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Invite Anyone – invite by email too – please help test


  • Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    Hi everyone. I have updated my Invite Anyone plugin to allow invitation by email address. It seems pretty solid, but I would really like to have some other people test it before I make it the stable version.

    If you have a non-production site and you wouldn’t mind testing it out, please download the development trunk version at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/download/. If you’re already running a version of Invite Anyone on your site, please make sure to deactivate it before downloading and activating this one. (Note too that you must deactivate and reactivate – if you just replace the files, the necessary db table won’t be created.)

    A brief rundown of the new functionality:

    – A new subnav item has been added to profile pages, called Send Invites

    – Under that item are two pages. The first, Invite New Members, allows you to enter up to five email addresses, a custom message, and select some of the groups you’re a member of.

    – The second page is Sent Invites, a list of invitations you’ve already sent.

    – When you send the invitation, an email goes to the invitee(s) with the custom message and a link to [your bp install]/register/accept-invitation/[email-address]

    – When the user clicks that link, he or she should see the normal register page, with a message above that says “You’ve been invited by [the name(s) of the user(s) who sent invitations]…”

    – When the user activates the new account, he or she will receive invitations to all invited groups, as well as friendship requests from all members who sent invitations.

    – There is also a new (and ugly!) link on the Group Send Invites page, which takes you to the Send Invites profile page and pre-selects the group you just came from.

    – There’s a pretty fair amount of email validation that happens. Try punching in some bad emails (banned on your WPMU install, poorly formed, etc) and see what happens. I should note that right now I’m using WPMU’s native email validation – I haven’t even tried loading it on a single-blog install of WP. I did use if ( function_exists ) so nothing should crash, but it’ll probably allow any old email on single WP.

    Phew – I think that’s it.

    In the future, things like number of allowed email addresses, the default message, etc will be under the control of the site admin. I’m also going to write some Javascript that does inline validation of form data. But for now I think the key functionality is in place.

    Please hammer away at it and leave any bugs/suggestions here.

Viewing 25 replies - 126 through 150 (of 174 total)

  • Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Thanks Boone, normally don’t like aps like poedit but actually it’s faster to use as it generated the .mo same time you save the working .po file so a swift upload and done, I now have the archaic British spelling of Favorite


    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    Very glaud it’s wourking for youu.


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    hey Boone,

    so you are saying it would be better to just remove the Tab “Send Invites” from the “Group Creation Process” ?


    Generally speaking, its hard for me to understand why there is the Tab “Send Invites” (at Group Creation) available in BP-Standard, but there are no 5 e-mail-fields available to invite external friends…..is this intentional ?

    Many thanks,

    Erich


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Is there a possible confusion here? ‘send invites’ on group creation exists in core but it’s limited to your existing friends only, it’s not something that the plugin can or should play around with? The plugin extends and adds functionality to the default ‘Send Invites’ and also adds the ‘send email invite’ but I may have misunderstood what you are asking , if so apologies, ignore me and Boone will furnish a more apt response.


    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    @Erich73 and @hnla – The Send Invites tab during the group creation process is indeed part of BP core. I’m not necessarily saying that you should remove the Send Invites step from group creation. I think it’s a good idea to give group creators a chance to populate their groups. (Though, if you wanted to, there are ways that you could remove the step.) My plugin does not currently allow for group creators to invite members to their group by email directly from the Groups section of the site – only from the Profile section. This is mostly a technical issue (ie I haven’t reconfigured the group invitation screen to do so yet). In the future I may add the functionality that Erich73 is looking for.


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    many thanks for clarification Boone & keep up the great work !


    BTW: I am voting for Boone to become the next BP Core Developer…..


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Erich my concern is that – given your assertion on the other thread “Now your site Is up and running” that it is very difficult to get a new site off the ground without being able to send email when you create groups – you are perceiving an issue where one doesn’t necessarily exist, certainly it might be nice to have the email address fields available on the group send invites screen but it’s not a necessity as there is a reasonably simple path to the profile send emails from the group creation stage, a little explanatory text would smooth things along a little for users. I won’t ramble on as I covered some of these points on the other thread, and I’m in danger of repeating myself and of being boring


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    BTW: I am voting for Boone to become the next BP Core Developer…..

    Ok I’ll second that :-)

    There is a clear core group of people who do know what they are doing and contribute significantly, and it would be great to see them all acknowledged as part of the main dev team.


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    Hi Boone,

    I found 2 more issues I do not know how to fix:

    1)

    the e-mail which the persin receives whom I invites looks like the following:


    You have been invited by %INVITERNAME% to join the community.

    Visit %INVITERNAME%’s profile at %INVITERURL%.


    How to change the “%INVITERNAME% and %INVITERURL% to something different ?

    2)

    when sending an invitation to somebody, then there is the Tab “Sent Invites”. There is the section named “Group” or “Invited to Group”. But this section does not show the Group-Name.

