[Jay]

I’m trying to figure out the best way to setup my buddypress site and having difficulty understanding the difference in groups vs. forums.

I’d like to kind of mimic what’s going on here at wpnyc.org. The homepage has 3 sections:
HELP
NEWS
JOBS

I’m guessing NEWS is an “activity feed”?

HELP and JOBS seem to be Groups because when you click on either you end up on the Forum tab of a Group page.

As I understand it, anyone can VIEW and POST in a group, regardless of whether or not they are a group member. Right?

And when you join a group, you get e-mail notifications about posts made in that group. Right?

Can the group e-mail notifications be setup so that group members only get an e-mail when the group administrator posts a new topic that he/she somehow flags as “important”? For example, I’m not a member of this BuddyPress page because I don’t want to get an e-mail every time anyone posts any question about BuddyPress. But I would like to get notified when the group admin posts a message a major announcement in the group forum, like an upcoming BuddyPress Meetup or announces a new version of BuddyPress.

please advise. thanks in advance.

[Steve]

@jake–

NEWS: Is a standard WP loop showing all Blog posts on the site.

HELP: is a custom Activity Stream that shows Forum posts from TWO Groups: WordPress Troubleshooting and BuddyPress Troubleshooting. Clicking on NEWS takes you to the WP Troubleshooting Group, well… because it had to go somewhere 😉

You can learn about building custom Activity Streams at BP Dev Docs.

When you join a group, YOU get to set your own email notifications. And there are also GLOBAL notifications you can set.

I’m sure there’s a plugin to allow notifications only when an Admin posts.

[Jay]

So the user selects the GLOBAL notifications? I’m hoping for some way for the website admin to be able to send e-mail notifications to all users regardless?

For example, if you wanted to inform all members of wpnyc.org of some major changes, how would you go about ensuring they all get that message in an e-mail?

Or, is there any way to automatically enroll all users in the larger group (a group consisting of all users)? Then I could ensure that they all get the e-mail notifications via this plugin: http://buddypress.org/community/groups/buddypress-group-email-subscription/.

[Steve]

Three ways for an Admin to send a message to all users:
1) Site Wide Notices
2) Use a subscription form plugin: This is how we do it here. Users are auto-subscribed and an email is generated when I create a regular Post.
3) Email Users plugin: Never tried it, but it looks like it would work.

[Jay]

@1) Instructions say “go to Messages >> Compose on the front-end.” But I don’t see that anywhere when I’m logged in as the admin. Where is it?

@2 and @3) I’ll try those. Thanks!

[Steve]

Does this link work for you? http://wpnyc.org/members/jake/messages/compose/

[Jay]

Yeah, that link does work. I didn’t see the Messages tab on my site because I had disabled messages. It seems that when I send a message via that message feature, it only appears when users log in to the site. But I want them to get an e-mail so I will try out the other plugins and report back. Thanks!

[Author]

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