Invite Anyone makes BuddyPress’s invitations features more powerful. The plugin has two components:
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The ability to invite members to the site by email. The plugin creates a tab on each member’s Profile page called “Send Invites”, which contains a form where users can invite outsiders to join the site. There is a field for a custom message. Also, inviters can optionally select any number of their groups, and when the invitee accepts the invitation he or she automatically receive invitations to join those groups.
The email invitation part of the plugin is customizable by the BP administrator, via Dashboard > BuddyPress > Invite Anyone.
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By default, BuddyPress only allows group admins to invite their friends to groups. In some communities, you might want members to be able to invite non-friends to groups as well. This plugin allows you to do so, by populating the invitation checklist with the entire membership of the site, rather than just a friend list.
Because member lists can get very long and hard to navigate, this plugin adds a autosuggest search box to the Send Invites screen – the same one that appears on the Compose Message screen – which allows inviters to navigate directly to the members they want to invite.
Some users have reported problems when the plugin is activated sitewide. If you are getting PHP errors on subdomain blogs when the plugin is activated across your WP installation, consider activating it only on the BuddyPress blog.
Invite Anyone has been downloaded 51,771 times. Are you using this plugin? Consider a donation.
Read an old comment thread related to this plugin here.
Translation credits
- Dutch – Jesper Popma
- Italian – Luca Camellini
- French – Guillaume Coulon
- Russian – Jettochkin
Version history
- 0.6.5 – July 10, 2010
- Workaround for “headers already sent” issue on group invites
- Fixed a number of variable type problems with email invitation pages
- 0.6.4 – July 7, 2010
- Fixed bug that kept item group invitations from being sent
- Fixed bug that prevented Send Invites profile tab from being hidden when access control was set to Administrator
- 0.6.3 – May 12, 2010
- Fixed bug that showed non-activated users in group invitation list on some instances of single WP
- Fixed bug that limited number of displayed groups on invite by email screen
- Cleaned up the appearance of the group list on the invite by email screen
- Fixed bug that may have cause foreach problem in email invitation
- 0.6.2 – May 8, 2010
- Fixed bug that kept group invitation member ddst from being populated on some non-MU setups
- Fixed bug that kept non-admins from seeing Send Invites group tab
- Fixed bug that prevented JS and CSS from loading on invitation step in group creation
- Fixed bug that caused email fields not to load properly in IE – thanks, techguy!
- Added do_action hooks for other plugins (eg Cubepoints) to access
- Added filter on acceptance URL and action hook before accept invitation screen for plugins to access
- 0.6.1 – April 27, 2010
- Added checks to allow email invitations to work when groups component is disabled
- Fixed l18n bugs in error messages
- French translation added – thanks, Guillaume!
- Russian translation added – thanks, Jettochkin!
- Updated translations
- 0.6 – April 23, 2010
- Plugin now includes a widget for email invitation from any page
- Sent Invites sortable by email address, date invited, date
- Invites can be cleared from Sent Invites list: individually, all accepted, all invitations
- Created admin controls over who group admins/mods/members can invite to groups
- Admins can now allow customization of invitation’s main message but still have control over a non-editable footer
- CSS issues fixed
- 0.5.2 – April 12, 2010
- Added Italian translation (thanks, Luca!)
- Removed “Want to invite…” prompt from Send Invites screen during group creation
- Attempted a fix for certain in_array errors in css/js loader file
- 0.5.1 – April 9, 2010
- Fixed bug with subject/message content when email is returned as an error
- Fixed error with email error messages when no groups were selected
- Changed width of textareas on Invite New Members tab
- 0.5 – April 9, 2010
- Enabled Opt Out option for invitees
- Subject line is now customizable by the admin
- Admin can toggle whether users can customize subject line and message body of invitation emails
- Some localization bugs fixed
- Filtered spammers from group invitation list
- Fixed bug that may have caused problems with some MU limited email domain lists
- Email Address field is now auto-populated on Accept Invitation screen
- Created admin toggle for group invites attached to email screen
- Added hook for additional fields on Invite New Members screen (as well as a hook for processing the additional data)
- 0.4.1 – April 5, 2010
- Fixed problem with email validation causing fatal errors on single WP
- Fixed bug that allows members to see Send Invites tab on profiles other than their own
- 0.4 – April 5, 2010
- New feature: Invite by email from the new Send Invites profile tab
- Links from group invite pages to profile Send Invites tab
- Removed “Send Invites” button during group creation on BP 1.2+
- Created admin panel for managing plugin settings
- 0.3.5 – March 30, 2010
- Corrected localization function (d’oh)
- Added Dutch translation – thanks, Jesper!
