For me it’s not important if the system is set in a way that it has to be the Admin to invite new members or if is up for the new members to ask to join. As long as the new member gains access exclusively after he has been added to a group by the Admin.
2. If the Groups are set to private they still appear in the group directory. I changed them to hidden and now they can only be seen by it’s members, which is perfect for my needs. But since that now i’m left with one empty tab in the groups directory (all groups), is there a way of making it disappear by editing some file? If so, which one and where?
3. Members can only see the list of the other Members of his Group
For now, even with all groups set to hidden, the members can have access to a list of all members. Is there a way to make them have access to a list of only the members of his group?
4. How can i prevent members to exit the group or groups they are part of? Maybe by editing some file?
Again, i appreciate all the help that you can provide.
Thank you.
#2) Copy bp-default’s header.php into your child theme and edit it.
Thank you for all the help.
@marcime – the plugin you talk about is for WPMU, but i’m using WP. Doesn’t work…
Any suggestion regarding question 3?
I’ve got another question along the same lines for educational groups. Let’s say that we’ve got a bunch of groups on our site but we want to restrict creating forums for only certain groups.
E.g. I want the “Biology” group to have a group forum and to use the “Buddypress Wiki Compnent” plugin and “Group Documents” plugin. But I don’t want the “X-box Lovers from India” group to have these options.
How would I go about doing that?
Actually, this site is a good example of what I’m looking for. Some of the plugin groups have forums and some do not.
Here’s a plugin without a forum: https://buddypress.org/community/groups/wibstats-statistics-for-wordpress-mu/
How would I disable forums for certain groups on a normal BP site? Basically I want forums for groups to be disabled by default, but then to be able to activate forums for groups on a case-by-case basis.
Group admins can choose to enable/disable the group’s Forum via the admin settings page on that Group.
