[@crashutah Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

Boone,

I know this wasn’t part of the initial release, but the harvester element would be a great feature. A really simple way to get this going could be to use Plaxo’s widget: http://www.plaxo.com/api/widget It basically pulls the emails from your address book and puts them in a text area. Would be pretty simple to integrate I think.

Thanks for the good work. I’ll be using this and will likely build on top of it.

[@crashutah Participant 16 years, 2 months ago]

DJPaul,

That’s the basic idea. So, people that have joined a specific group can email out their friends to come and join the same group directly. Essentially it would make the registration process unique to how the person was referred to the BuddyPress install.

Kind of like on Facebook, when a friend invites me to be part of Facebook and I’m not a member, then when I sign up I’m automatically their friend. Of course, in this case I want a BuddyPress “group” to be added automatically. I guess it does also make sense to make the person requesting that I join my friend also.

That’s the backend need.

The front end need is to make the registration page a customized landing page based on who requested that you sign up to participate in the BuddyPress install.

Both challenges, but I think the modification of the sign up process like I’m describing will open up some really interesting doors to innovation with BuddyPress. The key for Facebook’s success is getting people signed up. Modifying the registration page to increase conversions seems like a logical next step to making this happen. Just interested in hearing if other people have done it and where I might start looking to make these changes.

[@crashutah Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

Andy,

What type of plugins/multiple db’s/caching do you have enable to handle all the users of this site?

Of course WordPress.com which runs MU has scaled quite well, but I know they do some special things on the backend to make that happen.

WordPress (which is what I’ve done up until now) scales VERY well. I’m amazed at how much traffic I can handle on WordPress for $6 a month.

[@crashutah Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’m actually very interested in doing this too. JJJ, if the request we sent to join the BP install had a parameter like &groupid=34 then couldn’t the registration process for BP be able to handle this variable and it automatically join someone to a specific group? I ask since hopefully that variable could also be used to modify the registration page according to the group that invited them to join the BP install.

Of course, it’s all possible if you hack the core, but can the registration process be modified like this using a plugin?

I appreciate any direction someone can offer on plugins that have done something similar or which areas to look to try and make this happen.

[@crashutah Participant 16 years, 6 months ago]

I’d love Google Connect also. However, I think it’s unlikely that Google Connect and Facebook Connect could be used on the same site. Google Connect just integrated with some other sites (I believe Twitter was their latest) and even OpenID. However, Facebook Connect is kind of a competitor to Google Connect. Point being that you probably can only have one or the other.

Personally, I think Facebook Connect is the better one to have integrated well right now.