Initiate group invitations from user profile page

[Azinfiro]

First off, thanks for developing BuddyPress and I'm sorry if you read my review and were offended; it bothers me how much of a near miss BP is on certain areas, I do, however, still appreciate it a lot.

It is strongly implied that BP is a modular project, but specifically with Groups, much is left to be desired since invitations rely on the Friends module.

My request is that you enable group moderators and administrators to invite and manage group members in the style of the admin pages on the individual group pages in the front end, independently of the Friends module.

Additionally, I would like to suggest that you add a group invitation button directly on user profiles for group administrators and moderators or provide an alternative in order to make group invitations feasible when browsing single profiles; having to navigate to the group page in order to add a user whose profile you're currently viewing feels like unnecessary work.

That's all I have for now. Thank you.

[boonebgorges]

Thanks for the report.

I agree that group invitations leave something to be desired in this respect. The basic motivations for the current system are:

1. We show a checklist of available members, in addition to the autocomplete field. If we lift the friends-only restriction, the checklist will show all site members. On a large site (say, thousands of members) this slows the page down enormously, and can even cause timeouts.
2. We don't want people to abuse group invitations by spamming all members on a site.

There's an existing ticket for this issue #2062. Let's use that ticket for further discussion of the issue. In the meantime, the plugin Invite Anyone will lift the friends-only restriction. See also #5421 for more thoughts on clarifying this screen.

As for your other idea, I like it, but the UX/workflow needs additional thought. What does the button say? What happens when you click it? Do you get a popup containing a list of all groups, or all groups that the clicking user belongs to? Etc. Let's continue discussion of this latter issue here in this ticket.

[Azinfiro]

A drop-down list of the groups you have permission to invite people to seems the most intuitive to me. I'm brand new to BP though, so I don't really have a good sense about whether that would get messy or not.

An overlay menu is an alternative, but that might get in your face.

What do you think of "Invite to Group", "Add to Group", or just "Invite" as labels for the button?

[DJPaul]

We're closing this ticket because it has not received any contribution or comments for at least two years. We have decided that it is better to close tickets that are good ideas, which have not gotten (or are unlikely to get) contributions, rather than keep things open indefinitely. This will help us share a more realistic roadmap for BuddyPress with you.

Everyone very much appreciates the time and effort that you spent sharing your idea with us. On behalf of the entire BuddyPress team, thank you.

If you feel strongly that this enhancement should still be added to BuddyPress, and you are able to contribute effort towards it, we encourage you to re-open the ticket, or start a discussion about it in our Slack channel. Please consider that time has proven that good ideas without contributions do not get built.

For more information, see ​https://bpdevel.wordpress.com/2018/01/21/our-awaiting-contributions-milestone-contains/
or find us on Slack, in the #buddypress channel: ​https://make.wordpress.org/chat/