- 0.3.4 – March 29, 2010
- Added POT file and localization function
- 0.3.3 – March 16, 2010
- Fixed bug that kept non-active users from appearing in member list
- 0.3.2 – March 2, 2010
- Made it possible to use the plugin with friends component turned off (thanks for the idea, Tim!)
- Turned off Site Wide Only to remove PHP errors on some subdomain blogs (thanks for the feedback, Mark!)
- 0.3.1 – March 1, 2010
- When creating a group and not inviting anyone, success message now reads “Group successfully created” rather than “Invites sent” (thanks for the idea, Ray!)
- 0.3 – February 27, 2010
- Compatibility with BP 1.2 bp-default; file rearrangement to ensure proper loading with BP 1.2+
- 0.2
- Compatibility with BP 1.2 bp-classic theme (bp-default forthcoming); bugfixes regarding file locations
- 0.1
- Initial release
Hi Boone,
Plugin is working great here..
But I have one question:
Is it also possible that the receiver of the invitation can see who is inviting him?
For example in the subject field of the email:
is inviting you to join
Thanks!
hmm..
the comment didn’t pick up all the text..
I meant..
For example in the subject field of the email:
(firstname) (lastname) is inviting you to join (sitename)
Hi Stef. Absolutely. Visit Invite Anyone admin panel (Dashboard > BuddyPress > Invite Anyone). Use the wildcard definitions near the top of the page to define whatever custom subject you’d like. For instance:
%INVITERNAME% is inviting you to join Stef’s Site
You can also make the subject line editable by end-users, who could then make the subject line into whatever they’d like.
ah.. i see. Works great! Thanks!
another question.. is it also possible that I can change the url of the plugin?
instead of: /invite-anyone to /uitnodigen
Hi Stef – Yes, you can do that. I notice that right now there’s an error in the code that means you’ll have to make the change in two places, but in the future it will be just in one place.
1) In your bp-custom.php,
define( 'BP_INVITE_ANYONE_SLUG', 'uitnodigen' );2) In by-email/by-email.php, change ‘invite-anyone’ on line 54 to whatever you’d like.
In future versions, only (1) will be necessary.
Please be sure to test this feature extensively. I haven’t done a lot of testing myself, so I’m not 100% positive that the change will work everyone (and that it won’t break any links). Thanks!
works perfect! thanks..
Just one small issue with the localization.
After accepting the invitation.. the registration appears with the following message.
http://img.skitch.com/20100519-xxspgnjqqbdnueqf2xnr35u57a.jpg
I’m not sure where I can remove remove the ‘by’ and change the ‘and’ into ‘en’.
I have this covered in the translation of buddypress and the theme translation.
Pretty weird huh?
Do you have any ideas?
Hi Boone,
I did a re-install of my website and the plugin works fine now. I still use all the other plugins (except for bp groupblog plugin)and there doesn’t seem to be any conflict on a fresh install. So I guess, bp groupblog must have somehow messed up my site. Because after further testing, some of the other plugins didn’t work as well. That’s why I have to re-install. Luckily it’s a new site.
Thanks very much for this fantastic plugin :)
On another plugin which you have developed (equally fantastic) is the group email plugin. This may not be the right place to post but just wanted to ask a quick question – the site admin was able to send group email under any group but the group admin has been unable to send any email notification out. Is there something I can check on to see if the plugin has been installed correctly?
O, just to add, when an email is sent out by the site admin, there is a message to say that the email has been sent successfully. When the group admin sends an email out, there is no such message. There is no error message either. The activity notification works fantastically.
If you disable groups for entire site. Plug throws errors when ever inviting. always bombs on
Class ‘BP_Groups_Group’ not found in /plugins/invite-anyone/by-email/by-email.php on line 573
I don’t have groups enabled for the site. Is there a quick fix for the plug to stop looking for groups enabled?
Hello!
Great plugin! It almost has everything I need. I was wondering if you had in mind adding a number of invites limit?
I’d like for my members to have only 5 invitations each and as they become more active, I would extend that number.
Also, a good idea is to have a reporting in the backend that will allow an easy viewing of who is the person that sends most invites and gets most invites accepted.
