The new Invitations plugin for Elgg by Elgg Community Ralf Heinrich is a very useful, well crafted plugin. It provides means of inviting friends to join an Elgg site–an often requested feature. It provides a form for invitations and has many configuration options from the administrative interface. It also includes a configurable walled garden feature.
Once installed by uploading to the mod folder and activating, the “more info” link in the tools administration brings up several options.
Invitations allows you to set the reply-to email address appended to outgoing invitations. These invitation emails have special links that recipients may click on to access registration to the site. The admin can set a time limit for the response.
It has options as to whom is allowed to send invitations: all, none, or admin. If all are allowed, the admin can disallow individual members through the user avatar menu:
Conversely, if none are allowed, exceptions can be maade through the same menu to allow certain individuals.
It has its own “Walled Garden” so if you use this plugin, you should disable the standard Walled Garden. Note that in Invitations, the walled garden can be configured to allow or disallow registration and forgotten password links.
To create an invitation, users have an invitations option in the dropdown menu from the toolbar. Selecting Invitations brings up this form.
One thing to note: when this plugin is enabled, you can no longer create accounts from the User Admin interface. You can disable the plugin temporarily if you need to do so. It seems to work fine now.
Another thing is that you may have to do a little configuring depending upon the particular build you are using. If you get white a screen while registering (svn rev 2175 and later) go to /mod/invitations/actions/invitationregisteraction.php . The commenting should make it clear what you need to do.
Invitations is clearly a very useful plugin for educational and other setting. I suspect that we will see more features and enhancements as time goes on. Another individual reports creating a variant that grabs email address from popular web-based email address books such as Yahoo and Gmail.
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Tags: Elgg, invitations, plugin
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Awesome, it’s brilliant to see so many Elgg plugins coming out!
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