Yeah, I can. I guess what I’m looking for is something that supports the front-end recognizing those different types at registration and then in themes. But, yes, I can create the roles and assign them capabilities. I’d like to do the same with groups and then either display the groups separately within the groups page or have multiple “pages” for each type. Same would be true for profiles.
Is this already possible for BP, even if roles setup in WP?
Maybe it’s something like the Members plugin with something on the front-end for new registrants or members to choose with some approval process. Sorta like the paid status for all these premium sites except without the need for paying.
I know this is a little back from the dead, but I would go about this in a totally different way myself.
I would use good old WordPress usermeta, and have three different registration screens. Giving users the ability to choose something will more often than not confuse them. If you give them a dedicated registration with only the options they need, that will yield better results.
I have a post around here somewhere on how to assign usermeta values directly from registration. Then rather than trying to group users together, rather than wasting a profile field that you eventually have to hide or prevent users from changing, and rather than creating custom user role types, you can just check the meta and go. And if they upgrade their account, you just update the usermeta value.
Custom user roles is a good idea too, but it comes with a little more work to make things cooperate the way you want to use them.
TLDR version: Introduce types of groups. e.g. “User group” type – it has no forum, no “Home” page, just members listing and activity stream. This group added to Activity Stream filters where relevant.
Would have to filter out custom group type “User group” out of the /groups/directory page & member profile group page.
These custom group types could be set so they are publicly visible/private to those members involved/or hidden (visible to the creator only). As per current Group privacy settings.
Could add e.g. “Friends”, “Colleagues” and “Fans” as default, empty groups for each user on user registration. Obviously revise theme to make the “Friends” page (“Connections”, maybe) look like the Friends page rather than a regular Group.
Different users might create “User group” types with the same name but with different meaning (“Fans” could be interpreted several ways for example). This is no problem as such categorisation is defined — and belongs to — the user who does it. Might need some semantic group kind/type identifier in the code to allow FOAF/SIOC RDF profiles to be able to assigned to these “User groups”.
@juanllamosas
This thread is about Mike Pratt’s Featured Groups Widget. This allows site admins to select certain BP groups to feature. It has nothing to do with individual members.
It sounds like you are talking about my Featured Member(s) Widget. If you are, you set a featured member by their unique ID, not by their username. When editing the widget’s parameters, it states “Member ID(s)
” and “Separate member IDs by commas”.
A member ID is the unique number automatically assigned to each user by WPMU upon registration. You can find each member’s unique member ID (also called userid), by logging into WPMU and clicking on “Site Admin > Users”. Then, hover your cursor of a given member’s username and look at the link text. you’ll see this in the url “user_id=”. You can also obtain a user’s unique ID by looking at the “ID” field in the wp_users table in WPMU’s MySQL DB.