    Many thanks,


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    I mentioned that about halfway back up the page you simply need to double up the %

    It should be %%INVITERNAME%%

    The sent invites screen groups name shows up fine on my installs, you have definitely activated option in backend to allow group invite to be sent?


    dre1080
    Member

    @dre1080

    Could this possibly be extended to also have a contacts importer..??

    users just enter their Gmail, Yahoo or Windows Live email address and password and it finds if their friends are already on the site, if not it will give an option to send invites to the email addresses you want..

    it could be tedious for some people to enter an email address again and again..just to make it simple for the user..


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    @hnla

    where can I do the double-up of the %%

    ?

    I am not a coder…….


    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    @Erich73 – You can customize the message however you’d like on the Dashboard admin panel. Under Buddypress > Invite Anyone. As for your report about the “Sent Invites” tab – are you sure that you sent group invites along with the email invitations? As @hnla says, make sure you’ve checked the option on the Dashboard panel.

    @dre1080 – I may try to make this work at a later date. If nothing else, I can put in the proper hooks that would allow someone else to build such an extension for my plugin. Stay tuned.

    @everyone – I just put a widget into the development version of the plugin, available at https://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/invite-anyone/download/. If anyone is interested, they can check it out! I want to get a few more new features before tagging a new stable version.


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Just to clarify what Boone said by default that message textarea in dashboard carries the replaced tags but due to gremlins at work they have been added as %INVITERNAME% instead of %%INVITERNAME%%

    Can’t see why this has gone slightly pear shaped as wildcard_replace looks correct as does invite_anyone_invitation_message() in by-email.php

    Widget?? I could of course install and answer my own question but Widget? why? hows one meant to use it? The only place I can think a widget could be used is the me/my bit of the hardcoded sidebar.php but that isn’t a widgitised area.


    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    @hnla – If you’re using a theme that supports widgets (like the bp-default theme), then the widget allows you to display some email fields on any BP page (for logged in users only, of course). It’s a way of making the email invitation function a little bit more public, so that more people know about it.

    It goes without saying that the widget is optional, though. If you don’t find a use for it, then you don’t have to turn it on :)


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    Yep I see, I widgitise areas just for the hell of it, just tend not to like using them personally but have to allow others some in to moving stuff around, and thinking about it some greater prominence might help create awareness initially .


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    Hey Boone,

    – do I need to activate your Plugin “Side-Wide” or just for my “Main Blog” ?

    – is there a chance to have an option like this: Allow email invitations to be sent by GROUP-ADMINS ?

    Many thanks,


    Boone Gorges
    Keymaster

    @boonebgorges

    @Erich73 – You really only need to have it activated on the main blog, but I don’t think it will hurt anything to do it sitewide. I should check into this. As for group admins: Good idea. I should be able to put that in the next version.


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    Thanks a lot Boone !

    can you also make a placeholder for the Website-URL and the Group-URL ?

    something like this, but for the Website-URL and the Group-URL:


    %%INVITERURL%% – URL to the profile of the inviter



    bpisimone
    Participant

    @bpisimone

    Here’s something by rich that might fit Erich’s description: http://etivite.com/groups/buddypress/forum/topic/quick-tip-remove-send-invites-for-groups/


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    Hi Boone,

    there is the option “4. (optional) Select some groups. Invitees will receive invitations to these groups when they join the site.”.

    This is showing 20 Groups, but those look like being taken from the first 20 Groups out of the full list of Groups.

    Lets say I do have 300 Groups, then only the ones starting with the letter “A” are being listed under this “option”.

    Is there a way to make this like a Random-List of Groups ?

    Or even better: is there a way to remove this “4. option” in the backend ?


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    @Boone,

    o.k. the plugin works fine !

    If you would still create a Group-Screen as you have mentioned, then it would be just perfect !

    Thanx !


    gregfielding
    Participant

    @gregfielding

    @boone, these are probably already on your list, but here’s 3 quick suggestions.

    1. Make the width of the message/subject boxes a percentage. My custom theme cuts off the ends. :)

    2. On the message “You’ve been invited by NAME to join…”, make the NAME a link, to open that member’s profile page in a new window.

    3. We need to be able to delete old invitations.

    And I’m excited to see the Widget version. I’m hoping it has text that can be easily tweaked. I want mine to say “Invite your friends to join”

    Great work Boone.


    abcde666
    Participant

    @erich73

    agree, the invitations you have sent in the list should be able to delete.


    Hugo Ashmore
    Keymaster

    @hnla

    There is a todo.txt in the folder where BG lists features to be implemented and in that ‘Sent Invites’ has a few entries one of which is to look into method of clearing individual accepted/all invites.

    @gregfielding – at present there don’t appear to be any rules for the widget markup probably because it’s a dev version, likely styles will be added later in stable release but if you are using the widget ( which appears perfectly stable) live then until stable version released you probably ought to add these two rulesets to either the invite-anyone stylesheet or your custom stylesheet if using one – if thast is you haven’t already sorted this out:

    .widget.invite-anyone li {
    margin:5px 0;
    }
    .widget.invite-anyone form li input {
    width:96%;
    }

    This is especially important as without these rules the default layout as rendered in IE6 is borked.

Viewing 25 replies - 126 through 150 (of 174 total)
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