I’m sure it’s not difficult I just don’t know WP syntax and no time to learn … little by little I’m learning! I know how to do that with mySQL and PHP but it would be bad coding. =)
Thanks again and I’d love to know if you would consider making this changes. I would be willing to pay.
Hi, I’ve just installed Buddypress and invite-anyone and am trying to test the email invite function.
I’m sending the email invites and getting confirmation that they have been successfully sent – they are just not arriving! (I know because they are my own alternative addresses.)
Does anyone know if there are any Buddypress settings which might be liable to cause this?
I have WordPress 2.9.2 with no other plugins as yet.
Hi Linda. Are you having problems with any other BP emails? When a new user registers for an account, does the verification email come through? Do email notifications of private messages work? Etc. Have you checked spam folders? Invite Anyone uses the same email functions as the rest of BP, so it’s unlikely that the problem is specific to IA.
Hi Boone,
Another question.
How do I set the language to dutch in Invite Anyone?
Actually I have this questions for all my plugins. I just can’t get them to dutch. :)
Thanks
Hi Stef – Do you have your WordPress language set as Dutch? Plugins like Invite Anyone *should* just inherit their language settings from the WordPress setting.
Rob – I will make this fix and release a bugfix very soon.
Giovanni – Both great ideas. I will try to put them in version 0.7 of the plugin.
Hi Boone,
Wonderful plugin! After a lot of searching, I finally found your plugin which allows for users with a specific title to invite people. I would like to note however, that when set to “Administrator” I could still send invites as a normal “Subscriber”, however, when the limitation was set to “Editor” the ability to send invitations as a Subscriber vanished.
This is not a problem for me since I only have administrators and subscribers. I just wanted to let you know. I am running wp3 and bp1.2.5
I can concur with comment 69 setting as administrato allows “subscribers” to send invites…
Max & Joseph – Thanks for pointing this out! It was a silly error I’d made in the code, which is fixed with version 0.6.4.
Thanks for the awesome plugin Boone!
I have one problem….When sending out invites from a group, this is displayed after you click the send invites button and selected a couple of members from the directory: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by…
Thanks, Anton. Others on the bp.org forums have noticed the same thing. I just published 0.6.5, a bugfix for this very issue. Hope it works for you!
Please check the download of 0.6.5 as it doesn’t seem to work.
John – Can you be more specific? I just downloaded a fresh version from the repo and it seems to be working fine. What problem are you experiencing?
Thanks Boone. 0.6.5 fixed the header problem.
Another bug….Once again…I’m finding all of them
When an Invitation is sent and the user has to click on the final registration email link, this is displayed: Call to undefined function friends_add_friend()
Do you have the friends component turned off? (I don’t think the plugin checks to make sure that it’s turned on before attempting to establish friendships.)
Hi Boone,
Yes. It is turned off.
Hey Boone.
Having a little trouble: the invites are sent perfectly to the new users, but when they register, the group invites aren’t there. The sender of the invites doesn’t show any outstanding invites on his or her list, either. I’ve been playing with a lot of plug ins on this install, and I’m wondering if perhaps I’ve got some relic in my db that is causing this problem. Any thoughts?
Sorry, should have included this:
WPMU: 2.9.2
Buddypress: 1.2.3
Just tested, and the group invites to current members works fine.
Thanks a lot for this excellent plugin! I have a suggestion though, a tip I got from our users:
When you invite people from the list they will appear in the right window and most people are expecting an invite is send straight away so they forget to scroll all the way down to the bottom to push the button Send Invites. To fix it: imo that bottom should be placed close to the selection box so people know they need to press it to send the Invites.
The form on the /register/accept-invitation/ page has action=””. Submitting it just reloads the page with no processing or messages, I’ve been unsuccessful understanding how the form submission is handled and could really use some guidance on debugging this.
Hey Boone, your plugin is just what I’ve been looking for to help populate our new site but I’ve run into a significant problem recently.
Having sent out invitations to a number of potential users, I am getting reports from all of those who reply that after completing registration, they meet with either a 404 page or an error telling them to manually enter their activation code. I attempted to recreate the problem with a dummy account and entered the code supplied in the url for the activation code … with no result.
Do you have any idea why this might be happening? I’m running other plugins as well but nothing that deals with the registration functions.
Matt – So you mean they’re able to register successfully, but *after* registration are led to the activate page? What version of BP/WP? Multisite?
That’s right. The only missing step is activation. Profiles show up as complete as they were formed during the registration process. But the user is unable to login to use their new profile.
