12 New All-Purpose BuddyPress Plugins For Customizing Your Social Network

BuddyPress plugin developers have been busy bees in the past few months. Most of these plugins offer small, helpful features that would be well-suited to nearly every BuddyPress community. Not all are hosted in the WordPress repository, so grab a cup of coffee and check out all the latest from the BuddyPress ninjas.

BP Custom Background For User Profile

 
This plugin was created by Brajesh Singh of BuddyDev.com. It gives your BuddyPress site members custom background images for their profile pages. A user can upload a new image and set it as his profile background image.

Download Plugin

BuddyPress Default Data

This plugin enables you to test BuddyPress on your own hosting and instantly add lots of users, messages, friends connections, groups, topics, and activity items. The best part is that it also comes with a “Clear BuddyPress” button to truncate all the tables when you’re finished testing.

Download Plugin

BP Community Activity on Profile

This plugin shows all the community activity on a user’s profile. It also adds a sub nav in user activity titled “All Activity” so that a logged in user can click on it to see what is happening across the network.

Download Plugin

BP Auto Login On Activation Plugin

This is another plugin from Brajesh at BuddyDev. It changes the default behavior of BuddyPress so that when a user activates his account, he’ll be logged in. Once the user is logged in, it will redirect him to his profile.

Download Plugin

Custom Admin Bar

The new Custom Admin Bar plugin will work with any BuddyPress theme that supports the WordPress admin bar. It allows you to customize your admin bar with your own logo and select important links that you want to highlight. Easily re-order the drop-down links via drag-and-drop. It even works with multisite!

Download Plugin

BP Username Changer

Make it possible for your users to change their usernames. The plugin first checks to see if the username is already reserved and then allows the user to input a new username in the settings.

Download Plugin

YD BuddyPress Feed Syndication

This plugin lets you syndicate external RSS feeds into your site’s BuddyPress activity feed. It enables each BuddyPress user to select as many external RSS feeds as he wants. Those feeds will be aggregated (mixed) into their activity feed automatically, with a title, an excerpt and a link to the original post.

Download Plugin

BuddyPress Message Privacy Plugin

This plugin lets each user control who can message him. It offers several options: a user can opt to receive messages from everyone, friends only or even specify a custom list of users from whom he want to receive messages. He can also create a custom list for other users who can send him a message, as well as a blacklist of users who will never be able to send him a message.

Download Plugin

BP Labs

We’ve featured BP Labs several times on wpmu.org. It offers three unofficial BuddyPress experiments: @mentions autosuggest, Quick Admin, and Activity Stream Spam. Install this plugin if you want to try out some of these new features while they’re in process.

Download Plugin

BuddyPress Group Suggest Widget

Help your BuddyPress members find groups to join by installing this new plugin. It suggests groups to a user based on his friends’ group memberships.

Download Plugin

BuddyPress Simple Google Map

The BuddyPress Simple Google Map plugin uses the static Google map API to add the maps to groups. It also includes a widget to showcase the map in the sidebar.

Download Plugin

BP Export Users

This really should be a core BuddyPress feature. It’s on the roadmap, but in the meantime you can use this plugin to export all user data from WordPress and BuddyPress to CSV.

Download Plugin