BuddyPress is a plugin that will give the site PM/Chat, groups, etc.
The best way to describe it is to go to their site:
Is this something we’d be interested in doing? Being that we’ve agreed on a private site, we have the security to consider these types of things.
I’ve never used it so I have no idea if it would be too much, or if we could just pick/choose what we want to include. I went looking just because I thought it would be good to have a private way for Admins to communicate without relying on email.
I like the idea of being able to use PMs a lot!
I like the idea of this plugin for (1) PMs, and (2) for blog organization.
Not so much — or at least, not only — for purposes of group reads, etc.; for one thing, we know from BL that even if there is a “group” feature, most of the discussion is likely going to occur in the comments section of our various blog posts anyway, and the specific group / reading game feed is going to be created by way of categories, so I’m not sure we’d need the “group” feature beyond that.
BUT this ties into the more general issue of how we can make the experience both fun and user-friendly for our community at large. E.g., it’s one thing for us admins and for those of us who are already familiar with WP’s basic setup to open our posts feed in the admin dashboard and see / be able to access the whole community’s posts in “edit” mode (and have a parallel window open for the actual blog feed experience — or at least that’s the way I’m currently doing it). But I’m pretty sure that for the average group member, especially the WP newbies, that is both overwhelming and overkill — all they’re bound to want is the feed of everybody’s posts, as well as the ability to create posts themselves and comment on other people’s posts. And while WP allows a restriction to be placed on what people can post to by using the “categories” feature, that won’t really get us very far (at least not without substantial manual intervention), because we’ll be using categories for sub-feeds such as reading games and group reads, so even if we use this feature to also limit people’s ability to post to, say, their own name / member feed and the existing reading games / group reads, every time we do create a new category (and attached sub-feed), we’re going to have to remember to turn this category on — probably manually — for all members of the group at large.
So, if this plugin could be used to facilitate members’ use of the blog and, at the same time, limit their powers to what they actually want and need to be able to do in order to to meaningfully participate in the community, it would be very helpful.
(As to how we can make the admin dashboard transparent to folks, especially again the WP newbies, I currently don’t have any ideas yet. Maybe just tell them to bookmark the “create a new post” form / page and use the basic blog feed in “view” mode for any and all other purposes?)
Ok, I’m going to install and turn on BuddyPress and we can give it a go. I have no idea what it’s going to be like …