I’m running the latest distributed versions of both WP and BP on a single blog install. But come to think of it, I did try to switch over the multisite two weeks ago and was stopped (apparently) by a glitch which won’t allow sites older than a week to switch over to Multisite. Might that attempt have screwed me up?
Clarification:
1. Registration content is completed and the confirmation email sent.
2. Activation link on the confirmation opens buddypress error
Matt – Are you sure this is an Invite Anyone problem? Try deactivating the plugin to see if activation links work out of the box.
After a good bit of testing, I think the problem is in fact coming from Invite anyone. My guess based on my reading of the bp.org support forum is that this is associated with the automatic friending mechanism. I’ve disable friends and replaced it with followers so this is definitely one place where I can see a conflict.
BTW – I think you’re right that a simple if_exists condition ought to take care of that problem. Not sure about the activation errors though. Can’t see the connection.
Aha, if you’ve deactivated the Friends component, that’s probably the problem. I’ll have a look over the next few days and see if I can release a bugfix to solve that issue.
Hey Boone. I can confirm the error what Matt Edminster is getting. I have also deactivated friends and using the followers plugin.
Hi Matt and Anton,
I got around to having a look at the friends thing. It’s strange – there was already a check to see whether the friends component was active; though it was a deprecated check, it still should have worked.
In any case, I’ve updated the trunk of the plugin to triple-check for the friends component. Also, as a bonus, I added support for bp-followers. When the invited user accepts the invitation, they’ll start following each other automatically if Followers is activated.
Would one or both of you mind checking out the trunk version http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/invite-anyone.zip and testing to see whether your problem is solved, before I tag a new stable version? Thanks.
Thanks Boone. Going to start testing it now.
Seems like it’s working without errors so far…
Wish I could agree!
All’s well with registration but it looks as if BP-Follow has been disabled for the new user. Even though it is still an active plugin on my install, all following links were removed from the new user’s menus.
Upon logging in with an admin account, following links initially didn’t load until I visited my profile. Are you getting this too Anton?
Matt – Very, very perplexing. What I’ve changed in IA shouldn’t (can’t) affect the display of followers. Are you sure that IA is causing this problem?
I have translated the plugin to norwegian using the plugin Codestyling Localization, but it still comes in english. The rest of the site is in norwegian except this plugin. There was a message from Codestyling Localization saying:
“Loading Issue: Author is using load_textdomain instead of load_plugin_textdomain function. This may break behavior of WordPress, because some filters and actions won’t be executed anymore. Please contact the Author about that.”
Can this cause the problem?
Boone … sorry for the long delay. No, it looks like this isn’t a problem with your plugin. It’s working well for me now. Thanks for your contributions.
Fantastic – thanks for letting me know, Matt!
Is your plugin compatible with wp3.0.1 and BP 1.2.6?
According to the WP plugin installation popup IA is requires WordPress Version: WPMU 2.8, BuddyPress 1.1 or higher and Compatible up to: WPMU 2.9.2, BuddyPress 1.2.5.2
Hi,
I’ve create a fork of this plugin. https://github.com/laullon/invite-anyone
I’m going to create a Spanish translation and solve minors problems I’ve found (https://github.com/laullon/invite-anyone/commit/7b8a3a23cf784ac4b364c298f89dfdd2f7eac113)
Also I’m going to do some mayor changes to adapt the plugin to a project I’m working on, experimental branch (https://github.com/laullon/invite-anyone/commits/experimental).
RJ – The plugin should work with those versions, yes. I’ll update the plugin info soon.
German – Awesome!! I can’t wait to see what you do with the plugin. If you’ve got anything really cool (or any fixes) please feel free to send a pull request or a patch.
Hello, I would like to change some of the words in the Invite Anyone plugin. For example: It states Send an Invite to friends…. I would like to add additional words. How would I change the words?
Thanks
Hello,
I am trying to find out how to change some of the wording in the Invite Anyone plugin. For example, at the beginning of the plugin it states: Invite Friends to join in the form below or words like that. I would like to change these words. How would I do this?
Thanks
Sheila – The plugin is fully localizable, so you should be able to make a language pack. See http://wpmu.org/basic-guide-to-creating-a-buddypress-language-file-for-sitewide-label-and-message-editing/ for a nice guide; the only difference is that you’ll be editing the Invite Anyone .pot file rather than the one that comes with BuddyPress.