New BuddyPress Gifts Plugin: Is Farmville on Its Way to BuddyPress?

A new BuddyPress plugin popped on the scene today that allows users to send each other gifts. BuddyPress Gifts is now available in the WordPress repository and is guaranteed to add a healthy does of community to your site. Users can select a gift among those pre-loaded by the plugin or custom images uploaded by the admin. When they visiting a friend’s page, he can send a gift with an attached custom message.

Check it out in action on the frontend:

BuddyPress Gifts Plugin Features:

• Sends gift images to other members in BuddyPress
• Updates activity stream to show gifts-sent information
• Members can choose gifts from the box in others’ gifts tab and send message with gift
• Receiving member can delete or reply to the message using the activity stream function in his own profile
• Administrator can upload, delete, and edit gift items in the admin dashboard

Sending image gifts may not be suitable for every BuddyPress site, but this functionality can be adapted to be used in other ways. If you think gifts are too cutesy, you can modify the plugin to be nominations that users can give each other or titles, ranks, etc.- anything that will appeal to your users to get them interacting with each other.

How To Install BuddyPress Gifts

1. Plugins >> Add New >> BuddyPress Gifts

2. Activate. You should now see Gifts under the menu at Dashboard >> BuddyPress >> Gifts

3. If you want to use your own images, upload 64*64px images to buddypress-gifts/includes/images before activating or add one by one in the admin dashboard

Now on the frontend your users are able to select and send gifts to each other. These sent gifts will appear in the user’s activity stream, as shown here:

Applications that allow users to send little gifts are the very reason many people are moving away from social networks that constantly flood the user activity stream with irrelevant and annoying updates. However, depending on the demographics of your community, this may be just the thing to spark up more user activity on your site. I enjoyed this plugin while testing it out on WP 2.9.2 and BuddyPress 1.2.3. What are your thoughts about gifting through BuddyPress? Are users looking for this? Would you use use it on your site?

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